Person:
Dinarte Diaz, Lelys
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Development Economics,
Economics of Education,
Crime Economics,
Latin America
Degrees
External Links
Departments
Development Research Group, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Lelys Dinarte Díaz is a research economist in the Human Development Team of the World Bank’s Development Research Group. Her primary research fields are development economics and economics of education and crime. Combining experimental and non-experimental approaches, one strand of her research agenda studies how educational interventions implemented in developing countries can modify at-risk youth performance, including academic performance, socio-emotional skills, and violent behaviors. She also conducts research on quality determinants for higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her current research involves projects in multiple Latin American countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Jamaica, and Peru. She holds a PhD and a MSc in economics from Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 10
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Publication
The Fast Track to New Skills: Short-Cycle Higher Education Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-09-29)Higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has expanded dramatically in the new millennium, yet enrollment in short-cycle programs (SCPs) is still relatively low. Shorter and more practical than bachelor’s programs, SCPs can form skilled human capital fast. The economic crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated underlying trends, such as automation, the use of electronic platforms, and the need for lifelong learning. Addressing these demands requires the urgent upskilling and reskilling of the population—a task for which SCPs are uniquely suited. The Fast Track to New Skills: Short-Cycle Higher Education Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean explores the labor market outcomes and returns of SCPs, examines their providers, and identifies the practices adopted by the best programs. Relying on unique data that includes a novel survey of SCP directors in five LAC countries, it finds that while SCPs generate, on average, good labor market outcomes, they vary greatly in quality. SCP providers respond quickly and flexibly to local economy needs; and specific practices related to faculty, job search assistance, and interaction with prospective employers are distinctive of the best programs. Drawing on these findings, The Fast Track to New Skills discusses how to create an environment where good programs are offered and students have the interest and means to attend them. It draws attention to a higher education sector that has been typically overlooked, both in research and policy. The Fast Track to New Skills will be of interest to policy makers, researchers, and the public at large. -
Publication
The Unintended Consequences of Deportations: Evidence from Firm Behavior in El Salvador
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-01)Can repatriation inflows impact firm behavior in origin countries? This paper examines this question in the context of repatriation inflows from the United States and Mexico to El Salvador. The paper combines a rich longitudinal data set covering all formal firms in El Salvador with individual-level data on all registered repatriations from 2010 to 2017. The empirical strategy combines variation in the municipality of birth of individuals repatriated over 1995-2002—before a significant change in deportation policies—with annual variation in aggregate inflows of repatriations to El Salvador. The findings show that repatriations have large negative effects on the average wages of formal workers. This is mainly driven by formal firms in sectors that face more intense competition from the informal sector, which deportees are more likely to join. Repatriation inflows also reduce total employment among formal firms in those sectors. Given that most deportees spend less than a month abroad, these findings suggest that the experience of being detained and deported can have strong negative effects not only on the deportees, but also on their receiving communities. -
Publication
Peer Effects on Violence: Experimental Evidence from El Salvador
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-03)This paper provides experimental evidence of the effect of having peers with different propensities for violence in the context of an afterschool program. By randomly assigning students to participate in the program with a set of similar or diverse peers in terms of violence, the study measures the effects of segregation or integration on students' behavioral, neurophysiological, and academic outcomes. The paper also exploits a discontinuity around the median of the propensity for violence distribution, to measure the impacts of segregation on marginal students. The results indicate that integrating students with different propensities for violence is better for highly and less violent children than segregating them. In particular, the intervention can have unintended effects on misbehavior and stress, if highly violent students are segregated and treated separately from their less violent peers. -
Publication
Preventing Violence in the Most Violent Contexts: Behavioral and Neurophysiological Evidence
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-05)This paper provides experimental evidence of the impact of an after-school program on vulnerable public-school students in El Salvador. The program combined a behavioral intervention with ludic activities for students aged 10-16 years old. The authors hypothesize that it affects violence, misbehaviors, and academic outcomes by modulating emotional regulation or automatic reactions to external stimuli. Results indicate the program reduced reports of bad behavior and school absenteeism while increasing students’ grades. Neurophysiological results suggest that the impacts on behavior and academic performance are driven by the positive effects of the program on emotional regulation. Finally, the study finds positive spillover effects for untreated children. -
Publication
Helping Families Help Themselves? Heterogeneous Effects of a Digital Parenting Program
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11)Parenting practices are crucial for the development of children’s brains and social skills. However, parenting styles may be far from ideal, particularly those of caregivers with high stress levels. Using an individual-level experiment with male and female caregivers of young children in El Salvador, this paper evaluates the impact of a free digital stress management and positive parenting intervention. The results indicate that, for males, the intervention increased stress and anxiety and lowered caregiver-child interactions. The effect on males was concentrated among the poorer and those residing with a partner. In contrast, women’s mental health was not impacted. Yet, their use of physical violence toward children decreased by 18 percent. These results align with theories linking economic deprivation and family structure to caregivers’ cognitive overload and mental health. -
