A recent conference, “Human Development in the Dominican Republic,” brought together policymakers from the Dominican Republic’s government and scholars from universities in the United States and Latin America to discuss education-focused projects and topics, including teacher ability and quality, school choice and search behavior, school construction and returns of education.

Christopher Neilson, assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, helped to organize the event. Neilson has studied education markets in Chile, which have a dominant feature of significant private sector and public-private interaction. He is exploring similar concepts in new projects working with the governments of the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Peru.

Other conference participants from Princeton included Fabiola Alba, a senior research specialist for Princeton’s Industrial Relations Section, and Sebastian Gallegos, a postdoctoral research associate in economics and the Industrial Relations Section and a lecturer in economics, who presented a session titled “What goes in must come out? Teacher ability and teacher quality.”

The next iteration of the conference will be held in fall 2017 in Cusco, Peru.