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Haimovich Paz, Francisco

Education Global Practice
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Applied microeconomics, Education, Labor markets, Income distribution
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Education Global Practice
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Francisco Haimovich Paz is an Economist in the World Bank Group’s Education Global Practice (GEDDR) since 2015. Before joining GEDDR, he worked at the Poverty Reduction and Equity Unit and the Human Development Sector Unit in Europe and Central Asia, and for the Inter-American Development Bank. He has also worked as researcher at the Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS) at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina. He specializes in applied microeconomics, with a particular focus on education, labor markets and income distribution. His research has been published in the Journal of Applied Economics and the Journal of International Development. Francisco holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Citations 15 Scopus

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Scalable Early Warning Systems for School Dropout Prevention: Evidence from a 4.000-School Randomized Controlled Trial
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06) Vazquez, Emmanuel; Haimovich, Francisco; Adelman, Melissa
    Across many low- and middle-income countries, a sizable share of young people drop out of school before completing a full course of basic education. Early warning systems that accurately identify students at risk of dropout and support them with targeted interventions have shown results and are in widespread use in high-income contexts. This paper presents impact evaluation results from an early warning system pilot program in Guatemala, a middle-income country where nearly 40 percent of sixth graders drop out before completing ninth grade. The pilot program, which was implemented in 17 percent of Guatemala’s primary schools and largely leveraging existing government resources, reduced the dropout rate in the transition from primary to lower secondary school by 4 percent (1.3 percentage points) among schools assigned to the program, and by 9 percent (3 percentage points) among program compliers. Although the effect size is relatively modest, the low cost of the program (estimated at less than US$3 per student) and successful implementation at scale make this a promising and cost-effective approach for reducing dropout in resource-constrained contexts like Guatemala.
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    At a Crossroads: Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05-02) Ferreyra, Maria Marta; Avitabile, Ciro; Botero Álvarez, Javier; Haimovich Paz, Francisco; Urzúa, Sergio
    Higher education (HE) has expanded dramatically in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) since 2000. While access became more equitable, quality concerns remain. This volume studies the expansion, as well as HE quality, variety and equity in LAC. It investigates the expansion’s demand and supply drivers, and outlines policy implications.
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    Predicting School Dropout with Administrative Data: New Evidence from Guatemala and Honduras
    (Taylor and Francis, 2018) Adelman, Melissa; Haimovich, Francisco
    School dropout is a growing concern across Latin America because of its negative social and economic consequences. Identifying who is likely to drop out, and therefore could be targeted for interventions, is a well-studied prediction problem in countries with strong administrative data. In this paper, we use new data in Guatemala and Honduras to estimate some of the first dropout prediction models for lower-middle income countries. These models correctly identify 80% of sixth grade students who will drop out within the next year, performing better than other commonly used targeting approaches and as well as models used in the United States.
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    Predicting School Dropout with Administrative Data: New Evidence from Guatemala and Honduras
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-07) Ham, Andres; Adelman, Melissa; Vazquez, Emmanuel; Haimovich, Francisco
    Across Latin America, school dropout is a growing concern, because of its negative social and economic consequences. Although a wide range of interventions hold potential to reduce dropout rates, policy makers in many countries must first address the basic question of how to target limited resources effectively for such interventions. Identifying who is most likely to drop out and, therefore, who should be prioritized for targeting, is a prediction problem that has been addressed in a rich set of research in countries with strong education system data. This paper makes use of newly established administrative data systems in Guatemala and Honduras, to estimate some of the first dropout prediction models for lower-middle-income countries. These models can correctly identify 80 percent of sixth grade students who will drop out in the transition to lower secondary school, performing as well as models used in the United States and providing more accurate results than other commonly used targeting approaches.
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    Simulating the Impact of the 2009 Financial Crisis on Welfare in Latvia
    (2012-01-01) Haimovich, Francisco; Azam, Mehtabul; Ajwad, Mohamed Ihsan
    This note details simulations of the distributional impacts of the 2009 financial crisis on households in Latvia. It uses household survey data collected prior to the crisis and simulates the impact of the growth slowdown. The simulations show that Latvia experienced a sharp rise in poverty, widening of the poverty gap, and a rise in income inequality due to the economic contraction in 2009. The 18 percent contraction in gross domestic product (affecting mainly trade hotels and restaurants, construction, and manufacturing) likely led the poverty head count to increase from 14.4 percent in 2008 to 20.2 percent in 2009. The poverty gap, which measures the national poverty deficit, was simulated to increase from 5.9 percent in 2008 to 8.3 percent in 2009. The analysis finds that the results are robust to most assumptions except post-layoff incomes, which substantially mitigated household welfare. The authors also simulate the impact of Latvia's Emergency Social Safety Net components and find that the Safety Net likely mitigated crisis impacts for many beneficiaries. The simulations measure only direct short-run impacts; hence, they do not take into account general equilibrium effects. Post-crisis income data from a different data source suggest that poverty rates increased by 8.0 percentage points between 2008 and 2009. As a result, the authors suggest that their ex-ante simulation performs reasonably well and is a useful tool to identify vulnerable groups during the early stages of a crisis.