Prospering through Prospera: CCT Impacts on Educational Attainment and Achievement in Mexico

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of student enrollment, school choice, academic achievement and grade progression to evaluate the impacts of Mexico’s conditional cash transfer program Prospera on educational outcomes over grades 4-9. Academic achievement is measured by nationwide standardized test scores in mathematics and Spanish. Enrollment decisions are the outcomes of sequential decisions at each age from individuals’ feasible choice sets, determined by the types of schools locally available and local-labor-market opportunities. The achievement production function has a value-added structure. Model parameters are estimated by maximum likelihood using nationwide administrative test-score data (the ENCEL data) combined with survey data from students and parents, census labor-market data, and geo-coded school-location data. The estimation approach controls for selective school enrollment in different types of schools, grade retention and unobserved heterogeneity. The results show that the Prospera program increases school enrollment and academic achievement for program beneficiaries in lower-secondary school grades (grades 7-9). The average test-score impacts are 0.09-0.13 standard deviations in mathematics and 0.03-0.05 standard deviations in Spanish. Students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds experience the largest impacts. The availability of telesecondary distance-learning schools is shown to be an important determinant of the Prospera program’s impacts on educational outcomes

How do intrahousehold dynamics change when assets are transferred to women? Evidence from BRAC’s challenging the frontiers of poverty reduction—targeting the ultra poor program in Bangladesh

Growing evidence shows that the distribution of individuals' ownership and control of assets within a household can have important implications for women’s empowerment and children’s well-being. Interventions that target assets to specific individuals can shift these intrahousehold dynamics, yet little evidence exists from rigorous evaluations. We study BRAC’s Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction—Targeting the Ultra Poor (CFPR-TUP) program in Bangladesh, which targets asset transfer (primarily livestock) and training to rural women in poor households. Previous research has shown large, significant positive program impacts at the household level. In this paper, we examine intrahousehold impacts using mixed methods. We focus on the Specially Targeted Ultra-Poor(STUP) component of the program, which targets households selected following a randomized controlled trial design. Adding a new round of data collection with quantitative sex-disaggregated information and qualitative exploration, we exploit the randomized design to assess intrahousehold impacts of STUP. Our analysis confirms that the program significantly increases household ownership of various assets but has complex effects on the targeted women. Quantitative estimates show increases in women’s sole and joint ownership of or control over transferred assets such as livestock, but a much greater increase in men’s sole ownership over nearly all other assets (including agricultural and nonagricultural productive assets, land, and consumer durables). These findings suggest that while the transferred assets tend to remain with women, new investments from mobilized resources are controlled by men. Moreover, the program reduces women’s mobility outside the home and their control over income, consistent with the transferred asset’s requiring maintenance at home. Qualitative findings are consistent with these quantitative results , but women’s contribution to their households is perceived as increasing their confidence and social capital, which they themselves value. Therefore, while provision of assets and training to women has ambiguous effects on women’s empowerment in terms of tangible assets and decisionmaking, women take intangibles into account and largely perceive positive (though still mixed) effects. The analysis shows that asset transfer targeted to women can increase women’s ownership of and control over the transferred asset itself but may not necessarily increase women’s intrahousehold bargaining position. Moreover, it reveals that outcomes valued by individuals may not always be tangible, highlighting the complexity of assessing whether interventions improve women’s empowerment

