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This paper investigates the labor market returns to high school types. We exploit comprehensive administrative data describing the school-to-work transition for the universe of Chilean students attending tenth grade in 2001. We discuss the role of self-selection into school types, pre-labor market abilities, firm characteristics, and present bounds for the parameters of interest. Attending private high schools has long-lasting e ects on earnings. Moreover, the long-term returns to school-level valueadded measures and monetary investments in education are larger among private-school students. Our findings provide new insights into the association of school choice and the inertia of income inequality.

This paper examines a training intervention aimed at boosting leadership and communication skills among employees of a large Latin American retailer. The identification exploits an experimental design in the context of a difference-in-difference strategy. Using longitudinal information obtained from the firm and two skills surveys, we document large positive effects of the training on store- and individual- level productivity. The intervention was more effective in boosting leadership than communication skills. Spillovers from trained managers to untrained sales representatives also contribute to the main effects. Our findings confirm the possibility of increasing productivity through training targeting critical soft-skills.

This paper assesses if voting for democracy affects long-term electoral participation. We study the effects of participating in Chile's 1988 plebiscite, which determined whether democracy would be reinstated after a 15-year long military dictatorship. Taking advantage of individual-level voting data for upwards of 13 million Chileans, we implement an age-based RD design comparing long run registration and turnout rates across marginally eligible and ineligible individuals. We find that Plebiscite eligibility (participation) significantly increased electoral turnout three decades later, reaching 1.8 (3.3) percentage points in the 2017 Presidential election. These effects are robust to different specifications and distinctive to the 1988 referendum. We discuss potential mechanisms concluding that the scale of initial mobilization explains the estimated effects. We find that plebiscite eligibility induced a sizable share of less educated voters to register to vote compared to eligibles in other upstream elections. Since less educated voters tended to support Chile's governing left-wing coalition, we argue that the plebiscite contributed to the emergence of one party rule the twenty years following democratization.

Inequality in Latin America fell substantially in the early 2000s. In this paper, we take advantage of administrative matched employee-employed data in Brazil, Chile and Ecuador to examine whether these inequality trends held in the formal sector, as well. We document a significant decrease in the log variance of earnings in Brazil and Ecuador in the early 2000s, whereas inequality in Chile between 2008 and 2015 remained largely flat. In this context, we find that inequality among salaried workers is largely a between-firm phenomenon across these three countries. We expand on our descriptive analysis and estimate an additive worker and firm fixed effects model to understand the driving factors behind inequality in the region. We find a significant decline in between-firm inequality in Brazil and a modest one in Chile. We last focus our attention on the commodities and manufacturing sectors, which were directly exposed to two large external shocks, the commodity-boom and the ''China Shock". We find an increase in inequality in the former sector accompanied by an reduction in inequality in the latter across the region.

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between environmental changes and infectious diseases and their impact on health in environmental justice (EJ) communities. The evolution of EJ science and research is contingent upon an integrated approach that takes into account social processes and environmental changes to address the burden of infectious diseases in EJ communities. We recognize that infectious disease and environmental justice is novel and calls for more research in this area, especially as the focus of public health shifts towards an ecologic and social approach to disease prevention. We attempt to explore in further detail how environmental changes such as urbanization, agriculture, and climate variability could potentially influence pathogen dynamics, vector transmission, host susceptibility, and disease outcomes among environmental justice populations.

Having first reached epidemic proportions in coastal metropolitan areas, COVID-19 has spread 4 around the country. Reported case rates vary across counties from zero to 125 per thousand 5 population (around a state prison in the rural county of Trousdale, Tennessee). Overall, rural 6 counties are underrepresented relative to their share of the population, but a growing proportion 7 of all daily cases and deaths have been reported in rural counties. This analysis uses daily 8 reports for all counties to present the trends and distribution of COVID-19 cases and deaths in 9 rural counties, from late March to May 16, 2020. I describe the relationship between population 10 density and case rates in rural and non-rural counties. Then I focus on noteworthy outbreaks 11 linked to prisons, meat and poultry plants, and nursing homes, many of which are linked to 12 high concentrations of Hispanic, American Indian, and Black populations. The growing 13 epidemic in rural counties is apparently driven by outbreaks concentrated in these institutional 14 settings, which are conducive to transmission. The impact of the epidemic in rural areas may 15 be heightened due to their weaker health infrastructure and more vulnerable populations, 16 especially due to age, socioeconomic status, and health conditions. As a result, the epidemic 17 may contribute to the ongoing decline of health, economic, and social conditions in rural areas.

