Education ministries worldwide have promoted community engagement through school committees. This paper presents results from a large field experiment testing alternative approaches to strengthen school committees in public schools in Indonesia. Two novel treatments focus on institutional...

I examine the impact of student incentives in Benin, using three different designs that can be implemented relatively cheaply and with administrative data. The first design is a standard incentive structure where students receive monetary rewards for reaching a performance target. In the other...

This paper presents results from a randomized controlled trial whereby approximately 1,000 OLPC XO laptops were provided for home use to children attending primary schools in Lima, Peru. The intervention increased access and use of home computers, with some substitution away from computer use...

A randomized evaluation in rural Kenya finds, contrary to the previous literature, that providing textbooks did not raise average test scores. Textbooks did increase the scores of the best students (those with high pretest scores) but had little effect on other students. Textbooks are written in...

We analyze a randomized trial of a program that rewarded Kenyan primary school teachers based on student test scores, with penalties for students not taking the exams. Scores increased on the formula used to reward teachers, and program school students scored higher on the exams linked to...

We evaluate a 'girl-friendly' primary school program in Burkina Faso using a regression discontinuity design. After 2.5 years, the program increased enrollment by 19 percentage points and increased test scores by 0.41 standard deviations. For those caused to attend school, scores increased by...

This paper provides regression discontinuity evidence on development impacts of intergovernmental transfers. Extra transfers in Brazil increased local government spending per capita by about 20 percent over a 4 year period with no evidence of crowding out own revenue or other revenue sources....

The most desirable Kenyan secondary schools are elite government schools that admit the best students from across the country. We exploit the random variation generated by the centralized school admissions process in a regression discontinuity design to obtain causal estimates of the effects of...

We examine the impact of the Kenyan Free Primary Education program on student participation, sorting, and achievement on the primary school exit examination. Exploiting variation in pre-program dropout rates between districts, we find that the program increased the number of students who...

We report an experiment in 3,000 villages that tested whether incentives improve aid efficacy. Villages received block grants for maternal and child health and education that incorporated relative performance incentives. Subdistricts were randomized into incentives, an otherwise identical...