Lottery-based identification strategies offer potential for generating the next generation of evidence on U.S. early education programs. Our collaborative network of five research teams applying this design in early education and methods experts has identified six challenges that need to be...

According to UNESCO, one-third of the world's youths are victims of bullying, which deteriorates academic performance and mental health, and increases suicide ideation and the risk of committing suicide. This paper analyzes a four-month parent-directed intervention designed to foster empathy in...

We study the evolution of belief systems that suppress productive effort. These include concerns about the envy of others, beliefs in the importance of luck for success, disdain for competitive effort, and traditional beliefs in witchcraft. We show that such demotivating beliefs can evolve when...

Two centuries ago, in most countries around the world, women were unable to vote, had no say over their own children or property, and could not obtain a divorce. Women have gradually gained rights in many areas of life, and this legal expansion has been closely intertwined with economic...

Many personal and policy decisions turn on perceptions of school effectiveness, defined here as the causal effect of attendance at a particular school or set of schools on student test scores and other outcomes. Widely-disseminated school ratings frameworks compare average student achievement...

We study the distributional effects of remote learning. Our approach combines newly collected data on parental preferences with administrative data from Los Angeles. The preference data allow us to account for selection into remote learning while also studying selection patterns and treatment...

Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school...

This study reports the findings from a year-long randomized evaluation assessing the impact of assigning 62 classrooms in Nigeria to receive either blocked or interleaved math problem sets. Blocked practice sessions focused on a single skill at a time. Interleaved problem sets alternated between...

School districts historically approached conflict-resolution from a zero-sum perspective: suspend students seen as disruptive and potentially harm them, or avoid suspensions and harm their classmates. Restorative practices (RP) -- focused on reparation and shared ownership of disciplinary...

This paper examines whether school COVID-19 policies influenced enrollment differently by student age and race/ethnicity. Unlike much prior research, we (i) analyze enrollments for virtually the entire U.S. public school population for both the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, (ii) compare...