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The adoption of new clinical practice patterns by medical care providers is often challenging, even when the patterns are believed to be efficacious and profitable. This paper uses a randomized field experiment to examine the effects of temporary financial incentives paid to medical care clinics for the initiation of prenatal care in the first trimester of pregnancy. The rate of early initiation of prenatal care was 34 percent higher in the treatment group than in the control group while the incentives were being paid, and this effect persisted at least 15 months and likely 24 months or more after the incentives ended. These results are consistent with a model where the incentives enable providers to address the fixed costs of overcoming organizational inertia in innovation, and suggest that temporary incentives may be effective at motivating improvements in long-run provider performance at a substantially lower cost than permanent incentives.

Argentina's Plan Nacer provides insurance for maternal and child health care to uninsured families. The program allocates funding to provinces based on enrollment of beneficiaries and adds performance incentives based on indicators of the use and quality of maternal and child health care services and health outcomes. The provinces use these resources to pay health facilities to provide maternal and child health care services to beneficiaries. This paper analyzes the impact of Plan Nacer Healton birth outcomes. The analysis uses data from the universe of birth records in seven Argentine provinces for 2004 to 2008 and exploits the geographic phasing in of Plan Nacer over time. The paper finds that the program increases the use and quality of prenatal care as measured by the number of visits and the probability of receiving a tetanus vaccine. Beneficiaries'probability of low birth-weight is estimated to be reduced by 19 percent. Beneficiaries have a 74 percent lower chance of in-hospital neonatal mortality in larger facilities and approximately half this reduction comes from preventing low birth weight and half from better postnatal care. The analysis finds that the cost of saving a disability-adjusted life year through the program was $814, which is highly cost-effective compared with Argentina's $6,075 gross domestic product per capita over this period. Although there are small negative spillover effects on prenatal care utilization of non-beneficiary populations in clinics covered by Plan Nacer, no spillover is found onto their birth outcomes.

The objectives of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, to analyse the state of the education system in Argentina, combining data from different sources, as each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. For instance, school census data have the advantage of being direct reports from state education agencies but do not provide wide socio-economic information on students, and do not give an estimation of how many people are out of the system. Using the population Census data it is possible to fill in the gap, as non-attendance rates by age and gender are easily calculated. This information, however, is available every 10 years. There are also many contextual variables (such as household income) that are not collected during the interviews. Using the household survey it is possible to get that information on a current basis. Although it covers only main urban areas, it is a good approximation to the urban census data. With these data, it was also possible to construct a measure to identify children who are below the modal grade for their age. Secondly, to closely explore the interrelations between quantitative educational outcomes and individual characteristics as well as school factors, exploiting the EEJ database. The research intends to uncover correlations among variables and in this sense, it is purely a descriptive paper to highlight associations rather than causal relations. The next section will provide the readers with the general context of the education sector, and its origins. Section II.B describes the main stylised facts observed during recent decades using data from different sources, with special focus on identifying risk schooling zones for teenagers. Section III explores the new data set that allows us to characterise dissimilar paths in youth education. The second part of this section will present a multivariate analysis to identify the groups that are most likely to having access secondary school and complete it. Findings are discussed by constructing different student profiles. The last section summarises the findings., Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS)

Este trabajo investiga el problema de la deserción y graduación de los estudiantes universitarios. Se utilizan modelos de riesgo proporcional no paramétricos para estimar los efectos cualitativos y cuantitativos de factores personales y características socioeconómicas de los alumnos sobre las probabilidades condicionales de deserción y graduación. Se emplean datos de una cohorte de estudiantes de 1991 de la carrera de Contador Público de la Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina. Los hallazgos son útiles para evaluar y diseñar políticas públicas en el sector de educación., This study examines the issue of student departure from a public university. Non-parametric proportional hazard models are used to estimate the quantitative and qualitative effects of the students' personal and socioeconomic characteristics on the probability of their dropping out or graduating. Data include a cohort of students who started studying accounting at the National University of Rosario, Argentina, in 1991. The results are useful to evaluate and design public policies in the educational sector., Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas

The authors estimate returns to schooling in urban Argentina for a 10-year period. In addition to comparable earnings functions, they also estimate the returns using quantile regression analysis to detect differences in the returns across the distribution. Over time, men in higher quantiles have higher returns to schooling compared with those in the lower quantiles. For women, returns are highest at the lowest quantile. The returns to education increased during the past decade. The authors do not rule out that increased demand for skills is driving the increasing returns over the decade.

Este reporte describe la situación socioeconómica en Chile basado en estadísticas distributivas, laborales y sociales obtenidas de las Encuestas de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional (CASEN) de 1990 hasta 2000. El reporte también utiliza otras fuentes de información y estudios de país. Chile mostró un desempeño económico positivo durante los 1990s, lo cual llevo a una gran reducción en la pobreza. Este comportamiento sitúa al país en la situación opuesta de sus vecinos del cono Sur, donde la pobreza creció. Este declive en la pobreza se debe principalmente al crecimiento económico, dado que la desigualdad se mantiene alta., This report describes the socio-economic situation in Chile based on a large set of distributional, labor and social statistics computed from microdata of the Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional (CASEN) from 1990 to 2000. The report also draws from other data sources and the existing literature. Chile had an outstanding economic performance during the 1990s, in particular in the first half of the decade, achieving a remarkable reduction in poverty, which contrasts with the experience of its neighbors in the Southern Cone. Poverty reduction was mainly due to economic growth, since inequality has remained very high., Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS)

This report describes the socio-economic situation in Chile based on a large set of distributional, labor and social statistics computed from microdata of the Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional (CASEN) from 1990 to 2000. The report also draws from other data sources and the existing literature. Chile had an outstanding economic performance during the 1990s, in particular in the first half of the decade, achieving a remarkable reduction in poverty, which contrasts with the experience of its neighbors in the Southern Cone. Poverty reduction was mainly due to economic growth, since inequality has remained very high.

Este trabajo investiga el problema de la deserción y graduación de los estudiantes universitarios. Se utilizan modelos de riesgo proporcional no paramétricos para estimar los efectos cualitativos y cuantitativos de factores personales y características socioeconómica de los alumnos sobre las probabilidades condicionales de deserción y graduación. Se emplean datos de una cohorte de estudiantes de la carrera de Contador Público de la Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina. Los hallazgos son útiles para evaluar y diseñar políticas públicas en el sector de educación., This study examines the issue of student departure from a public university. Non-parametric proportional hazard models are used to estimate the quantity and quality effects of the students' personal and socioeconomic characteristics on the probability of their dropping out or graduating. Data include a cohort of students who started studying accounting at National University of Rosario, Argentina, in 1991. The results are useful to evaluate and design public policies in the educational sector., Departamento de Economía

El objetivo central del trabajo es analizar la dimensión demográfica de la pobreza en la Argentina. Sin ser exhaustivo, el trabajo trata varias facetas de la relación entre características demográficas e insuficiencia de ingresos. El primer objetivo del trabajo es obtener una detallada caracterización de la estructura demográfica de la Argentina y su evolución en las últimas dos décadas (capítulo II). A continuación se busca presentar evidencia general sobre el nivel y evolución de la pobreza en la Argentina (capítulo III). El cumplimiento de estos dos objetivos permite enmarcar el análisis del resto del trabajo., Proyecto realizado para el Diálogo Regional de Política. Red para la Reducción de la Pobreza y la Protección Social Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo., Departamento de Economía