Long-Term Impacts of the Oportunidades Conditional Cash Transfer Program on Rural Youth in Mexico

This paper studies the long-term effects of participation in the Mexican Oportunidades program on a variety of outcomes and behaviors of rural youth in Mexico. It analyzes data from a social experiment, which randomly phased-in the program in rural Mexican villages. In 1997, 320 villages (the treatment group) were randomly selected for early incorporation into the program and 186 villages (the control group) were designated as a control group to be incorporated eighteen months later. This paper examines whether differential exposure to the program significantly impacted educational attainment, labor market outcomes, marriage, migration and cognitive achievement of youth. The results show positive impacts of longer exposure on grades of schooling attained, but no effects on achievement tests. With respect to work, we find an overall reduction in work for male youth.

A Method for Verifying Indicators of Journal Quality

A recent search of the UlrichsWeb Global Serials Directory for active, digital, peer reviewed, scholarly journals shows that world’s academic articles are published in more than 58,500 journals. By one estimate the growth of new journal titles increases by 2.5% ever year (Ware & Mabe, 2015). At the same time, universities are adopting researcher information systems that provide administrators and other campus stakeholders with nearly complete bibliographic data for all articles published by their faculty authors. As campus leaders work to make sense of this data, they may turn to their library for help. Questions may include: Are all of these new or previously unencountered journal titles legitimate? Who are the main publishers of our articles? What are the emerging trends that promotion and tenure committees should consider? The most common way to address these questions involves significant shortcomings--proprietary subscription databases, like Scopus, Web of Science, and Academic Analytics, have limited coverage of the journal literature and, by design, are unlikely to include newer and lesser known journal titles. At the same time many universities publish thousands of articles per year, manually checking each article submitted to a faculty annual review database would prove to be a tedious and lengthy process. To reduce the labor involved in identifying indicators of journal quality, we have developed a method using open source software and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In specific, our method reduces the labor in identifying the publishers for a long list of journals and in identifying the access model for these journals (subscription-only or open access). To do this we wrote an R script that uses the SHERPA RoMEO and the DOAJ APIs. Using this method permitted us to quickly identify the journals that needed closer inspection. This method will help others that are working to verify journal quality in large data sets without relying on problematic, journal blacklists

The Chilean Pension Reform Turns 25: Lessons From the Social Protection Survey

In 1980, Chile dramatically reformed its retirement system, replacing what was an old insolvent PAYGO program with a new structure that relies heavily on funded defined contribution individual accounts. In addition, eligibility and benefit requirements were standardized, and a safety net for old-age poverty was strengthened. Twenty-five years after this reform, the Chilean model is being re-assessed, in terms of coverage, contribution, investment, and retirement benefit outcomes. This paper introduces a recently-developed longitudinal survey of individual respondents in Chile, the Social Protection Survey (or Encuesta de Previsión Social, EPS), and illustrates some uses of this survey for microeconomic analysis of key aspects of the Chilean system.