This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool against gambling and lottery behavior in South Africa. The study implemented a simple, interactive dice game that simulates worsening winning odds of rolling sixes as more dice are added to the game.
... Vea más + The analysis exploits two levels of exogenous variation, first from random assignment into the debiasing game, and second from the number of rolls it takes to obtain the sixes. Treated individuals who needed above-median number of rolls to obtain simultaneous sixes are significantly less likely than the control group to gamble or play the lottery in the following year. The converse is true for individuals who needed below-median number of rolls, suggesting a perverse treatment effect among this group. The analysis also finds suggestive evidence that the debiasing affected the sensitivity to varying winning odds. Changes in entertainment utility or risk preferences cannot explain these findings, rather the results are consistent with changes in risk beliefs.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS7195 FEB 01, 2015
One of the most fruitful advances in modern economics has been the introduction of psychological realism into the model of "economic man." The World Development Report 2015 organizes the evidence about how humans actually think and make decisions into a coherent framework useful for designing development policy.
... Vea más + This paper elaborates on the three principles of human thinking that constitute the report's intellectual framework: Human thinking is dual process -- automatic as well as deliberative (thinking automatically); it is conditioned by social context and the salience of social identities (thinking socially); and it is shaped by mental models that are socially constructed (thinking with mental models). Behavioral insights create scope for policy interventions that produce "miracles" from the perspective of traditional economics.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS7197 FEB 01, 2015
Behavioral economics recognizes that mental models -- intuitive sets of ideas about how things work -- can bias an individual's perceptions of himself and the world.
... Vea más + By representing an ascriptive category of people as unworthy, a mental model can foster unjust social exclusion of, for example, a race, gender, caste, or class. Since the representation is a social construction, shouldn't society be able to control it? But how? This paper considers three interventions that have had some success in developing countries: (1) Group deliberation in Senegal challenged the traditional mental model of female genital cutting and contributed to the abandonment of the practice; (2) political reservations for women and low castes in India improved the way men perceived women, the way parents perceived their daughters, and the way women perceived themselves, but have not generally had positive effects on the low castes; and (3) reductions in the salience of identity closed performance gaps between dominant and stigmatized groups in experiments in India and China. Spoiled collective identities need to be changed or made less prominent in order to overcome social exclusion.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS7198 FEB 01, 2015
This paper examines wage dynamics and turnover using tracking data of adolescents from the Philippines. The analysis uses individual test scores in grade 6 to proxy abilities.
... Vea más + The empirical results show that (i) returns to labor market experience are large, nearly a half of the conventional estimate of returns to schooling; (ii) returns to experience are higher if educational attainment and/or test scores are higher; and (iii) ability, measured by test scores, positively influences the upgrading of occupations toward more skilled categories, although educational attainment plays an important role in determining the first occupation. The complementarity between schooling and experience is greater among good performers who show high test scores; education and ability augment gains from accumulating labor market experiences.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS7184 JAN 01, 2015
The Early Childhood Education Enhancement Project for the Arab Republic of Egypt aimed to support an increase in the access to early childhood education of 4 and 5 year-old children, particularly the disadvantaged, and also to equip kindergarten classes with learning materials.
... Vea más + The outcome of the project is moderately satisfactory with both the Bank and the Borrower performed moderately satisfactory. A moderate risk to development was related to inadequate coordination between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Insurance and Social Affairs and subsequent involvement of participating NGOs and community run kindergartens.This was and continues to be a substantial risk to long-term sustainability of the project's outcomes. Lessons learned from the project include the following: 1) although project implementation units situated within the ministry are more effective than those established outside the ministry structure, careful planning is required to ensure leadership continuity; 2) plans for parallel financing and joint project activities with co-financing partners should be carefully designed, prepared for, coordinated, and implemented to avoid project delays; 3) project implementation plans and schedules should be more realistic, flexible and in-line with the Bank's previous country experience; and 4) assessment of impact and monitoring and evaluation of school construction projects may require a new approach.
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Informe final de ejecución y resultados ICR3220 DEC 29, 2014
Cognitive ability, as measured by IQ and background factors such as socioeconomic status and demographics have historically been seen as the principal determinants of a students academic success.
... Vea más + However, a growing body of research from psychology, education, behavioral economics and neuroscience is showing that personality traits also predict academic and work performance. This change in paradigm suggests that education systems face a more complex challenge than traditionally recognized: to work not only with the different types of intelligence possessed by students but also with their different personality traits in order to produce academic success measured by cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This paper reviews the research findings from the different literatures (psychology, education, behavioral economics, and neuroscience) that relate to these questions. Several good reviews summarize the findings on aspects of these questions, but rarely address all of the questions above. In particular, those reviews do not shed light on how education can improve both cognitive and non-cognitive skills and how such skills promote creativity and labor market outcomes. The scientific literatures on human intelligence and personality are large, but our focus is on the subset of research findings that relate intelligence and personality to academic performance. Likewise, the literature on creativity, innovation, and productivity is extensive, but our focus will be on the research findings that relate academic performance to creativity and, ultimately, to productivity in the workplace.
