This dissertation studies development topics such as education, political economy, and social protection in three Latin American countries. In the first chapter, we study how parents' responses to migration inflows can re-configure the education system structure and have long-lasting effects on inequality through changes in classroom composition. In recent years thousands of children have been migrating, and evidence informing public policy for the welfare of millions of migrants and recipient communities will be critical in the coming years. In this chapter, we leverage cross-grade within-school variation on migrant share to understand the effect of the sudden influx of Venezuelan migrant children into the Peruvian school system. Our estimates reveal that as Venezuelan migrants enter Peruvian schools, incumbents' parents respond by transferring their children to higher-quality schools with fewer migrants. A ten percentage point increase in exposure to migrants increases the probability of switching by 1.5 percentage points in primary and 1.1 percentage points in secondary. The students who switch are boys and low-achieving students in primary and high-achieving girls in secondary schools. Moreover, higher shares of migrants have minor detrimental effects on incumbents' schooling outcomes in primary and secondary schools. Finally, results suggest binding resource constraints and disruption as the mechanism behind migrant impact on incumbents. In the second chapter, we study the role of local female leadership in violence in Colombia, leveraging gender-mixed close mayoral elections. We find that municipalities with female mayors experienced fewer attacks and political violence than municipalities with male mayors. Consistently, we show that the number of police officers is larger in municipalities with female mayors. Considering those security and defense policies are widely centralized in the Executive Branch, we interpret our findings as suggesting evidence of negative perception bias from the Executive Branch against female mayors. Finally, in the third chapter, we study the effects of larger cash grants on the educational attainment of low-income middle and high school students in Mexico. Starting in 2009, school grants from the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program increased by 27 percent for females and 30 percent for males in 263 of 551 urban localities. Using a difference-in-difference analysis of longitudinal program registries linked to national standardized tests, we find that students with larger grants experienced lower dropout rates in middle school and were more likely to graduate high school on time. Specifically, the likelihood of graduation increased by 38.7 percent for females and 41.3 percent for males, suggesting an elastic response to the larger grants.