Person:
Nopo, Hugo R.
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Latin America; Gender; Education; Ethnicity; Poverty
Degrees
Departments
Inter-American Development Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Hugo Ñopo (Ph.D. Northwestern, 2003), a Peruvian national, is a Lead Research Economist in Education at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), based in Bogotá, Colombia. Before that Hugo was at the Research Department of the IADB, Assistant Professor at Middlebury College, affiliated Researcher at Group for the Analysis of Development (GRADE) and advisor at the Ministry of Labor and Social Promotion in Peru. He has also been professor at different Peruvian universities and speaker in different conferences. Hugo’s research agenda includes early child development, gender and racial inequalities in educational systems and the labor markets, impact evaluation of public policies, and trust and reciprocity among economic agents. His research work has been published in different specialized academic journals and books. Currently he is also a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany.
Publication Search Results
1 - 6 of 6
-
Publication
New Century, Old Disparities : Gender and Ethnic Earnings Gaps in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank, 2012-09-07)Despite sustained economic growth at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, Latin America and the Caribbean still faces high inequality and weak indicators of well-being among certain population groups. Women, people of African ancestry, and indigenous peoples are often at the bottom of the income distribution. The share of female-headed households rose in the past 20 years. By the beginning of the 1990s, women headed 1.2 percent of complete households (households in which both husband and wife are present) and 79.8 percent of single- head households. This book presents a regional overview of gender and ethnic disparities in labor earnings during this last turn of the century. Latin America and the Caribbean provide a rich environment for studying social inequality, because historical inequalities along gender and ethnic lines persist, despite positive indicators of economic development. The extent of inequality and its probable causes vary widely across the many countries in the region. The book adopts a sophisticated econometric methodology for measuring earnings gaps and applies it consistently across and within countries to measure gender and racial or ethnic differences. The analysis includes a dynamic dimension that sheds light on the evolution of earnings gaps over time. The book offers important insights on economic and political strategies that could be adopted to reduce inequality. The reduction of gender-based segregation in the workplace represents an area in which policy interventions can improve the efficiency of labor markets. Determining whether addressing occupational rather than hierarchical segregation is more effective is one of the areas of policy design to which this book aims to make a contribution. Latin America and the Caribbean is also a racially and ethnically diverse region, with some 400 ethnic groups. -
Publication
Gender Earnings Gaps in the World
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012)This paper documents gender disparities in labor earnings for sixty-four countries around the world. Disparities are partially attributed to gender differences in observable socio-demographic and job characteristics. These characteristics are used to match males and females such that gender earnings disparities are computed only among individuals with the same characteristics, as in Ñopo (2008). After comparing males and females with the same characteristics we found that the earnings gap falls on a range between 8% and 48% of average females' earnings, being more pronounced in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The unexplained earnings gaps are more pronounced among part-time workers and those with low education. -
Publication
Broken Gears : The Value Added of Higher Education on Teachers' Academic Achievement
(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-01)Good teachers are essential for high-quality educational systems. However, little is known about teachers' skills formation during college. By combining two standardized tests for Colombian students, one taken at the end of senior year in high school and the other when students are near graduation from college, this paper documents the extent to which education majors relatively improve or deteriorate their skills in quantitative reasoning, native language, and foreign language, in comparison to students in other programs. Teachers' skills vis-a-vis those in other majors deteriorate in quantitative reasoning and foreign language, although they deteriorate less for those in math-oriented and foreign language-oriented programs. For native language, there is no evidence of robust differences in relative learning mobility. -
Publication
Discrimination in Latin America : An Economic Perspective
(Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank, 2010)The chapters presented in this volume adopt a variety of these methodological tools in order to explore the extent to which discrimination against women and demographic minorities is pervasive in Latin America. In chapter two, Castillo, Petrie, and Torero present a series of experiments to understand the nature of discrimination in urban Lima, Peru. They design and apply experiments that exploit degrees of information on performance as a way to assess how personal characteristics affect how people sort into groups. Along similar lines, in chapter three, Cardenas and his research team use an experimental field approach in Colombia to better understand pro-social preferences and behavior of both individuals involved in the provision of social services (public servants) and potential beneficiaries of those services (the poor). In chapter four, Elias, Elias, and Ronconi try to understand social status and race during adolescence in Argentina. They asked high school students to select and rank ten classmates with whom they would like to form a team and use this information to construct a measure of popularity. In chapters five and six, Bravo, Sanhueza, and Urzua present two studies covering different aspects of the labor market using different methodological tools. Based on an audit study by mail, their first study attempts to detect gender, social class, and neighborhood of residence discrimination in hiring practices by Chilean fir. In a second study, they use a structural model to analyze gender differences in the Chilean labor market. In chapter seven, Soruco, Piani, and Rossi measure and analyze possible discriminatory behaviors against international emigrants and their families remaining in southern Ecuador (the city of Cuenca and the rural canton of San Fernando). Finally, in chapter eight, Gandelman, Gandelman, and Rothschild use micro data on judicial proceedings in Uruguay and present evidence that female defendants receive a more favorable treatment in courts than male defendants. -
No Thumbnail AvailablePublication
Occupational Training to Reduce Gender Segregation: The Impacts of ProJoven
( 2008)This paper illustrates the process of program evaluation for ProJoven, the Peruvian youth labor training program. The program provides beneficiaries with basic three-month training in low-skill occupations and with internship opportunities. ProJoven's design promotes gender equality by encouraging female participation in training for traditionally male-dominated occupations and by providing subsidies so mothers with children can participate. Complementing detailed fieldwork in search of the appropriate control group, the econometric work implements a two-stage matching procedure that includes propensity scores (on the first stage), and gender and labor income (on the second one). The matching on gender allows identification of differentiated program impacts on men and women. The matching on income attacks the problem of Ashenfelter's Dips. The evaluation shows substantial differences in ProJoven's impact for men and women. Eighteen months after participation in the program, employment rates for women improved by about 15% (while employment for men reduced by 11%), gender occupational segregation reduced by 30% and women's labor income improved by 93% (while men's earnings increased by 11%). On the other hand, the cost of the promotion of gender equality represented only 1.5% of ProJoven's total budget. These results suggest that labor training programs that promote equal gender participation have disproportionately positive effects on outcomes for women trainees in a labor market with substantial gender differences. -
No Thumbnail AvailablePublication
Using Pseudo-panels to Measure Income Mobility in Latin America
( 2011)This paper presents a comparative overview of mobility patterns in 14 Latin American countries between 1992 and 2003. Using three alternative econometric techniques on constructed pseudo-panels, the paper provides a set of estimators for the traditional notion of income mobility as well as for mobility around extreme and moderate poverty lines. The estimates suggest very high levels of time-dependent unconditional immobility for the region. However, the introduction of socioeconomic and personal factors reduces the estimate of income immobility by around 30 percent. There are also large variations in country-specific income mobility (estimated to explain some additional 10 percent of inter-temporal income variation). Analyzing the determinants of changes in poverty incidence within cohorts revealed statistically significant roles for age, gender, and education of the household head, the latter subject to distinctive effects across levels of attainment and transition in and out of poverty.