The Impact of Cash Transfers on School Enrollment: Evidence from Ecuador

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression discontinuity design for families around the second quintile of this index, which is the program's eligibility threshold. This allows us to compare results from two different credible identification methods, and to investigate whether the impact varies with families' poverty level. Around the first quintile of the poverty index the impact is positive while it is equal to zero around the second quintile. This suggests that for the poorest families the program lifts a credit constraint while this is not the case for families close to the eligibility threshold

Developing Monitoring and Debugging Tools for the AP1000 Array Multiprocessor

The LERP project aims to assist the ap1000 programmer with essential monitoring and debugging tools. LERP is based on off-line analysis and replay of an event trace. A common event trace format includes both low level system events and user-defined events. In this paper we address the issues of instrumentation of ap1000 programs with minimal interference, and presentation of traced program behaviour to the user. We describe an interface to the existing display tools ParaGraph and Upshot, and a new compound event analysis tool suited to machines of the ap1000 scale. 1 Introduction The ap1000 is a pioneering member of a class of MIMD wormhole message-passing machines with many hundreds of processors (each of which is a general purpose microprocessor with significant speed and memory in its own right), connected by three communications networks. We may term this class the "kilo-processor" machines. 1 It provides significant challenges to programmers who need to develop correct and effi..

A PADRE in MUFTI (A Multi User Free Text retrieval Intermediary)

The Parallel Document Retrieval Engine (PADRE) has hitherto lacked the ability to support multiple time-sharing searchers, a deficiency which detracted from its cost effectiveness. Extensions, adjuncts and performance improvements are now proposed to permit multiple use and to ensure reasonable response times. This paper describes the proposed multi-user architecture, reports query-processing speed-ups, outlines a number of alternative types of user-interaction client including an interface to network browsers in common use. Implementation progress is reported and potential load handling capacity is discussed. KEYWORDS Text retrieval, information retrieval, parallel computing. 1 Introduction The Parallel Document Retrieval Engine (PADRE) has previously demonstrated that full text scanning methods supported by parallel hardware permit powerful query constructors and rapid response to changing document collections [3, 5, 6]. The addition of paralleldisk -resident inverted file indexes ..