Utilization of cost-effective essential preventive health services increased after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) provision that non-grandfathered private insurers provide cost-effective preventive services without cost sharing in 2010. Little is known, however, whether this change is also observed among Asians in the US. We examined patterns of preventive services utilization among Asian subgroups relative to non-Latino whites (whites) after the implementation of the ACA’s preventive services provisions. Using 2013–2016 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data, we examined utilization trends in preventive services among Asian Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asians relative to whites. We also ran logistic regression models to estimate the likelihood of having received each of the seven essential preventive services (routine checkups, flu vaccinations, cholesterol screenings, blood pressure checkups, Papanicolaou “pap” tests, mammograms, and colorectal cancer screenings). Compared to whites, Asians had higher rates of utilization of routine checkups, cholesterol screenings, and flu vaccinations, but they had lower utilization rates of blood pressure checkups, pap tests, and mammograms. The patterns of preventive services utilization differed across the Asian subgroups. All Asian subgroups, except for Filipinos, were less likely to have pap tests or mammograms than whites. Moreover, we observed a decreasing trend in having pap tests, mammograms, or colorectal cancer screenings among all Asian subgroups between 2013 and 2016. Our findings suggest that there are low cancer screening rates across Asian subgroups. This indicates the need for programs tailored to specific Asian subgroups to improve cancer screening.

An aspect of citation behavior, which has received longstanding attention in research, is how articles’ received citations evolve as time passes since their publication (i.e., citation ageing). Citation ageing has been studied mainly by the formulation and fit of mathematical models of diverse complexity. Commonly, these models restrict the shape of citation ageing functions and explicitly take into account factors known to influence citation ageing. An alternative—and less studied—approach is to estimate citation ageing functions using data-driven strategies. However, research following the latter approach has not been consistent in taking into account those factors known to influence citation ageing. In this article, we propose a model-free approach for estimating citation ageing functions which combines quantile regression with a non-parametric specification able to capture citation inflation. The proposed strategy allows taking into account field of research effects, impact level effects, citation inflation effects and skewness in the distribution of cites effects. To test our methodology, we collected a large dataset consisting of more than five million citations to 59,707 research articles spanning 12 dissimilar fields of research and, with this data in hand, tested the proposed strategy.

We develop a simple dynamic model of policy reform that captures some of the determinants that underlie the differences between the reform paths taken by a number of countries since the early 1990s. The model focuses on the interaction between domestic institutions and international organizations that promote reform, on the one hand, and the political incentives for reversing reforms, on the other. At equilibrium, there are three types of reform paths. A country can undergo a full-scale, lasting reform, can carry out a partial but lasting reform, or can go through cycles of reforms and costly counter-reforms. Domestic institutions, along with the incentives provided by international organizations, determine the equilibrium path. A politically myopic international organization may induce cycles of reforms and costly counter-reforms, thereby reducing the country's well-being. An international organization that only provides funds to promote reforms may have a less beneficial effect than one that assists the country with fresh funds to defend reforms when there is a risk of reversal. International funds that promote reforms can also influence domestic institutions. For example, due to the intervention of an international organization, countries could have incentives to dismantle institutions that build up reversal cost and/or do not fully build their fiscal capacity.

Professor Robert M. Groves is among the world leaders in survey methodology and survey statistics over the last four decades. Groves’ research—particularly on survey nonresponse, survey errors and costs, and responsive design—helped to provide intellectual footing for a new academic discipline. In addition, Groves has had remarkable success building academic programs that integrate the social sciences with statistics and computer science. He was instrumental in the development of degree programs in survey methodology at the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland. Recently, as Provost of Georgetown University, he has championed the use of big data sets to increase understanding of society and human behavior. Between his academic tenures, Groves served as Director of the US Census Bureau. Professor Groves is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association, elected member of the International Statistical Institute, elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies and presidential appointed member of the National Science Board. The interview was conducted in early 2016 at Georgetown University.