4,802 research outputs found
The effect of a large expansion of pre-primary school facilities on preschool attendance and maternal employment
We provide evidence on the impact of a large construction of pre-primary school facilities in Argentina. We estimate the causal impact of the program on pre-primary school attendance and maternal labor supply. Identification relies on a differences-in-differences strategy where we combine differences across regions in the number of facilities built with differences in exposure across cohorts induced by the timing of the program. We find a sizeable impact of the program on pre-primary school participation among children aged between 3 and 5. In fact, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of a full take-up of newly constructed places. In addition, we find that the childcare subsidy induced by the program increases maternal employment and that this effect is in line with the one previously found for the US.
The Effect of Pre-Primary Education on Primary School Performance
Although the theoretical case for universal pre-primary education is strong, the empirical foundation is weak. In this paper, we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre-primary education on subsequent primary school performance in Argentina. We estimate that one year of preprimary school increases average third grade test scores by 8 percent of a mean or by 23 percent of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores. We also find that preprimary school attendance positively affects student’s self-control in the third grade as measured by behaviors such as attention, effort, class participation, and discipline.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57218/1/wp838 .pd
Average case polyhedral complexity of the maximum stable set problem
We study the minimum number of constraints needed to formulate random
instances of the maximum stable set problem via linear programs (LPs), in two
distinct models. In the uniform model, the constraints of the LP are not
allowed to depend on the input graph, which should be encoded solely in the
objective function. There we prove a lower bound with
probability at least for every LP that is exact for a randomly
selected set of instances; each graph on at most n vertices being selected
independently with probability . In the
non-uniform model, the constraints of the LP may depend on the input graph, but
we allow weights on the vertices. The input graph is sampled according to the
G(n, p) model. There we obtain upper and lower bounds holding with high
probability for various ranges of p. We obtain a super-polynomial lower bound
all the way from to . Our upper bound is close to this as there is only an essentially quadratic
gap in the exponent, which currently also exists in the worst-case model.
Finally, we state a conjecture that would close this gap, both in the
average-case and worst-case models
Sequential Attention: A Context-Aware Alignment Function for Machine Reading
In this paper we propose a neural network model with a novel Sequential
Attention layer that extends soft attention by assigning weights to words in an
input sequence in a way that takes into account not just how well that word
matches a query, but how well surrounding words match. We evaluate this
approach on the task of reading comprehension (on the Who did What and CNN
datasets) and show that it dramatically improves a strong baseline--the
Stanford Reader--and is competitive with the state of the art.Comment: To appear in ACL 2017 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for
NLP. Contains additional experiments in section 4 and a revised Figure
The Effect of Pre-Primary Education on Primary School Performance
Although the theoretical case for universal pre-primary education is strong, the empirical foundation is weak. In this paper, we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre-primary education on subsequent primary school performance in Argentina. We estimate that one year of preprimary school increases average third grade test scores by 8 percent of a mean or by 23 percent of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores. We also find that preprimary school attendance positively affects student’s self-control in the third grade as measured by behaviors such as attention, effort, class participation, and discipline.Preschool, Pre-primary education, Primary school performance
Giving children a better start : preschool attendance and school-age profiles
The authors study the effect of pre-primary education on children's subsequent school outcomes by exploitinga unique feature of the Uruguayan household survey (ECH) that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance in the context of a rapid expansion in the supply of pre-primary places. Using a within household estimator, they find small gains from preschool attendance at early ages that magnify as children grow up. By age 15, treated children have accumulated 0.8 extra years of education and are 27 percentage points more likely to be in school compared with their untreated siblings. Instrumental variables estimates that control for nonrandom selection of siblings into preschool lead to similar results. The authors speculate that early grade repetition harms subsequent school progression and that pre-primary education appears as a successful policy option to prevent early grade failure and its long lasting consequences.Primary Education,Education For All,Youth and Governance,Early Childhood Development,Educational Sciences
The effect of pre-primary education on primary school performance
Although the theoretical case for universal pre-primary education is strong, the empirical foundation is weak. In this paper, we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre-primary education on subsequent primary school performance in Argentina. We estimate that one year of preprimary school increases average third grade test scores by 8 percent of a mean or by 23 percent of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores. We also find that preprimary school attendance positively affects student's self-control in the third grade as measured by behaviors such as attention, effort, class participation, and discipline.
Giving Children a Better Start: Preschool Attendance and School-Age Profiles
We study the effect of pre-primary education on children's subsequent school outcomes by exploiting a unique feature of the Uruguayan household survey (ECH) that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance in the context of a rapid expansion in the supply of pre-primary places. Using a within household estimator, we find small gains from preschool attendance at early ages that magnify as children grow up. By age 15, treated children have accumulated 0.8 extra years of education and are 27 percentage points more likely to be in school compared to their untreated siblings. Instrumental variables estimates that control for non random selection of siblings into pre-school lead to similar results. We speculate that early grade repetition harms subsequent school progression and that pre-primary education appears as a successful policy option to prevent early grade failure and its long lasting consequences.Preschool, Pre-primary education, Primary school performance
Approximation Limits of Linear Programs (Beyond Hierarchies)
We develop a framework for approximation limits of polynomial-size linear
programs from lower bounds on the nonnegative ranks of suitably defined
matrices. This framework yields unconditional impossibility results that are
applicable to any linear program as opposed to only programs generated by
hierarchies. Using our framework, we prove that O(n^{1/2-eps})-approximations
for CLIQUE require linear programs of size 2^{n^\Omega(eps)}. (This lower bound
applies to linear programs using a certain encoding of CLIQUE as a linear
optimization problem.) Moreover, we establish a similar result for
approximations of semidefinite programs by linear programs. Our main ingredient
is a quantitative improvement of Razborov's rectangle corruption lemma for the
high error regime, which gives strong lower bounds on the nonnegative rank of
certain perturbations of the unique disjointness matrix.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure
Giving children a better start: preschool attendance and school-age profiles
We study the effect of pre-primary education on children's subsequent school outcomes by exploiting a unique feature of the Uruguayan household survey (ECH) that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance. A rapid expansion in the supply of pre-primary places over the last decade generates sufficient variation in the data to warrant identification. Using a within household estimator that only exploits differences in exposure across siblings, we find small gains from preschool attendance at early ages that magnify as children grow up. By age 16, children that attended preschool have accumulated more than 1 extra year of education and are 27 percentage points more likely to be in school compared to their siblings with no preschool education. We speculate that early grade repetition harms subsequent school progression and that pre-primary education appears as a successful policy option to prevent early grade failure and its long lasting consequences.
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