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WORKING PAPERS
December 14, 2023
This paper examines the effectiveness of Malawi's selective secondary schools in influencing student learning outcomes. Using data from Malawi’s National Examination Board, we employ value-added and regression discontinuity methods to gauge the impact of school types on high-stakes exam results. Fin...
WORKING PAPERS
October 25, 2023
Enrolling in preschool at age three has large positive impacts on vocabulary in children’s mother tongue, which is the primary language of instruction in preprimary in Kenya. However, these short-term gains do not necessarily translate into persistent advantages in vocabulary or other measures of c...
Blog Post
October 25, 2023
A couple of years ago I joked that many development economics papers could be summarized by simply saying “schools: they’re good!”—or as an economist might put it, “the returns to education are positive.” Papers documenting the benefits of education have been at the core of development economics for...
Blog Post
July 14, 2023
It’s rare to read an education report that doesn’t mention the learning crisis. As data on low learning levels have emerged in recent years, global education aid has swung its focus sharply toward improving test scores among primary school children. Of course, learning to read is a good thing in its...
Blog Post
July 03, 2023
The global debate around high-stakes exams is strongly influenced by research from high-income countries. That research emphasises who gets sorted into the “best” schools. An alternative perspective that hasn’t received enough attention takes exams as artificial bottlenecks that prevent many childre...
Blog Post
July 03, 2023
UNESCO tells us that only one in seven low- and middle-income countries knows how much learning has been lost due to COVID school closures. Where there has been no measurement, simulations of learning loss are beginning to take the place of empirical facts. Yet countries examine millions of kids eac...
Blog Post
June 20, 2023
This is the third of our biennial updates on global education aid finance. In these posts we examine aid data from the OECD, analysing how much aid is going to education, where it is allocated, by who, and through what channels. The latest available data, which we use for this analysis, is from 2021...
WORKING PAPERS
May 17, 2023
We evaluate two labor market interventions targeting young women in Nairobi, Kenya. The first was a multifaceted program involving vocational training, in-kind transfers of physical capital, and ongoing mentoring. The second was an unrestricted cash grant. Both interventions shift women into self-em...