Disparities in Children’s Vocabulary and Height in Relation to Household Wealth and Parental Schooling: A Longitudinal Study in Four Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Children from low socio-economic status (SES) households often demonstrate worse growth and developmental outcomes than wealthier children, in part because poor children face a broader range of risk factors. It is difficult to characterize the trajectories of SES disparities in low- and middle-income countries because longitudinal data are infrequently available. We analyze measures of children’s linear growth (height) at ages 1, 5, 8 and 12y and receptive language (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) at ages 5, 8 and 12y in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam in relation to household SES, measured by parental schooling or household assets. We calculate children’s percentile ranks within the distributions of height-for-age z-scores and of age- and language-standardized receptive vocabulary scores. We find that children in the top quartile of household SES are taller and have better language performance than children in the bottom quartile; differences in vocabulary scores between children with high and low SES are larger than differences in the height measure. For height, disparities in SES are present by age 1y and persist as children age. For vocabulary, SES disparities also emerge early in life, but patterns are not consistent across age; for example, SES disparities are constant over time in India, widen between 5 and 12y in Ethiopia, and narrow in this age range in Vietnam and Peru. Household characteristics (such as mother’s height, age, and ethnicity), and community fixed effects explain most of the disparities in height and around half of the disparities in vocabulary. We also find evidence that SES disparities in height and language development may not be fixed over time, suggesting opportunities for policy and programs to address these gaps early in life

The Apple Falls Increasingly Far: Parent-Child Correlation in Schooling and the Growth of Post-Secondary Education in Switzerland

We analyze the completed highest education degree of two birth cohorts (1934-1943 and 1964-1973) in Switzerland, using data from the 1999 Swiss Household Panel. The fraction of tertiary graduates has increased over time, for women more so than for men. Educational attainment depends strongly on the educational attainment of parents. For women, we find that a substantial fraction of the overall increase in participation in tertiary education can be explained by the narrowing gap in participation rates between women with lowly educated parents and women with highly educated parents. Logit models show that financial problems have become more important as an impediment for higher education

Gender, Assets, and Agricultural Development Programs: A Conceptual Framework

Being able to access, control, and own productive assets such as land, labor, finance, and social capital enables people to create stable and productive lives. Yet relatively little is known about how agricultural development programs can most effectively deliver these outcomes of well-being, empowerment, and higher income in a way that acknowledges differential access to and control over assets by men and women. After reviewing the literature on gender and assets, this paper offers a conceptual framework for understanding the gendered pathways through which asset accumulation occurs, including attention to not only men's and women's assets but also those they share in joint control and ownership. Unlike previous frameworks, this model depicts the gendered dimensions of each component of the pathway in recognition of the evidence that men and women not only control, own, or dispose of assets in different ways, but also access, control, and own different kinds of assets. The framework generates gender-specific hypotheses that can be tested empirically: i) Different types of assets enable different livelihoods, with a greater stock and diversity of assets being associated with more diverse livelihoods and better well-being outcomes; ii) Men and women use different types of assets to cope with different types of shocks; iii) Interventions that increase men's and women's stock of a particular asset improve the bargaining power of the individual(s) who control that asset; and iv) Interventions and policies that reduce the gender gap in assets are better able to achieve development outcomes related to food security, health, and nutrition and other aspects of well-being related to agency and empowerment. The implications of these gender differences for designing agricultural development interventions to increase asset growth and returns to assets as well as for value chain development are discussed. Based on this analysis, additional gaps in knowledge and possible investigations to address them are identified

Quantum state transfer with untuneable couplings

We present a general scheme for implementing bi-directional quantum state transfer in a quantum swapping channel. Unlike many other schemes for quantum computation and communication, our method does not require qubit couplings to be switched on and off. The only control variable is the bias acting on individual qubits. We show how to derive the parameters of the system (fixed and variable) such that perfect state transfer can be achieved. Since these parameters vary linearly with the pulse width, our scheme allows flexibility in the time scales under which qubits evolve. Unlike quantum spin networks, our scheme allows the transmission of several quantum states at a time, requiring only a two qubit separation between quantum states. By pulsing the biases of several qubits at the same time, we show that only eight bias control lines are required to achieve state transfer along a channel of arbitrary length. Furthermore, when the information to be transferred is purely classical in nature, only three bias control lines are required, greatly simplifying the circuit complexity

ADOLESCENT AMENORRHEA

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73937/1/j.1749-6632.1967.tb14694.x.pd