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Blog Post
September 15, 2020
How much do educational outcomes around the world depend on where you were born? In a new CGD working paper, we propose a very simple strategy to overcome this problem and build a “Rosetta Stone” for test scores. We take a single sample of students and give them questions from each major exam around...
WORKING PAPERS
September 15, 2020
How can we accurately measure the global distribution of skills when people in different countries take different tests? We develop a new methodology to non-parametrically link scores from distinct populations. By administering an exam combining items from different assessments to 2,300 primary stud...
Blog Post
January 18, 2018
Last week the World Bank's Chief Economist, Paul Romer, told the Wall Street Journal the Bank had manipulated its own competitiveness rankings to undermine Chile's socialist government, and hinted Chile might not be alone—then he retracted the claim. Romer's conspiracy theories pro...
Blog Post
November 07, 2017
As economic indicators deteriorate, the Tanzanian government has jailed an opposition leader for questioning the Bank of Tanzania's growth statistics. It's time for the World Bank and the IMF to speak up. If it's illegal to question a government's statistics, why should anyone trust ...
WORKING PAPERS
June 13, 2017
Public employees in many developing economies earn much higher wages than similar private-sector workers. These wage premia may reflect an efficient return to effort or unobserved skills, or an inefficient rent causing labor misallocation. To distinguish these explanations, we exploit the Kenyan gov...
Blog Post
June 05, 2017
Two recent books reveal an internal debate about the value of childcare and women's work at the Inter-American Development Bank. Impact evaluations show home visitation programs are cheaper and better for kids than center-based childcare. But a new volume argues the cost-benefit calculation may ...
Feb
2
2017
12:30—2:00 PM
January 26, 2017
The city of Bogotá set out to reduce crime and increase state legitimacy by raising state presence on city streets: either increasing police time by two thirds, or delivering clean up and lighting services. In their new paper, Christopher Blattman and his co-authors find that these large and ...