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Although there is a general agreement in the literature of the importance of social-emotional skills for labor market success, there is little consensus on the specific skills that should be acquired or how and when to teach them.
... Vea más + The psychology, economics, policy research, and program implementation literatures all touch on these issues, but they are not sufficiently integrated to provide policy direction. The objective of this paper is to provide a coherent framework and related policies and programs that bridge the psychology, economics, and education literature, specifically that related to skills employers value, non-cognitive skills that predict positive labor market outcomes, and skills targeted by psycho-educational prevention and intervention programs. The paper uses as its base a list of social-emotional skills that employers value, classifies these into eight subgroups (summarized by PRACTICE), then uses the psychology literature -- drawing from the concepts of psycho-social and neuro-biological readiness and age-appropriate contexts -- to map the age and context in which each skill subset is developed. The paper uses examples of successful interventions to illustrate the pedagogical process. The paper concludes that the social-emotional skills employers value can be effectively taught when aligned with the optimal stage for each skill development, middle childhood is the optimal stage for development of PRACTICE skills, and a broad international evidence base on effective program interventions at the right stage can guide policy makers to incorporate social-emotional learning into their school curriculum.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS7123 NOV 01, 2014
Increasing recognition that investments in early childhood development (ECD) are essential for children to reach their full potential has led development agencies, including the World Bank, to place a higher priority on young children in their partnership with countries.
... Vea más + A recent review of the World Banks experience in ECD suggests rapidly increasing commitments and provides selected lessons from operations and documents promising new initiatives (Sayre et al., 2014). The review considered ECD activities for the period June 2000 to July 2013 within the Education (ED), Health, Nutrition, and Population (HNP), and Social Protection and Labor (SP) Global Practices. This brief summarizes key findings and messages from the review.
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A child's earliest years present a window of opportunity to improve outcomes later in life. A growing body of literature demonstrates that lack of investments in children in early years can have dramatic negative consequences for their future ability to learn and lead healthy and productive lives.
... Vea más + The opposite also holds: Investing in young children can generate very high returns, particularly when compared to equivalent investments made at later stages in life. The course builds on face-to-face training workshops implemented over the last two years and consists of three interactive web-based modules with 15 topics and a total learning time of approximately four to five hours. The three modules are devoted to three simple questions: (1) why invest in ECD? (2) What matters for ECD? (3) How should ECD interventions be implemented? At the end of each module, participants are invited to take a quiz with questions related to the materials covered in the module, and upon completion of the three quizzes with at least 80 percent of correct answers, participants receive a certificate of completion for the course.
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Resumen 93787 NOV 01, 2014
Denboba, A.; McLin, M.; Neuman, M.; Sayre, R.; Wang, Y.; Wodon, Q.
This paper investigates whether a large-scale deworming intervention aimed at primary school pupils in western Kenya had long-term effects on young children in the region.
... Vea más + The paper exploits positive externalities from the program to estimate the impact on younger children who did not receive treatment directly. Ten years after the intervention, large cognitive effects are found -- comparable to between 0.5 and 0.8 years of schooling -- for children who were less than one year old when their communities received mass deworming treatment. Because mass deworming was administered through schools, effects are estimated among children who were likely to have older siblings in schools receiving the treatment directly; in this subpopulation, effects are nearly twice as large.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS7052 OCT 01, 2014
Knowledge, learning, and innovation are one of eight objectives that will be monitored in the Bank's new strategy. The independent evaluation group (IEG) is conducting a program of learning and results evaluations to promote a better understanding of how the World Bank acquires, captures, and transfers knowledge and learning in its lending operations, and what scope there is for improving.
... Vea más + The objective of the program is to delineate attributes of effective learning in World Bank lending. These attributes refer to learning into lending (inputs into project design); learning while lending (feedback and modifications of design and implementation while the project is underway); and learning from lending (lessons from the project that were transmitted to other projects). The evaluation program will assess how the Bank can become better at generating, accessing, and using learning and knowledge in its lending operations. It acknowledges the importance of the feedback from knowledge to learning and from learning back to enhanced knowledge. The report is organized as follows: chapter one gives approach and context. Chapter two explores two essential aspects of learning - knowledge exploitation and knowledge exploration and the factors influencing them. Chapter three examines the contribution of mentoring. Chapter four addresses the extent to which incentives, leadership, and culture are aligned to promote learning in lending. Chapter five considers the implications of the report's findings, for the Bank's change process, for IEG, and for the design of the second evaluation in IEG's learning and results series.
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Individuals' lives are filled with decisions. Until recently, most economists have assumed that people choose among objective, well-understood options.
