The Power and Peril of Global Professionalization: The Global Knowledge Economy, The World Bank, and Higher Education

Since 1962, the World Bank has involved itself in higher education discourse and practice through the provision of loans and grants to developing nations. Initially, such involvement focused primarily on tangible infrastructure projects such as building schools and providing textbooks for students. Over time, however, the Bank has increasingly come to involve itself in less tangible projects such as policy work, technical assistance, and educational discourse – including the creation of the imaginary of the Global Knowledge Economy (GKE). Through this increased focus on higher education policy and discourse, the Bank has come to wield increasing authority over the discourse of knowledge and its means of production. In order to better elucidate the rising authority of the World Bank over higher education and discourses of knowledge production, this dissertation explores the historical development of the Bank’s work in higher education broadly, as well as in two specific countries, Morocco and Indonesia. The dissertation studies the Bank’s involvement in higher education through a critical historical method, which combines traditional historical analysis with a critical policy studies lens. Through this analysis, I argue that the authority of the World Bank over the discourse and practice of higher education and knowledge production has increased significantly through time due to the Bank’s role in the creation of a new global profession of higher education economists, and that this increased authority reveals an underlying irony in the Bank’s thinking and operations. The irony is that the Bank relies upon a fundamental belief in the power of free markets in the economic sphere, but increasingly deploys methods of centralized planning over higher education and knowledge production through these new professionals. This profession is allowed to flourish in part because the Bank and the GKE both exist within a global realm in which the global public sphere has not been clarified. This dissertation adds to the historical record of the Bank’s involvement in higher education discourse, policy and practice, while also exploring the need for more robust theories of the public sphere and for alternative views of knowledge and education at the global level

Unpacking the causal chain of financial literacy

A growing body of literature examines the causal impact of financial literacy on individual, household, and firm level outcomes. This paper unpacks the mechanism of impact by focusing on the first link in the causal chain. Specifically, it studies the experimental impact of financial literacy on three distinct dimensions of financial knowledge. The analysis finds that financial literacy does not immediately enable individuals to discern costs and rewards that require high numeracy skills, but it does significantly improve basic awareness of financial choices and attitudes toward financial decisions. Monetary incentives do not induce better performance, suggesting cognitive constraints rather than lack of attention are a key barrier to improving financial knowledge. These results illuminate the strengths and limitations of financial literacy training, which can inform the design and anticipated effects of such programs.Financial Literacy,Education For All,Access&Equity in Basic Education,Access to Finance,Primary Education

MERCATOR (Mapping EnumeRATOR for CUDA) User\u27s Manual

Welcome to the MERCATOR user\u27s manual! MERCATOR is a CUDA/C++ system designed to assist you in writing efficient CUDA applications by automatically generating significant portions of the GPU-side application code. We hope you find it helpful; please feel free to contact the authors with any questions or feedback

Dynamics of Demand for Index Insurance: Evidence from a Long-Run Field Experiment

This paper estimates how experimentally-manipulated experiences with a novel financial product, rainfall index insurance, affect subsequent insurance demand. Using a seven-year panel, we develop three main findings. First, recent experience matters for demand, consistent with overinference from small samples. Second, spillovers also matter, in the sense that the recent payout experience of village co-residents affects insurance demand about as much as one's own recent payout experience. Third, the spillover effect decays as time passes while the effect of one's own experience does not. We discuss implications of this analysis for commercial sustainability of this complicated but promising risk management technology

Barriers to household risk management : evidence from India

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? This paper uses a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. The analysis finds that demand is significantly price-elastic, but that even if insurance were offered with payout ratios similar to US, widespread coverage would not be achieved. The paper identifies key non-price frictions that limit demand: liquidity constraints, particularly among poor households, lack of trust, and limited salience. The authors suggest potential improvements in contract design to mitigate these frictions.Financial Literacy,Debt Markets,Access to Finance,Emerging Markets,Labor Policies

A minimal dynamical model of intonation:Tone contrast, alignment, and scaling of American English pitch accents as emergent properties

The pitch accent system of Mainstream American English (MAE) is one of the most well-studied phenomena within the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) approach to intonation. In this work we present an explicit model grounded in dynamical theory that predicts both qualitative phonological and quantitative phonetic generalizations about the MAE system. While the traditional AM account separates a phonological model of the structure of the accents from the F0 algorithm that interprets the phonological specification, we propose a unified dynamical model that encompasses both. The proposed model is introduced incrementally, one dynamical term at a time, to arrive at the minimal model needed to account for observed empirical generalizations, avoiding unnecessary complexity. The quantitative and qualitative properties of the MAE system that inform the dynamical model are based on an analysis of a large database of productions of the four most well-studied pitch accents of American English: three rising accents (H*, L+H*, L*+H) and a low-falling accent (L*). The dynamic model highlights the importance of velocity-based measures of F0, not typically invoked in intonational research, as key to understanding F0 differences among pitch accent categories. Although the focus of this work is on the MAE pitch accent system, suggestions are made for how the unified phonetic-phonological dynamical framework presented can be further developed to account for other pitch-based phenomena in a variety of languages