Every Child Matters? An Evaluation of "Special Educational Needs" Programmes in England

The need for education to help every child rather than focus on average attainment has become a more central part of the policy agenda in the US and the UK. Remedial programmes are often difficult to evaluate because participation is usually based on pupil characteristics that are largely unobservable to the analyst. In this paper we evaluate programmes for children with moderate levels of 'special educational needs' in England. We show that the decentralized design of the policy generates significant variations in access to remediation resources across children with similar prior levels of difficulty. However, this differential is not reflected in subsequent educational attainment – suggesting that the programme is ineffective for 'treated' children. In the second part of our analysis, we use demographic variation within schools to consider the effect of the programme on whole year groups. Our analysis is consistent with no overall effect on account of the combined direct and indirect (spillover) effects. Thus, the analysis suggests that a key way that English education purports to help children with learning difficulties is not working.education, special needs, evaluation

IDENTIFYING AND MEASURING RESILIENCE FACTORS AMONG CHILDREN WITH PRENATAL SUBSTANCE EXPOSURE IN A TRIBAL NATION AND IN ASSOCIATION WITH COVID-19 MORTALITY

Background: Historical and contemporary trauma among Native Americans is linked to disparate health outcomes across the lifespan including the very recent coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. Early and prolonged exposure to positive family-child engagement activities and the natural environment (greenspace) act as protective factors against a range of maladaptive development across the lifespan. Yet, little is known regarding specific activities relevant among high-risk families in Tribal Nations and no evidence exists in terms of measuring that impact of greenspace against risk of COVID-19 mortality. Purpose: 1) Partner with a Tribal Nation to develop a study to identify resilience promoting factors in early childhood in the context of prenatal substance exposure (PSE); 2) Identify common positive family-child engagement activities among high-risk families; and 3) Measure the impact of greenspace and risk of COVID-19 mortality in the United States. Methods: Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), strengths-based, and community-driven approaches were applied to studies one and two. The methodological study (study one; development phase) involved relationship-building to partner with one Tribal Nation and to design an epidemiological study. The qualitative study (study two; phase I) consisted of in-person semi-structured interviews with caregivers to children, ages 0-3 years, with and without PSE to identify common activities, and barriers, facilitators, and positive child outcomes to activities. The quantitative study (study three; phase II) measured greenspace exposure by leaf area index (LAI) deciles derived from 2011-2015 averaged 250 m resolution annual maximum LAI maps to assess a dose-response association with COVID-19 mortality. Results: Study one yielded the development of a successful partnership with a Tribal Nation and a robust study design. Study two identified common cultural, community, outdoor and home activities that children engaged in with their family. Common barriers and facilitators overlapped in terms of cost, adequate transportation, safety, and family or friend presence. Positive outcomes for children were gaining cultural knowledge, bonding opportunities, and feeling soothed. Study three indicated a dose response association between high levels of LAI and lower mortality due to COVID-19. Conclusion: Studies one and two demonstrated the impact of CBPR in engaging in research with a Tribal Nation. Study three provided evidence of a protective effect of greenspace exposure and risk of COVID-19 mortality. This research lays the groundwork for a future study that will quantify the impact of these resilience factors against social-emotional development among young children with and without PSE

Empirical Essays on Finance and Innovation

This dissertation consists of three empirical studies in finance and innovation. I study various financial factors affecting innovation such as stock market manipulation and public to private transaction. I also investigate the effect of ownership structure on these public to private transactions. The first study finds that the End-of-day price manipulation is associated with short-termism of the firms orientation, long-term harm to a firms equity values, and commensurate with reduced incentives for employees to innovate. Insider trading, by contrast, enables innovators to achieve exacerbated profits from innovation. Using a sample of suspected manipulation events for all stocks from nine countries over the years 2003-2010, I find evidence consistent with these real impacts of market manipulation on innovation. These findings are not attributable to bad firms innovating less and manipulating more, since the average firm subjected to manipulation in the sample is more innovative during the pre-manipulation period. The second study investigates the effect of going private buyout transactions on the investments in innovation using an international sample of buyout transactions from 36 countries over 1997 to 2011. Patent counts and citations are used to proxy for quantity, quality and economic importance of innovation. The data indicate that the effect of buyouts on innovation is quite sizable in terms of quantity and quality, as both patent counts and citations drop following a buyout. I also find that the number of radical patents (i.e. more scientific) drop as well. When we split the sample into institutional and management buyouts the negative association is only confirmed for institutional buyouts. We find that the negative effect of buyouts on innovation is aggravated in post-2006 period, suggesting that the nature of deals has worsened for innovation over time. The data also show that buyouts have a negative effect on innovation efficiency. The third study considers ownership structure of target firms that are subject to going private buyout transactions, which are often highly leveraged and give rise to potential agency conflicts among existing shareholders. In this study, I examine ownership structure prior to going private transactions in 33 countries around the world from 2002 to 2014.The data indicate strong and consistent evidence that pre-going private ownership is characterized by higher institutional and corporate ownership. Family ownership lowers the probability of a public to private transaction. Stronger creditor rights increase the probability of going private particularly for whole company and institutional buyouts