Publication
Does Maternal Depression Undermine Childhood Cognitive Development? Evidence from the Young Lives Survey in Peru
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11)This paper studies the effect of maternal depression on early childhood cognition in Peru. The identification strategy exploits variation in exposure to exogenous shocks during early life to instrument for maternal depression. The results suggest that maternal depression is detrimental to the child's vocabulary at age five. Although the effects fade out by age eight, early vocabulary gaps can undermine other development outcomes. The effects do not vary by maternal education, but they are significant only for children living in disadvantaged households. The presence of a partner worsens the effect of maternal depression on vocabulary development, and this effect is driven by households with partners who drink heavily. -
Publication
Talk or Text?: Evaluating Response Rates by Remote Survey Method during COVID-19
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-04)Researchers and policy makers face significant challenges in selecting a method to conduct remote surveys, especially when collecting sensitive information or during turbulent life stages of hard-to-reach groups. In the context of the COVID-19 lockdown, this study randomly selected about 600 adults in El Salvador to survey using two different tools: telephone interviews or a self-completion survey via WhatsApp. The findings show that phone-based surveys increase the rate of survey completion by 42 percentage points. Even larger effects are documented for women and older adults. Although the direct costs of phone-based surveys are substantially higher—doubling implementation cost—the estimates imply that when adjusted for the probability of completion, the costs of conducting phone-based surveys can be 25 percent lower. -
Publication
Is Investment in Preprimary Education Too Low? Lessons from (Quasi) Experimental Evidence across Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)A large body of evidence suggests sizeable improvements in cognitive and social-emotional skills and subsequent educational attainment following preprimary education interventions as well as increases in earnings later in life. Yet, while the world has nearly reached universal primary education, coverage of early childhood education is still low in many countries. This study uses a novel global dataset of effect sizes from more than 50 studies conducted in 19 countries to examine measures of school participation, cognitive skills, social-emotional skills, and behavior, both during and after preprimary ages. Estimates from meta-regression analysis suggest both strong demand for preprimary services when offered and significant improvements in children’s cognitive skills (0.15 sd) and their executive functioning, social-emotional learning, and behavior (0.12 sd) during the pre-primary period. Moreover, our meta-analytic results indicate statistically significant persistent advantages (0.07 sd) in each type of skill beyond the preprimary period. Pooled heterogeneous treatment effects also suggest higher gains for disadvantaged children. Lastly, cost-benefit analysis using studies from low- and middle-income countries implies benefit-to-cost ratios ranging between 1.7 and 14.2, suggesting high returns to preprimary investments even in contexts with limited state capacity. -
Publication
What Makes a Program Good?: Evidence from Short-Cycle Higher Education Programs in Five Developing Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs) can play a central role in skill development and higher education expansion, yet their quality varies greatly within and among countries. This paper explores the relationship between programs’ practices and inputs (quality determinants) and student academic and labor market outcomes. It designs and conduct a novel survey to collect program-level information on quality determinants and average outcomes for Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Peru. Categories of quality determinants include training and curriculum, infrastructure, faculty, link with productive sector, costs and funding, and practices on student admission and institutional governance. The paper also collects administrative, student-level data on higher education and formal employment for SCP students in Brazil and Ecuador and match it to survey data. Machine learning methods are used to select the quality determinants that predict outcomes at the program and student levels. Estimates indicate that some quality determinants may favor academic and labor market outcomes while others may hinder them. Two practices predict improvements in all labor market outcomes in Brazil and Ecuador—teaching numerical competencies and providing job market information—and one practice— teaching numerical competencies—additionally predicts improvements in labor market outcomes for all survey countries. Since quality determinants account for 20-40 percent of the explained variation in student-level outcomes, quality determinants might have a role shrinking program quality gaps. Findings have implications for the design and replication of high-quality SCPs, their regulation, and the development of information systems. -
Publication
The Contribution of Short-Cycle Programs to Student Outcomes: Evidence from Colombia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10)Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs), lasting two or three years, capture about a quarter of higher education enrollment in the world and can play a key role enhancing workforce skills. This paper estimates the program-level contribution of SCPs to student academic and labor market outcomes, and studies how and why these contributions vary across programs. This paper exploits unique administrative data from Colombia on the universe of students, institutions, and programs to control for a rich set of student, peer, and local choice set characteristics. Results indicate that program-level contributions account for about 60–70 percent of the variation in student-level graduation and labor market outcomes. Estimates show that programs vary greatly in their contributions, across and especially within fields of study. Moreover, the estimated contributions are strongly correlated with program outcomes but not with other commonly used quality measures. Programs contribute more to formal employment and wages when they are longer, have been provided for a longer time, are taught by more specialized institutions, and are offered in larger cities.