Does the Quality of Training Programs Matter? Evidence from Bidding Processes Data

This paper estimates the effect of training quality on labor-market earnings using a Peruvian non-experimental training program, PROJOVEN, which targets disadvantaged youths aged 16 to 24 years. The identification of causal effects is possible because of two attractive features in the data. First, the selection of training courses is based on public bidding processes that assign standardized scores to multiple proxies for quality. Second, the program`s evaluation framework allows for the identification and comparison of individuals in the treatment and comparison groups six, 12, and 18 months after the program. Using difference-in-differences kernel matching methods, we find that individuals attending high-quality training courses have higher average and marginal treatment impacts. The external validity of our estimates was assessed by using five different calls of this program over a nine-year period.

Sobre la participación extranjera y los patrones de contratación después de la privatización

(Disponible en Inglés) Quienes critican la globalización afirman que la propiedad foránea de empresas privatizadas guarda relación con resultados laborales negativos posteriormente a la privatización, tales como un aumento de los despidos y una disminución de la contratación. En este trabajo se emplean nuevos datos a nivel de empresa de una muestra representativa de países para comprobar la validez de esta idea y se presentan pruebas de que los extranjeros que adquieren empresas propiedad del Estado tienden a adquirir empresas que ya habían sido mejor reestructuradas antes de su privatización. Además, en este trabajo no se halla prueba alguna de que la participación foránea en empresas privatizadas tenga alguna relación con los resultados laborales negativos.

Streamlining and Privatization Prices in the Telecommunications Industry

This paper fills a void in the issue of determinants of privatization prices by concentrating in one industry across many countries. This has not been done before, as the literature has only focused on (i) many industries in one country, (ii) a single industry in one country, and (iii) many industries in many countries. We complement a recently released database with newly collected data, and we are able to cover 84 telecommunications privatizations, which account for nearly 80 percent of the sector in terms of value. Our findings are consistent with the little existing work on privatization prices, as our best policy prescription is primarily to concentrate on the transparency and cleanliness of the privatization process, as sale methods do matter. We show that government administration of labor downsizing may result in adverse selection, as the best workers are the first to leave when given the opportunity.

Should State-Owned Firms Change CEOs Before Privatization? The Case of the Telecommunications Industry

Should state-owned enterprises change chief executive officer before privatizing? We test competing views on this question by complementing a recently released database with newly collected data. We are able to cover 77 telecommunications privatizations, which account for nearly 80 percent of the sector in terms of value. We find that CEO replacement will improve performance in the telecommunications industry before privatization as measured by penetration, operating efficiency, and profitability. CEO change before privatization does appear to have real consequences in firm performance before privatization. Moreover, findings are consistent with previous research that links CEO replacement and an increase in privatization prices

¿Cumple la privatización lo que promete? El acceso a los servicios telefónicos y el ingreso familiar en zonas rurales pobres empleando un experimento cuasinatural en Perú

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) Este trabajo aprovecha un experimento cuasinatural realizado en Perú, en el que el gobierno ordenó a la compañía de telecomunicaciones privatizada que instalara aleatoriamente y operara teléfonos públicos en pequeños poblados en zonas rurales de todo el territorio nacional. Es posible, usando una encuesta de hogares preparada especialmente para una muestra representativa de poblaciones rurales, establecer una relación entre el acceso a los servicios telefónicos y el ingreso familiar. Se descubrió que, independientemente del nivel de ingresos, la mayoría de las características del uso del servicio telefónico público guardan una relación positiva con el ingreso. Resulta notable que se produzca un beneficio tanto a los niveles de ingreso correspondientes a las familias campesinas como a los de las familias no campesinas. Los hallazgos no sólo son válidos cuando se emplean variables instrumentales, sino que además se confirman cuando se emplean métodos de correspondencia de puntajes de propensión.

