The Impact of Early Childhood Development Interventions on Children’s Health in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Investing in a child’s early years reduces incidences of stunting, wasting, worm infections, and anemia among young children. Yet, 250 million children are at risk of not reaching their full development potential in low-and-middle income countries (LMIC) due to inadequate nutrition and lack of early stimulation. Multiple early childhood health interventions such as growth monitoring, nutrition supplementation, cash transfers, handwashing, and deworming have been tested to evaluate their impact on improving child health outcomes in LMIC. However, there is limited evidence assessing the relative benefits of implementing one type of intervention over another. This review is among the first to identify the interventions which have comparatively outperformed others in improving children’s physical health since the year 2000 and the gaps in the quality of existing evidence. Upon a comprehensive review of the impact from 39 early childhood interventions, we find that interventions including nutrition or cash based assistance outperform interventions offering information based support or growth monitoring. Further examination of the long term impacts, cost-effectiveness, and extended exposure of these interventions is needed to understand what works in improving child health during early years

Cruising Through School: General Equilibrium Effects of Cruise Ship Arrivals on Employment and Education

Cruise ship tourism has been the fastest growing branch of the tourism sector since the turn of the century. As a result, cruise tourism’s increased port traffic has garnered attention as a development strategy for port cities of developing nations over the past two decades. I utilize 10.6 million automatic identification system (AIS) locations from 517 cruise ships to estimate granular city by year cruise ship arrivals in 5,644 port destinations over 220 nations and territories from 2009 to 2018. Matched with 355,463 individual Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) women’s surveys in 23 countries from 2009 to 2016, this study examines cruise tourism’s relationship to female labor participation and associated human capital attainment in destination port cities of developing nations. Using fixed effects to identify this relationship, I find positive general equilibrium effects from cruise tourism on labor participation and educational attainment with strong age dynamics. For each 1% increase in cruise ship arrivals to a port city, female labor participation increase 7% and women gain around a 1/3 more years of education. Additionally, this study employs a Kaplan Meier survivorship model as well as Cox Proportional Hazard Ratios to understand the dynamic change in educational attainment related to age from a cruise tourism shock. Older women respond to an expanding service sector by seizing job opportunities, while younger women acquire a near secondary level of education in anticipation of employment opportunities. The mechanism behind tourism led growth may be the result of improvements in human capital attainment by women. Rhetoric regarding tourism’s role as a development strategy appears to be more nuanced than previously attributed when considering educational choice. This study contributes a novel micro-dataset and a novel measure for cruise tourism at a global scale to examine a broader scope of tourism’s impact on regional development and welfare effects

The Impact of Early Childhood Development Interventions on Children’s Health in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Investing in a child’s early years reduces incidences of stunting, wasting, worm infections, and anemia among young children. Yet, 250 million children are at risk of not reaching their full development potential in low-and-middle income countries (LMIC) due to inadequate nutrition and lack of early stimulation. Multiple early childhood health interventions such as growth monitoring, nutrition supplementation, cash transfers, handwashing, and deworming have been tested to evaluate their impact on improving child health outcomes in LMIC. However, there is limited evidence assessing the relative benefits of implementing one type of intervention over another. This review is among the first to identify the interventions which have comparatively outperformed others in improving children’s physical health since the year 2000 and the gaps in the quality of existing evidence. Upon a comprehensive review of the impact from 39 early childhood interventions, we find that interventions including nutrition or cash based assistance outperform interventions offering information based support or growth monitoring. Further examination of the long term impacts, cost-effectiveness, and extended exposure of these interventions is needed to understand what works in improving child health during early years

Market Access and Quality Upgrading: Evidence from Four Field Experiments. A Replication Study of Bold et al. (American Economic Review, 2022)