MEPI, BEVI, and EI leadership: Implications and applications for global leadership assessment and development

Across multiple settings, individuals who assume organizational leadership roles may find themselves grappling with unique opportunities to influence meaningful change. The complexities of such processes become especially apparent in a global context where multiple dynamics must be navigated simultaneously and skillfully. What variables are associated with greater or lesser effectiveness in these global leadership roles? Can such processes be measured in an ecologically valid manner? What might we learn about the cultivation of global leadership by an examination of such interacting intricacies? This dissertation sought to answer these questions by reviewing and applying existing global leadership theories and the Equilintegration (EI) Leadership Model to develop a comprehensive program analysis of an international leadership development program, the Middle Eastern Partnership Initiative Student Leaders’ Program. The MEPI program is a United States State Department initiative which brings very bright and talented young people from across the Middle East to the United States each summer for a six week leadership immersion program hosted by Georgetown University and five other university partners. The Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI) was used to assess Time 1 / Time 2 change processes by examining participant experiences before and after completion of the MEPI program. Leadership rating and ranking forms were also developed based on the EI Leadership Model and implemented by program administrators. Program analysis results suggest that this intervention is associated with optimal changes for a substantive majority of MEPI participants. More specifically, a number of BEVI indices suggest that the MEPI program is achieving its mission and goals for a considerable majority of participants (e.g., they became more open and aware regarding the nature of self, others, and the larger world, and less likely to see the world in “black and white terms”). However, the BEVI also yielded rich data indicating that not all participants changed in these optimal ways. Namely, individuals who entered the program with a “self structure” that was less congruent with program expectations and opportunities (e.g., in terms of how emotions are accessed or attributions made) tended to become overwhelmed from the standpoint of the BEVI and its EI theoretical framework, with a corresponding attenuation of openness to and interest in engaging with self, others, and the larger world vis-à-vis the mission and goals of the MEPI program (i.e., for this “low optimal” subgroup, the MEPI program is associated with outcomes that appear to be the opposite of what is intended by participation). Among related findings of note, higher educated students showed less optimal change than their less educated counterparts, which suggests that “education” in the Middle East may not prepare a subset of students for the intensity of the MEPI program. Moreover, data suggest that female participants tended to become more overwhelmed by the MEPI experience although they demonstrated equally optimal changes as males, which suggests that the experience of being female in the Middle East may add an additional layer of complexity to the process of identity development when faced with a “high impact learning” experience, which the MEPI program certainly is. Among other findings and recommendations, the following analysis considers why some participants responded more optimally than others and offers suggestions for program improvement over time, including deeper engagement with candidate selection and pre-program orientation processes, greater attention to the nature and form of transformative and high impact learning experiences like MEPI, the relevance of a liberal education background versus the more professional / skill based education of many MEPI participants, and the key and interacting role of moderating variables such as gender

Within and across department variability in individual productivity : the case of economics

