Diether W. Beuermann

Inter-American Development Bank | IDB · Country Caribbean Department

JEL Codes: J24 L25 M13 O12 Keyword: Business Training Entrepreneurship Soft skills a b s t r a c t There has been growing interest in approaches to business training that incorporate insights from psychology to develop soft skills associated with successful entrepreneurship. The empirical evidence on the causal effects of these approaches on entrep...

To explore whether schools’ causal impacts on test scores measure their overall impact on students, we exploit plausibly exogenous school assignments and data from Trinidad and Tobago to estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several outcomes. Schools’ impacts on high-stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on important outcomes su...

There has been growing interest in approaches to business training that incorporate insights from psychology to develop soft skills associated with successful entrepreneurship. The empirical evidence on the causal effects of these approaches on entrepreneurs’ business outcomes is encouraging, but still not substantial enough to be conclusive. This...

This paper explores whether the academic benefit from attending a preferred secondary school differs between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries of the Jamaican Conditional Cash Transfer Program, Programme of Advancement through Health and Education (PATH). The academic outcomes assessed include end of secondary and post-secondary high-stakes exami...

AUTHORUbfal, Diego; Arráiz, Irani; Beuermann, Diether; Frese, Michael; Maffioli, Alessandro; Verch, DanielDATEMar 2021DOWNLOAD:English (0 downloads)DOIhttp://dx.doi.org/10.18235/0003182There has been growing interest in approaches to business training that incorporate insights from psychology to develop soft skills associated with successful entrep...

This paper estimates the effects of Jamaica’s elimination of user fees in public health facilities on the health and labor supply of working-age individuals. The policy change affected about 83 percent of the population, that is, those who lack health insurance and mainly rely on the public health system. The analysis finds no effects among individ...

We evaluate the effectiveness of sending text messages to pregnant women containing prenatal care visit reminders, suggestions for healthy eating behaviors, and encouragements regarding vitamin intake during pregnancy. Our focus is on disadvantaged women living in the district of Ventanilla, Peru, with average per capita incomes equivalent to 1.8 t...

This study analyses the effects of exposure to tropical storms and hurricanes during pregnancy on children's anthropometric measures taken within the first five years of life. We merge destruction indexes calculated at the district level with 13 yearly rounds of household level surveys from Jamaica. The empirical strategy exploits variation arising...

The book explores the historical development and status of political and economic institutions in The Caribbean. The Caribbean institutional reality is studied vis-à-vis best international practices. The main objective is identifying positive aspects and institutional areas in need of improvement that could facilitate a sustainable development path...

This paper provides experimental evidence for the impact of home internet access on a broad range of child outcomes in Peru. We compare children who were randomly chosen to receive laptops with high-speed internet access to (i) those who did not receive laptops and (ii) those who only received laptops without internet. We find that providing free i...

We present findings of the first experimental evaluation of the participatory budgeting (PB) model carried out in rural Russia within the context of a major decentralization reform. The reform aimed (among other things) to increase citizens’ participation in budgetary decision making and to strengthen public oversight over budget implementation in...

Using meta-analysis we find that, on average, sought-after schools do not improve student test scores. A potential explanation for this result is that parents value schools that improve outcomes not well-measured by test scores. We explore this notion using both administrative and survey data from Barbados. Using a regression discontinuity design,...

Remittances represent about 15 percent of Jamaica’s GDP; being the 16th country worldwide in terms of economic significance of remittances. Therefore, assessing to what extent and through what mechanisms remittances are useful for development is highly relevant. Accordingly, we identify whether remittances facilitate consumption smoothing during he...

We estimate the impact of access to information and communications technology on agricultural profitability and child labor among isolated rural villages in Peru. We exploit the timing of an intervention that provided at least one public (satellite) payphone to villages that did not previously have communications services. Using a village-level pan...

This paper presents results from a randomized controlled trial whereby approximately 1,000 OLPC XO laptops were provided for home use to children attending primary schools in Lima, Peru. The intervention increased access and use of home computers, with some substitution away from computer use outside the home. Children randomized to receive laptops...

Thinly traded securities exist in both emerging and well developed markets. However, plausible estimations of market risk measures for portfolios with infrequently traded securities have not been explored in the literature. We propose a methodology to calculate market risk measures based on the Kalman filter which can be used on incomplete datasets...

In today's knowledge-based societies, understanding basic scientific concepts and the capacity to structure and solve scientific questions is more critical than ever. Accordingly, in this article we test an innovative methodology for teaching science and environment in public primary schools where traditional (teacher-centred) teaching was replaced...

This paper presents results from a randomized control trial in which approximately 1,000 OLPC XO laptops were provided for home use to children attending primary schools in Lima, Peru. The intervention increased access and use of home computers, with some substitution away from computer use outside the home. Beneficiaries were more likely to comple...

Thinly traded securities exist in both emerging and well developed markets. However, plausible estimations of market risk measures for portfolios with infrequently traded securities have not been explored in the literature. We propose a methodology to calculate market risk measures based on the Kalman filter which can be used on incomplete datasets...

We estimate the effects of mobile phone coverage on different measures of economic development. We exploit the timing of mobile coverage at the village level merging it with a village-level panel dataset for rural Peru. The main findings suggest that mobile phone expansion has increased household real consumption by 11 per cent, reduced poverty inc...

We exploit the timing of cell phone coverage in rural Peru to investigate its effects on economic development. We exploit information regarding the location, date of installation and technical characteristics of cell phone towers in order to construct coverage patterns at the village level from 2001 through 2007. We then merge this information with...

While previous literature has found that the effect of public services decentralization on quality of delivery and satisfaction is ambiguous, little evidence has been provided regarding the role that the efficiency of local governments may play in enhancing a decentralization reform. To shed light on this issue, we exploit a randomized intervention...

We estimate the impact of access to information and communication technologies on agricultural profitability and child labor among isolated villages in rural Peru. We exploit an intervention that provided at least one public (satellite) payphone to 6,509 rural villages that did not previously have any kind of communication services (either landline...

This paper exploits the fact that insurance eligibility in the United States changes abruptly at age 65 due to universal coverage provided by Medicare. In that way, we adopt a regression discontinuity design to analyze the effect of health insurance coverage on health care access and utilization. The main findings suggest that groups with lower pre...

Property rights in urban squatters have a diversity of origins, evolve gradually, and are greater than what is thought. As a consequence, the benefits of these rights are also generated in a partial and gradual fashion, as the consolidation of these rights evolves. This vision is based on empirical evidence detailed in the document, as well as on a...

We estimate and test different continuous-time short-rate models for the UK. The preferred model encompasses both the “level effect” of Chan, Karolyi, Longstaff and Sanders (1992a) and the conditional heteroskedasticity effect of GARCH type models. Our findings suggest that including a GARCH effect in the specification of the conditional variance,...

The aim of this article is 2-fold: first to test the adequacy of Pareto distributions to describe the tail of financial returns in emerging and developed markets, and second to study the possible correlation between stock market indices observed returns and return's extreme distributional characteristics measured by Value at Risk and Expected Short...

This paper provides evidence on the effects of access to telecommunications technologies on agricultural profitability and human capital investment decisions among highly isolated villages in rural Peru. I exploit a quasi-natural experiment, in which the Peruvian government through the Fund for Investments in Telecommunications (FITEL) provided at...