Ideas to action: independent research for global prosperity
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Blog Post
November 15, 2019
Politicians often claim elite schools are vehicles for social mobility. We look at the evidence on effects on the kids who attend elite schools—and on the kids who don’t—to explore whether they live up to their hype. We suggest they produce at best a small bump in learnin...
Blog Post
October 31, 2019
The ‘Learning Adjusted Year of Schooling’ (LAYS) concept, introduced last year by the World Bank, seeks to combine access and learning outcomes into a single measure, allowing funders to compare directly across different kinds of interventions. We like the idea and applaud innovation in ...
Blog Post
October 15, 2019
Efforts to make aid more effective in the last two decades have given prominence to "country ownership." With true country ownership, aid is supposed to follow the priorities of recipient countries, rather than those of the funders. Yet funders have their priorities too. So recipients and ...
WORKING PAPERS
October 11, 2019
This paper illustrates the tradeoff between country ownership and funders’ priorities with a formal model in which aid is governed by a contract to produce a jointly desired outcome. The model generalizes the Principal-Agent approaches for studying aid which treat countries as having multiple ...
WORKING PAPERS
September 27, 2019
Many teachers in low- and middle-income countries lack the skills to teach effectively, and professional development (PD) programs are the principal tool that governments use to upgrade those skills. At the same time, few PD programs are evaluated, and those that are evaluated show highly varying re...
Blog Post
September 25, 2019
Ministers are gathering at the UN this week to discuss the financing needs to meet the Global Goals—with the challenge that resources will clearly fall short, not least because most high-income countries are still failing to meet their financial commitments. We reviewed the...
Blog Post
September 24, 2019
There are just eleven years to go to achieve the many targets under SDG4 and recent reports suggest things are woefully off-track. The UN General Assembly—taking place in New York this week—will be the platform for the announcement of various new initiatives and big&nbs...
Blog Post
September 12, 2019
The global education community has been calling on poor countries to increase their spending on education for years now, to little avail. Instead of repeatedly making the case for how important education is, or calling for poliltical will, a smarter approach could be to directly address the politica...