Does the Rotten Child Spoil His Companion? Spatial Peer Effects Among Children in Rural India

This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisition using observational data. We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child’s nearest geographical neighbors, into a production function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh, India. Our peer group construction takes the form of directed networks, whose structure allows us to identify peer effects and enables us to disentangle endogenous effects from contextual effects. We exploit variation over time to avoid confounding correlated with social effects. Our results suggest that spatial peer and neighborhood effects are strongly positively associated with a child’s cognitive skill formation. These peer effects hold even when we consider an alternative IV-based identification strategy and different variations to network size. Further, we find that the presence of peer groups helps provide insurance against the negative impact of idiosyncratic shocks to child learning.Children, peer effects, cognitive skills, India

Does the Rotten Child Spoil His Companion? Spatial Peer Effects Among Children in Rural India

This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisition using observational data. We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child's nearest geographical neighbors, into a production function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh, India. Our peer group definition takes the form of networks, whose structure allows us to separately identify endogenous peer effects and contextual effects. We exploit variation over time to avoid confounding correlated with social effects. Our results suggest that spatial peer and neighborhood effects are strongly positively associated with a child's cognitive skill formation. Further, we find that the presence of peer groups helps provide insurance against the negative impact of idiosyncratic shocks to child learning. We show that peer effects are robust to different specifications of peer interactions and investigate the sensitivity of our estimates to potential mis-specification of the network structure using Monte Carlo experiments. --Children,peer effects,cognitive skills,India

RPA and OCR integration

Neustálý pokrok v digitálním světě si žádá vytváření rychlejších technologií, které pomohou organizacím udržet krok. I přes to, že současné technologie poskytují nepřeberné množství způsobů, jak pomoci zaměstnancům s jejich každodenními úkoly, existuje stále mnoho organizací, které zpracovávají rutinní agendu ručně. Musí neustále opakovat obdobné úkony za pomoci office aplikací a přizpůsobených informačních systémů. Tato práce poskytuje přehled, jak robotizace procesů (RPA) integrovaná s optickým rozpoznáváním znaků (OCR) může pomoci s tímto problémem. Popisuje různé dodavatele RPA a OCR, analyzuje jejich notace a nastiňuje, jakou hodnotu přináší organizacím. Navíc zprostředkovává pohled na implementaci řešení integrování RPA a OCR technologií spolu s hodnocením jejich výhod a nevýhod. Výsledkem této práce je prototyp s integrovaným RPA a OCR představující řešení pro proces managementu objednávek.The constant advancement of the digital world necessitates the creation of faster technology that will assist organizations in staying on track. Even though the current technologies offer numerous ways to support employees in their everyday tasks, many organizations still handle tedious administrative work manually. They must repeat similar activities on a regular basis using office applications and customized information systems. This thesis provides an overview of how Robotic Process Automation integrated with Optical Character Recognition can address this problem. This work describes various RPA and OCR vendors, analyses their notations and outlines the value that they bring to organizations. Furthermore, it aims at the notion of implementing a solution integrating RPA and OCR technologies along with assessing their pros and cons. A prototype of an integrated RPA and OCR model as a solution for an order management process is the product of this work