Research

Oil price and its shocks matter for economic vitality and firms’ operations and strategies for the long-term and short-term. The plethora of evidence in the literature has failed to fill the gap in investigating oil’s impact on short-term needs for businesses. We attempt to fill in this void. Using US firms’ data, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in oil price is associated with improving WCM by reducing the days it takes to recoup working capital by 15.3%. Similarly, in years where firms received ITC, a 1% change in oil price is associated with improving WCM by reducing the days to recoup WC by 26.1% compared to 33.6% for years ITC was not received. We contribute to literature and practice as the results are robust in controlling for spurious correlation, endogeneity concerns, varying regression models, and alternative measures. 

Enhancing students’ educational outcomes and overall socio-economic well-being is closely connected to investment in education and human capital development. In developing countries, governments and policymakers constantly seek to improve students’ capacity through educational investments. A commonly favored approach chiefly in developing countries is revising the length of school instruction periods. Relatedly, an additional year of official high school is regarded an effective education policy tool that improves students’ present and prospective educational outcomes. In 2007, the Ghanaian government increased the length of official high school from three to four grades as part of the 2008 Education Act (Act 778). However, after only three years, the government reverted the length of high school back to three grades. The objective of this study is to exploit the natural experiment created by the back-and-forth policy changes to estimate the effect of the four year high school system on high school and post-secondary educational outcomes. We find that age-based exposure to the additional year of official high school heavily underscores improvements in high school attendance, high school graduation, and tertiary attendance. These results hold across multiple robustness checks, including falsification tests and sensitivity checks regarding how treatment is assigned. We further find little differences in the impact of the policy on girls and boys. However, the additional year of official high school does appear to yield larger benefits among non-agricultural and urban households. The policy in Ghana is unique because it impacted only three student cohorts before it was reversed, and it entailed no changes in curriculum or other aspects of school infrastructure. Therefore, this paper contributes to the existing literature by isolating the impact of the additional year of official secondary schooling alone. It is therefore notable that we find positive impacts from extended high school even without complementary interventions.

Governments especially in developing countries continue to mitigate low school enrollment by ensuring the improvement of child human capital through quality education and inclusiveness. Eradication of school fees is one form of government intervention policy makers in Low- and Middle-Income Countries adopt to improve children education outcomes and human capital. In this study, we explore the impact of a free-school intervention; the Capitation Grant (CG) in Ghana on the literacy and numeracy skills of Junior High School (JHS) children. We provide evidence of the impact of free school intervention on literacy by disentangling a child’s literacy in a second language from mother tongue literacy. We estimate the observed differences in literacy and numeracy abilities attributable to the implementation of the CG by estimating a two-way fixed effects model. We find that in the short-term, the CG leads to decline in mother tongue, official language, and numeracy abilities. In the long-term, there is an upswing in children’s literacy in the country’s official language and their ability to do math. However, the ability to read and write a mother tongue becomes progressively worse.

The purpose of this project identified by Congress is for services for low-income children and families, including access to childcare. The overarching goal for this project is to enhance/expand the current services of the University of New Mexico (UNM) FOCUS program, including the development/implementation of a family needs assessment and robust ongoing program evaluation, as well as information dissemination on the work of the UNM FOCUS program locally and nationally. The ACF project aims to serve families with very young children who are affected by structural and social determinants of health, including poverty, parental substance use disorder, family mental health needs, lack of access to childcare, lack of access to transportation and/or housing instability by providing increased and integrated medical and behavioral health as well as developmental and social supports.

The New Mexico FOCUS Medication-Assisted Treatment - Prescription Drug and Opioid Addiction Expansion project is a federally funded project which primarily targets mothers, with Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) who are parenting children 0-6 years old in New Mexico (NM). The project provides continuity of care to OUD-impacted mothers and families, providing a family medical home that includes primary care, Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT), and access to Early Intervention (EI) for drug-exposed children. The MAT uses at least one of the FDA-approved medications for the maintenance treatment of OUD in combination with comprehensive OUD psychosocial services.

The purpose of the New Mexico Adolescent Substance Use Reduction Treatment Implementation (ASURE-TI) grant is to expand access to, and effectiveness of, adolescent behavioral health treatment services in New Mexico with a specific focus on building agency capacity to offer comprehensive Youth Support Service (YSS). YSS is a para-professional service model predicated on the belief that youth who engage in long-term, healthy relationships and learn appropriate life skills develop pro-social behaviors including self-efficacy, motivation, and collaborative engagement. YSS is designed to promote resiliency and enhance wellness for all New Mexico youth. It provides experiential and developmental supports intended to enhance natural support deficits in order to build skills and capabilities that empower the youth to successfully navigate their own personal life course.