Household Wealth and Heterogeneous Impacts of a Market-Based Training Program: The Case of PROJOVEN in Peru

This paper analyzes the relationship between households' wealth and heterogeneous treatment impacts for a market-based training program that has benefited more than 40,000 disadvantaged individuals in Peru since 1996. We proxy long-run wealth by a linear index based on 21 households assets, and three main findings emerge. First, we find that voluntary choices among eligibles, rather than administrative choices, play a bigger role in explaining demographic disparities in program participation. Second, quantile treatment effects on the treated suggest important differences in program impacts at different quantiles of earnings, and strong differences in distributional impacts for men and women. Third, both parametric-based and semiparametric regression-matching estimates reveal that the poorest among the poor benefit the same from the program. It is the type of institution that provides the training services that largely accounts for the heterogeneity of the impacts.Training, program evaluation, factor analysis, poverty, quantiles, matching methods

Evolutionary modes in protein observable space: the case of Thioredoxins

In this article, we investigated the structural and dynamical evolutionary behaviour of a set of ten thioredoxin proteins as formed by three extant forms and seven resurrected ones in laboratory. Starting from the crystallographic structures, we performed all-atom molecular dynamics simulations and compare the trajectories in terms of structural and dynamical properties. Interestingly, the structural properties related to the protein density (i.e. the number of residues divided by the excluded molecular volume) well describe the protein evolutionary behaviour. Our results also suggest that the changes in sequence as occurred during the evolution have affected the protein essential motions, allowing us to discriminate between ancient and extant proteins in terms of their dynamical behaviour. Such results are yet more evident when the bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic thioredoxins are separately analysed

Deterministic Cramer-Rao bound for strictly non-circular sources and analytical analysis of the achievable gains

Recently, several high-resolution parameter estimation algorithms have been developed to exploit the structure of strictly second-order (SO) non-circular (NC) signals. They achieve a higher estimation accuracy and can resolve up to twice as many signal sources compared to the traditional methods for arbitrary signals. In this paper, as a benchmark for these NC methods, we derive the closed-form deterministic R-D NC Cramer-Rao bound (NC CRB) for the multi-dimensional parameter estimation of strictly non-circular (rectilinear) signal sources. Assuming a separable centro-symmetric R-D array, we show that in some special cases, the deterministic R-D NC CRB reduces to the existing deterministic R-D CRB for arbitrary signals. This suggests that no gain from strictly non-circular sources (NC gain) can be achieved in these cases. For more general scenarios, finding an analytical expression of the NC gain for an arbitrary number of sources is very challenging. Thus, in this paper, we simplify the derived NC CRB and the existing CRB for the special case of two closely-spaced strictly non-circular sources captured by a uniform linear array (ULA). Subsequently, we use these simplified CRB expressions to analytically compute the maximum achievable asymptotic NC gain for the considered two source case. The resulting expression only depends on the various physical parameters and we find the conditions that provide the largest NC gain for two sources. Our analysis is supported by extensive simulation results.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 13 pages, 4 figure

The Long-Run Labor-Market Consequences of Civil War: Evidence from the Shining Path in Peru

This study exploits district-level variation in the timing and intensity of civil war violence to investigate whether early-life exposure to civil wars affects labor-market outcomes later in life. In particular, we examine the impacts of armed conflict in Peru, a country that experienced the actions of a tenacious, brutally effective war machine, the Shining Path, between 1980 and 1995. This study finds that the most sensitive period to early-life exposure to civil war violence is the first 36 months of life. A one standard deviation increase in civil war exposure leads to a four percent fall in adult monthly earnings. Neither fetal, nor pre-school, periods significantly affect long-run earnings. Substantial heterogeneity in the earnings impacts emerge when considering variation in the types of civil war violence. Sexual violations disproportionally affected the wages of women, while torture and forced disappearances disproportionally affected the wages of men. Evidence on intervening pathways suggests that health rather than schooling is the most important channel in connecting early-life exposure to civil war and adult earnings

On the SNR Variability in Noisy Compressed Sensing

Compressed sensing (CS) is a sampling paradigm that allows to simultaneously measure and compress signals that are sparse or compressible in some domain. The choice of a sensing matrix that carries out the measurement has a defining impact on the system performance and it is often advocated to draw its elements randomly. It has been noted that in the presence of input (signal) noise, the application of the sensing matrix causes SNR degradation due to the noise folding effect. In fact, it might also result in the variations of the output SNR in compressive measurements over the support of the input signal, potentially resulting in unexpected non-uniform system performance. In this work, we study the impact of a distribution from which the elements of a sensing matrix are drawn on the spread of the output SNR. We derive analytic expressions for several common types of sensing matrices and show that the SNR spread grows with the decrease of the number of measurements. This makes its negative effect especially pronounced for high compression rates that are often of interest in CS.Comment: 4 pages + reference