A knowledge representation formalism is \elaboration tolerant" to the extent that it is convenient to modify a set of facts expressed in the formalism to take into account new phenomena or changed circumstances. John McCarthy illustrated this idea by deening 19 elaborations of the Missionaries and Cannibals Problem. We argue that, to a certain degree, the goal of elaboration tolerance is met by...

This dissertation consists of four essays on human capital, institutions, and incentives. In the first essay, I investigate the effects of voucher-school competition on educational outcomes in Chile. I present a theoretical model that produces three empirical predictions: voucher-school competition 1) improves student outcomes; 2) may put stronger pressure on public schools to increase quality;...

Soon after their arrival to Korea, Christian missionaries were confronted by decisions regarding how they would present written materials to the Korean people. While many Koreans used their indigenous script (Hangeul) for everyday purposes, higher status literacy materials were expected to be presented using Chinese characters (Hanja), a system unfamiliar to most but considered more prestigious...

In February 2010, a group of American missionaries went to Haiti to assist children orphaned in the January earthquake. The group had plans to set up an orphanage in the Dominican Republic and to transport orphaned children across the border, eventually arranging adoptions into American families. The group was arrested during this process when government agencies discovered the missionaries had...

The positions of Pedro Arata, Moisés Santiago Bertoni, Carlos Leonhardt and Guillermo Furlong in the debate about the role of the Society of Jesus in the introduction and development of science in the La Plata region are investigated. Written between 1890 and the late 1950s, these authors' works not only analyze the medical, pharmaceutical and botanical knowledge of the Jesuit missionaries in t...

Several studies have argued that learning a foreign language has the potential to increase the general cognitive ability and test scores of students. In this analysis, the Mormon missionary program is used to test whether or not students who were assigned to learn a foreign language performed better in college. The results indicate that the increase in GPA due to serving a Mormon mission is the...

Leprosy has received scant attention in discussions of health in colonial India, which have focused on imperial and colonial politics, and on state intervention.1 Nongovernmental efforts, of which leprosy offers an important instance, have been neglected.2 In this article I discuss the dissemination of western medicine for leprosy in colonial India, which was largely the work of Christian missi...