This paper evaluates the effect of a free compulsory education reform in rural China on the incidence of child labor. We exploit the cross-province variation in the roll-out of the reform and apply a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the causal effects of the reform. We find that...

This paper investigates whether unconditional cash transfers can keep refugee children in school and out of work. We raise this question in the unique context of Turkey, which hosts the world's largest refugee population (including 3.6 million Syrians). Refugees in Turkey are supported by the...

Cash transfer programs are widely used in settings where child labour is prevalent. Even if many of these programs are explicitly implemented to improve children's welfare, in theory their impact on child labour is undetermined. This paper systematically reviews the empirical evidence on the...

We explore how access to Head Start impacts maternal labor supply. By relaxing child care constraints, public preschool options like Head Start might lead mothers to reallocate time between employment, child care, and other activities. Using the 1990s enrollment and funding expansions and the...

Many studies have documented that a phonics approach is an essential component in the teaching of reading for beginning readers, especially for students at risk of reading disabilities. We study whether phonics approaches, as indicated by the choice of basal readers (materials for the initial...

This paper examines how access to informal insurance shapes family responses to reductions in social welfare benefits, and how these adjustments affect children's development. In 2003, Israel reformed its child allowance program, significantly reducing unconditional cash benefits for large...

Although school integration of the children of economic migrants in developed countries is well-studied in the literature, little evidence based on large scale representative data exists on the school integration of refugee children - many of whom live in low- or middle-income countries. This...

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) are programs under which poor families get a stipend provided they keep their children in school and take them for health checks. While there is significant evidence showing that they have positive impacts on school participation, little is known about their...

This paper provides new estimates of the medium and long-term impacts of Head Start on the health and behavioral problems of its participants. We identify these impacts using discontinuities in the probability of participation induced by program eligibility rules. Our strategy allows us to...

This paper investigates the impact of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs on crime. Making use of a unique dataset combining detailed school characteristics with time and geo-referenced crime information from the city of São Paulo, Brazil, we estimate the contemporaneous effect of the...