Human Development of Peoples

This paper provides a framework and estimates of Enrollment Rates per natural and combines them with previous Income and Child Mortality per natural estimates by Clemens and Pritchett (2008) to produce a Human Development Index Per Natural. The methodology is applied for 1990 and 2000 to provide estimates of growth rates of this measure over the period. The paper also develops and illustrates a framework for estimating an education place premium, and discusses how it is related to per natural measures. The peoples of the least developed countries stand to gain the most from international migration, but there are potentially significant gains to migration between developing countries as well.Migration, Human Development, Education

Human Development of Peoples

This paper provides a framework and estimates of Enrollment Rates per natural and combines them with previous Income and Child Mortality per natural estimates by Clemens and Pritchett (2008) to produce a Human Development Index Per Natural. The methodology is applied for 1990 and 2000 to provide estimates of growth rates of this measure over the period. The paper also develops and illustrates a framework for estimating an education place premium, and discusses how it is related to per natural measures. The peoples of the least developed countries stand to gain the most from international migration, but there are potentially significant gains to migration between developing countries as well.Migration, Human Development, Education

Trade Policy and Factor Prices: An Empirical Strategy

This paper presents a new empirical strategy for estimating the effects of trade policy on domestic factor prices when policy endogeneity is suspected. Absent income effectson factor supplies or domestic prices, the coefficient on the terms of trade can provide an unbiased estimator of the effect of trade barriers on the factor distribution of income for a small economy. In the more general case where income effects are allowed for, we provide a means to quantify and control for the possible bias. We implement our strategy on a cross-national data set of trade policies and income shares of capital and labor. We find little evidence of the existence of Stolper-Samuelson effects, both for the sample as a whole as well as within cones of diversification. Consistent with a model of wage bargaining, we find that the effect of openness on capital shares is greater for countries with higher unionization rates.Factor prices, trade policy, Stolper-Samuelson theorem, wage bargaining

A Minimum Relative Entropy Principle for Learning and Acting

This paper proposes a method to construct an adaptive agent that is universal with respect to a given class of experts, where each expert is an agent that has been designed specifically for a particular environment. This adaptive control problem is formalized as the problem of minimizing the relative entropy of the adaptive agent from the expert that is most suitable for the unknown environment. If the agent is a passive observer, then the optimal solution is the well-known Bayesian predictor. However, if the agent is active, then its past actions need to be treated as causal interventions on the I/O stream rather than normal probability conditions. Here it is shown that the solution to this new variational problem is given by a stochastic controller called the Bayesian control rule, which implements adaptive behavior as a mixture of experts. Furthermore, it is shown that under mild assumptions, the Bayesian control rule converges to the control law of the most suitable expert.Comment: 36 pages, 11 figure

The performance of decentralized school systems : evidence from Fe y Alegría in Venezuela

This program evaluation estimates the effects on standardized test scores of graduating from the Fe y Alegría private school system in Venezuela. The authors find an Average Treatment Effect on the order of 0.1 standard deviations (approximately 16 percent of the average score), using a control group of public school students. These effects are significantly larger for households at the bottom of the distribution, and smaller for those at the top. The authors posit that the better performance of the Fe y Alegría system stems from their labor contract flexibility and decentralized administrative structure.Tertiary Education,Education For All,Secondary Education,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning

Intellectual property rights, human capital and the incidence of R&D expenditures

Numerous studies predict that developing countries with low human capital may not benefit from the strengthening of intellectual property rights. The authors extend an influential theoretical framework to highlight the role of intellectual property rights in the process of innovation and structural change. The resulting theory is consistent with a stylized fact that appears in the data, namely that countries with poor intellectual-property protection may accumulate human capital without a corresponding increase in research and development investment as a share of national income. The model predicts that without minimum intellectual-property protection, additional education may result in more imitation rather than innovation. The preponderance of the econometric evidence presented in this paper suggests that interactions between human capital and intellectual property rights determine global patterns of research and development effort, and intellectual property rights tend to raise the effect of education on the incidence of research and development.Economic Theory&Research,E-Business,Debt Markets,Labor Policies,Knowledge for Development