To stay ahead of the competition, firms need to constantly adapt to the changing environment by identifying new opportunities and product innovations. The search for future discontinuities and trends using external knowledge sources enables firms to develop a foresight capability to proactively...

This paper provides a comparative analysis of statistical methods to evaluate the consumer perception about the quality of Services of General Interest. The evaluation of the service quality perceived by users is usually based on Customer Satisfaction Survey data and an ex-post evaluation is...

We assigned two cohorts of kindergarten students, totaling more than 24,000 children, to teachers within schools with a rule that is as-good-as-random. We collected data on children at the beginning of the school year, and applied 12 tests of math, language and executive function (EF) at the end...

Many nations allow private entities to manage publicly funded schools and grant them greater flexibility than traditional public schools. However, isolating the causal effect of attending these privately managed public schools relative to attending traditional public schools is difficult because...

This paper analyzes four instruments that are widely used to measure the quality of centers serving children ages 0 to 36 months - the CLASS, the ITERS-R, the CC-IT-HOME, and the MITRCC - and that were administered to a sample of 404 child care centers in Ecuador. We first assess the...

Private providers have become an important source of health care in Latin America, yet there is still little documentation on them, especially regarding their role as providers of preventive and public health interventions. This paper uses Demographic and Health Surveys from various Latin...