Traditionally, economists have focused on how to improve productivity and the ability to generate income by adult workers. But in the last two decades, the percentage of economists who work in the development of our youngest has been growing. The reason? Find out in this article.
Salud Mesoamerica Initiative (SMI) is an ambitious regional results-based aid initiative in Mesoamerica that ties a portion of donor funding to the achievement of externally measured maternal, newborn and child health results—at both the micro/service-delivery and macro/population levels—in the participating countries’ poorest municipalities. SMI relies exclusively on independent (external) teams to measure results which determine funding approval. In contrast, other results-based financing initiatives typically determine payment through self-reported results that are verified.
Salud Mesoamerica Initiative (SMI) is a unique results-based aid initiative that rewards countries for achieving health targets in the poorest municipalities in Mesoamerica. A partnership between private and public donors and governments, it offers lessons for philanthropists, corporate social responsibility teams, and bilateral donors about how to alter development assistance from the usual model of paying for inputs to a new one in which countries are paid for achieving results for their poorest populations.
The current spread of coronavirus poses a major public health challenge to every country in the world. Schools and their administrators may be the next in line to face the test, as these institutions have traditionally been a key channel of contagion of all sorts of illnesses.
With nearly 210,000 confirmed cases and 8,650 deaths in at least 166 countries or territories, COVID-19, also known as coronavirus, has become the latest threat both to human health and the global economy. With no vaccine against the disease to date, prevention looks like the only available option to mitigate the spread of the virus.
This paper assesses the effectiveness of an intervention aimed at improving the reading skills of struggling third-grade students in Colombia. In a series of randomized experiments, students participated in remedial tutorials conducted during school hours in small groups. Trained teachers used structured pedagogical materials that can be easily scaled up. Informed by the outcomes of each cohort, we fine-tuned the intervention tools for each subsequent cohort. We found positive and persistent impacts on literacy scores and positive spillovers on some mathematics scores.
Despite the renewed interest in technical education, only a handful of studies analyze its effect on academic outcomes. In this paper we apply a regression discontinuity design to oversubscribed technical high school tracks in Pernambuco, Brazil, to identify the impact of technical education during high school on student academic outcomes. We find that students above the technical high school admission exam score cutoff drop out less from high school and have Math and Portuguese standardized test scores over 0.1 standard deviations higher than students below the cutoff.
The extensive sorting of more talented teachers into the most advantaged schools contributes to the wide socioeconomic achievement gaps in Latin America. The Chilean Pedagogical Excellence Assignment (AEP, for its Spanish acronym) is a unique program in the region that provides monetary incentives to talented teachers with an additional bonus if they work in disadvantaged schools. The eligibility rule of this program allows us to implement a sharp regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal impact of winning the award on the school choice decisions of talented teachers.
This research examines the effect of accountability threats for low performing schools on resource allocation decisions and provides evidence that schools act with strategic behavior only when the accountability pressure is high. We used a generalization of a traditional regression discontinuity design, taking advantage of the sharp discontinuity in the Chilean accountability system’s ranking of schools based on performance measures, and of a unique school level expenditure data set, to make causal estimates of the effect of being ranked as “low-performing” on school spending decisions.
Low salaries, a limited amount of full-time teaching positions, and alternative systems of allocating teaching hours lead teachers to look for additional jobs in other schools. Although this is a more common phenomenon of teacher labor markets in developing countries, teachers who teach specific subject areas are in general more likely to hold positions in more than one school. Yet, little is known about the impact of multiple school jobs on teachers’ productivity.