University departments (or research institutes) are the governance units in any scientific field where the demand for and the supply of researchers interact. As a first step towards a formal model of this process, this paper investigates the characteristics of productivity distributions of a population of 2,530 individuals with at least one publication who were working in 81 world top Economics departments in 2007. Individual productivity is measured in two ways: as the number of publications until 2007, and as a quality index that weights differently the articles published in four journal equivalent classes. The academic age of individuals, measured as the number of years since obtaining the PhD until 2007, is used to measure productivity per year. Independently of the two productivity measures, and both before and after age normalization, the main findings of the paper are the following five. Firstly, individuals within each department have very different productivities. Secondly, there is not a single pattern of productivity inequality and skewness at the department level. On the contrary, productivity distributions are very different across departments. Thirdly, the effect on overall productivity inequality of differences in productivity distributions across departments is greater than the analogous effect in other contexts. Fourthly, to a large extent, this effect on overall productivity inequality is accounted for by scale factors well captured by departments’ mean productivities. Fifthly, this high degree of departmental heterogeneity is found to be compatible with greater homogeneity across the members of a partition of the sample into seven countries and a residual category.Ruiz-Castillo acknowledges financial support from the Spanish MEC through grant SEJ2007-6743

The long-run economic consequences of high-stakes examinations : evidence from transitory variation in pollution

Cognitive performance during high-stakes exams can be affected by random disturbances that, even if transitory, may have permanent consequences. We evaluate this hypothesis among Israeli students who took a series of matriculation exams between 2000 and 2002. Exploiting variation across the same student taking multiple exams, we find that transitory PM2.5 exposure is associated with a significant decline in student performance. We then examine these students in 2010 and find that PM2.5 exposure during exams is negatively associated with postsecondary educational attainment and earnings. The results highlight how reliance on noisy signals of student quality can lead to allocative inefficiency

Congress UPV Proceedings of the 21ST International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators

This is the book of proceedings of the 21st Science and Technology Indicators Conference that took place in València (Spain) from 14th to 16th of September 2016. The conference theme for this year, ‘Peripheries, frontiers and beyond’ aimed to study the development and use of Science, Technology and Innovation indicators in spaces that have not been the focus of current indicator development, for example, in the Global South, or the Social Sciences and Humanities. The exploration to the margins and beyond proposed by the theme has brought to the STI Conference an interesting array of new contributors from a variety of fields and geographies. This year’s conference had a record 382 registered participants from 40 different countries, including 23 European, 9 American, 4 Asia-Pacific, 4 Africa and Near East. About 26% of participants came from outside of Europe. There were also many participants (17%) from organisations outside academia including governments (8%), businesses (5%), foundations (2%) and international organisations (2%). This is particularly important in a field that is practice-oriented. The chapters of the proceedings attest to the breadth of issues discussed. Infrastructure, benchmarking and use of innovation indicators, societal impact and mission oriented-research, mobility and careers, social sciences and the humanities, participation and culture, gender, and altmetrics, among others. We hope that the diversity of this Conference has fostered productive dialogues and synergistic ideas and made a contribution, small as it may be, to the development and use of indicators that, being more inclusive, will foster a more inclusive and fair world

Nepotistic relationships in Twitter and their impact on rank prestige algorithms

Micro-blogging services such as Twitter allow anyone to publish anything, anytime. Needless to say, many of the available contents can be diminished as babble or spam. However, given the number and diversity of users, some valuable pieces of information should arise from the stream of tweets. Thus, such services can develop into valuable sources of up-to-date information (the so-called real-time web) provided a way to find the most relevant/trustworthy/authoritative users is available. Hence, this makes a highly pertinent question for which graph centrality methods can provide an answer. In this paper the author offers a comprehensive survey of feasible algorithms for ranking users in social networks, he examines their vulnerabilities to linking malpractice in such networks, and suggests an objective criterion against which to compare such algorithms. Additionally, he suggests a first step towards ―desensitizing‖ prestige algorithms against cheating by spammers and other abusive use

The Determinants of University Participation in Canada (1977−2003)

The decision to attend university is influenced by the balance of the expected returns and costs of attending university, by liquidity constraints and capital market imperfections that may modify these calculations and, hence, by the family income of prospective students. Family circumstances also play a role. We examine the secular increase in the propensity of children from Canadian families, evident in annual surveys spanning two and a half decades, to attend university. We quantify the importance of these factors taking account of the greater propensity by young women than men to attend university and controlling for secular trends in socioeconomic norms that impinge on these decisions.university participation, parental education, university premium, gender, tuition, income, societal trends