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Human capital in countries at development focuses the first workshop of the 4th NCID Development Week.

Among other topics, issues such as incentives to increase academic achievement or improve child nutrition, and the quality of teaching in day care centers in the most disadvantaged nations were addressed.

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PHOTO: Carlota Cortés
01/06/15 17:25 Isabel Solana

The first workshop of the IV Development Weekorganized by the Navarra Center for International Development (NCID) of the University of Navarra, focused on human capital in countries at development from a microeconomics perspective, through the exhibition of programs of study conducted in countries such as China, Mexico, India, Ecuador and Macedonia, among others. The activity took place on June 1 and 2, 2015 at IESE Business School's campus in Madrid.

position The first session was opened by Luis Ravina, researcher principal of the NCID, and was followed by Jere Behrman, professor at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). It was given by Jere Behrman, professor at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), who has worked at the World Bank, the Inter-American Bank development and the United Nations Development Program development. It was entitled 'Aligning Learning Incentives of Students and Teachers: Results from a Social Experiment in Mexican High Schools.'.

At discussion paper, Professor Behrman presented the impact of three types of incentives using data from a social experiment with 88 randomly selected Mexican high schools with more than 40,000 students divided between three study groups and one control group. In the first group, individual incentives were provided to students to improve performance in mathematics subject ; in the second, they were targeted to teachers; and in the third, both individual and group incentives were given to students, teachers and administrators. The impact of the program revealed that the best effects occurred in group three, in the second there were minor impacts, and in the third, no impact.

Marcos Vera Hernández, from University College London (UK), gave the second session, 'Can Bureaucrats Really be Paid Like CEOs?Can Bureaucrats Really be Paid Like CEOs? Performance Incentives for Improving Child Nutrition in Rural Chinese Schools.'. She presented a work that studied incentives for school administrators and how their response to incentives varies according to the amount of resources they have under their control. The study focused specifically on the implementation of programs to reduce anemia in rural China.

We randomly selected 170 schools and reached the following conclusions: first, with a smaller subsidy , larger incentives were effective, but smaller incentives (10% of volume) were not effective in reducing anemia. Second, increasing the size of block grants that were under the control of school administrators led to substantial reductions (but was almost twice as costly as incentives alone). Third, incentives were seen to crowd out the effect of additional resources (or vice versa).

'Firm responses and the unintended consequences of piecemeal regulation' was the degree scroll of the discussion paper of Gianmarco León, from Pompeu Fabra University. According to agreement with the expert, when state capacity is limited, regulations are often designed in a piecemeal fashion. This opens the possibility that new regulations can worsen the ignored externalities generated in the production chain. Using data from daily management and surveys, work showed that in Peru's fishing industry - the largest in the world - environmental pollution from manufacturing plants caused 55,000 additional hospital admissions per year as a consequence of the introduction of individual property rights on fish. By removing incentives for suppliers to compete for resources and allowing companies in the market to move from being inefficient to efficient, the reform extended production over time. Longer periods of moderate pollution were shown to be worse for health than shorter periods of exhibition with higher intensity. The results demonstrated the risks of a piecemeal design of regulation in production chains and the importance of profile of production time, which is often ignored -as the hours pass, the value of some products, such as perishables, decreases.

Oliver Vanden Eynde, Paris School of Economics, presented the research 'Military Service and Human Capital Accumulation: Evidence from Colonial Punjab'. The author pointed out that there is little evidence of the relationship between military conscription and educational outcomes in countries at development. Along these lines, he estimated in this paper the impact of military conscription on human capital accumulation in colonial Punjab and found that higher military conscription fees was associated with increases in literacy. From agreement with the results, 10 additional conscripts per thousand men in World War I (1911) were associated average with 3 more literate men per thousand in 1931. Further analysis indicated that the observed improvement in human capital was due to the literacy of illiterate soldiers.

For his part, Alex Armand, researcher of NCID, presented his research 'Who Wears the Trousers in the Family? Intra-household Resource Control, Subjective Expectations and Human Capital Investment.'. In it he studied how the interaction between intra-household resource allocation and parental beliefs about the returns of Education influences human capital investment among poor households. To this end, he analyzed a conditional transfer program in the Republic of Macedonia, with the purpose to improve secondary school enrollment among children from poor households. Specifically, it analyzed the random allocation of resources to mothers or fathers, together with information on parents' subjective expectations about the returns to schooling. The study showed that when resources were channeled to mothers, schooling increased for children whose parental returns were sufficiently high at the beginning of the program.

The last session of the workshop was entitled 'A Helping Hand? Teacher Quality and Learning Outcomes in Kindergarten.'. It was given at position by Pedro Carneiro, researcher of high school of programs of study Taxes (UK), professor at University College London and economist at the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CEMMAP).

In this work two cohorts of kindergarten children - a total of more than 23,000 - were assigned to teachers within their centers. They collected data on the children at the beginning of the school year and conducted 12 tests of math, language and executive function at the end of the year. All teachers were videotaped giving class for a full day and the videos were coded to a recently developed metric of teacher behavior (the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, or CLASS).

Substantial effects were found with respect to teachers: teacher behaviors are more significant than teacher characteristics (such as IQ and personality) in achieving better student performance.

Development Week is a congress on Economics of development organized annually by NCID. This group of research belonging to Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra seeks scientific solutions -viable and sustainable- to situations of extreme poverty in countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. To achieve this, it focuses on three lines: the quality of public and private institutions in each nation, technology transfer and migration. 

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