Bold et al. (2022b) investigate the effect of providing access to a larger, centralized market where quality is rewarded with a premium on farm productivity and framing incomes from smallholder maize farmers in western Uganda, using a series of randomized experiments and a differencein-differences approach. We successfully reproduce the results of this study using the publicly provided replication packet. Then test the robustness of these results by re-defining treatment and outcome variables, testing for model misspecification and the leverage of outliers, and testing for non-random selection in the Fisher-permutation process. Our results show that the findings in Bold et al. (2022b) are robust to a variety of decisions in the research process. This evokes confidence in the internal validity of the findings

Replication and Sensitivity Analysis of "Market Access and Quality Up-grading: Evidence from Four Field Experiments": A Comment on Bold et al. (2022b)

Bold et al. (2022b) investigate the effect of providing access to a larger, centralized market where quality is rewarded with a premium on farm productivity and framing incomes from smallholder maize farmers in western Uganda, using a series of randomized experiments and a difference-in-differences approach. We successfully reproduce the results of this study using the publicly provided replication packet. Then test the robustness of these results by re-defining treatment and outcome variables, testing for model misspecification and the leverage of outliers, and testing for non-random selection in the Fisher-permutation process. Our results show that the findings in Bold et al. (2022b) are robust to a variety of decisions in the research process. This evokes confidence in the internal validity of the findings

Contrasting Incentives for Earnings Management: Board Activity and Board Remuneration in Spanish Firms

We analyze the effect board activity and board remuneration has on earnings management (EM). Our results show that more active boards are inefficient in preventing earnings manipulation. Regarding board compensation we find a U-shaped relation indicating that excessive remuneration will lead to more earnings management. Policy recommendations are derived from the findings

Building Blocks: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Evaluating Contemporary Early Childhood Development Practices in Developing Countries

The impacts of interventions targeting the ‘golden’ years of a child’s development are being increasingly recognized by the development professionals. With growing evidence on early childhood interventions across developing countries, there is an increasing need to synthesize the impact of these interventions, for understanding what works for developing physical, social, emotional, language, and cognitive outcomes for children. With an aim to fill this gap, this research aims to undertake a systematic review of literature for examining the impact of early childhood development interventions in developing nations from 2000 to 2019. Conditional on the nature of the evidence found, this study will aim to undertake a meta-analysis of the experimental and quasi-experimental studies on early childhood development interventions. This study will be first of its kind to provide a synthesis of all the evidence on early childhood interventions for children between 0-8 years of age, across developing countries

Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope

This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally reproducible results (over 85%). Second, excluding minor issues like missing packages or broken pathways, we uncover coding errors for about 25% of studies, with some studies containing multiple errors. Third, we test the robustness of the results to 5,511 re-analyses. We find a robustness reproducibility of about 70%. Robustness reproducibility rates are relatively higher for re-analyses that introduce new data and lower for re-analyses that change the sample or the definition of the dependent variable. Fourth, 52% of re-analysis effect size estimates are smaller than the original published estimates and the average statistical significance of a re-analysis is 77% of the original. Lastly, we rely on six teams of researchers working independently to answer eight additional research questions on the determinants of robustness reproducibility. Most teams find a negative relationship between replicators' experience and reproducibility, while finding no relationship between reproducibility and the provision of intermediate or even raw data combined with the necessary cleaning codes

Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope

This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally reproducible results (over 85%). Second, excluding minor issues like missing packages or broken pathways, we uncover coding errors for about 25% of studies, with some studies containing multiple errors. Third, we test the robustness of the results to 5,511 re-analyses. We find a robustness reproducibility of about 70%. Robustness reproducibility rates are relatively higher for re-analyses that introduce new data and lower for re-analyses that change the sample or the definition of the dependent variable. Fourth, 52% of re-analysis effect size estimates are smaller than the original published estimates and the average statistical significance of a re-analysis is 77% of the original. Lastly, we rely on six teams of researchers working independently to answer eight additional research questions on the determinants of robustness reproducibility. Most teams find a negative relationship between replicators' experience and reproducibility, while finding no relationship between reproducibility and the provision of intermediate or even raw data combined with the necessary cleaning codes