... Vea más + As a result, economists and policy makers have paid very little attention to the decision-making process itself. Yet recent advances in the behavioral sciences challenge the simple 'rational' view of human decision making in which individuals have boundless ability to process information and make optimal decisions given their fixed preferences. It is now clear that what individuals perceive as their 'choices' is subjective and malleable. Possibly irrelevant factors, such as default options, can have powerful effects on choice. A society's historical legacy may have persistent effects on how alternative choices are interpreted and valued. The social relationships and social norms in a community may make some choices 'thinkable' or 'imaginable,' whereas others that are also feasible are not. In short, economics has paid insufficient attention to the psychological, social, and cultural underpinnings of decision making. This report enlarges our understanding of decision making with the aim of expanding policymakers' toolkits and improving the effectiveness of standard policies. By recognizing that individuals have limited capacities to process information, that they use mental short cuts and mental models to interpret and evaluate their choices, and that individual have social preferences, the report provides an enriched view of human decision making that has significant implications for the scope, design, and implementation of development policy.
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This study explores the reintegration processes that ex-combatants, as well as the communities that receive them, go through in the transition from being soldiers to being civilians across the Great Lakes region (GLR) of Africa (Uganda, Rwanda, DRC, RoC, and Burundi).
... Vea más + This study uses a cross-country comparative approach capitalizing on survey data col¬lected between 2010 and 2012 from nearly 10,000 ex-combatants and community members across the GLR. This is the first time that such a large sample of data on ex-combatants from across multiple countries has been systematically compared and analyzed, thus the study represents the cutting edge of empirically driven quan-titative research on the reintegration processes of ex-combatants. An important component of the analysis of ex-com¬batant reintegration processes revolves around their position relative the broader community. As such, this study compares the reintegration processes of ex-com¬batants with those of community members and there¬fore, explores in turn the ways in which these two types of reintegration processes interact with each other. Notably, the core structure of the analysis presented in the detailed data analysis in annexes one and two is not only about ex-combatants and the processes through which they reintegrate, but also an investigation of commu¬nities themselves, i.e. their willingness and ability to absorb ex-combatants back into society. This study presents a snapshot of the social and economic dimensions of the overall reintegration process of ex-combatants and community members. However, the conceptual discussion and analysis of empirical evidence presented consolidates key knowledge and understanding about the broad trends of ex-combatants reintegration processes across the GLR. Further, the findings here no doubt carry weight for understanding ex-combatants reintegration processes in contexts beyond the GLR.
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This paper presents the results of the 2014 review of World Bank Group staff compensation. The main objective of this paper is to seek Board approval (i) for the 2014 (FY15) structure adjustments for WBG Washington-appointed staff and country office staff, and (ii) to set aside funds for the FY15 non-salary programs.
... Vea más + This year's (FY15) HQ compensation review is the result of the application of the indexation methodology under the multi-year review process, as approved by the Board on February 8, 2011. As in 2013 (FY14), this year the HQ salary structure will be adjusted using published projected market pay increases. In country offices, comprehensive compensation reviews have been performed for the majority of locations.
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This document presents the work program and budget proposal for FY15 for the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) and indicative plans for FY16-17.
... Vea más + It outlines the results and impact that IEG expects to achieve; strategic priorities and alignment with the new World Bank Group (WBG) strategy; changes to business lines, including what IEG will be doing more and less of; and details on work program deliverables and resource management. IEG faces a unique opportunity to deepen its impact, and make a significant contribution to the successful implementation of the new WBG strategy. To achieve the twin goals, the WBG and its clients and partners need to better understand what works and the reasons why, and draw lessons and good practices from experience to inform decision making and future action. Independent evaluation is essential to help the WBG address these challenges and build a stronger internal culture for results, accountability, and learning.
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This study examines whether financial incentives through pay flexibility can improve the performance of staff in government bureaucracies. Its main messages for pay policy are pay flexibility can improve performance, pay flexibility works most strikingly in changing managerial behavior.
... Vea más + Improving public sector performance does not need to wait for systematic pay rationalization or pay simplification throughout government. Pay flexibility can work with rather than instead of long-term career incentives. The strategy and implementation of pay flexibility reforms must take into account the extent of fragmentation and complexity of the existing public sector pay structure in the country.
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This working paper presents a benchmarking analysis of School Based Management (SBM) using empirical data from the Philippines. School based management is widely used as a policy tool in many countries that seek to improve the quality of service delivery through decentralization.
... Vea más + School based management typically takes many years to have an impact on educational outcomes, but policy makers need to know sooner how well the policy is being implemented. The paper extends the well-known Rasch methodology from the literature on student achievement, including the Programme for International Student Assessment, to the measurement of the implementation of school based management by computing a Rasch measure of the implementation of school based management. To test whether the resulting benchmarked measure is plausible and has practical policy value, the measure is tested for correlations with standardized measures of personality and political skills of school principals, developed in the psychology and political science literatures. The paper will be useful for readers interested in studying school based management as well as those interested more generally in the methodology of benchmarking implementation of public policy where the ultimate results are subject to long implementation periods. The methodology presented in this paper can be applied to enhance the rigor of the ongoing Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) exercise to benchmark educational policies in various domains. That exercise is set to become one of the flagship policy analytical tools being developed by the World Bank and partner agencies.
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Documento de trabajo sobre investigaciones relativas a políticas WPS6938 JUN 01, 2014