We exploit the extensive job loss associated with the devastating fourth wave of COVID-19 in Vietnam to examine the impact of unemployment on young people's experiences of anxiety and depression. Using data from a longitudinal study with individual and survey-wave fixed effects, we show that job...

This paper analyses the difference in short-term employment recovery between young men and women in India, Peru and Vietnam following the national lockdowns imposed in all three countries during 2020. We employ a mediation model to establish whether - and to what extent - commonly suggested...

Many low- and middle-income countries have introduced Public Works Programmes (PWPs) to fight poverty. PWPs provide temporary cash-for-work opportunities to boost poor households' incomes and to provide better infrastructure to local communities. While PWPs do not target children directly, the...

Global warming is changing precipitation patterns, harming communities strongly tied to agricultural production, particularly in low-and-middle income countries (LMICs). Whilst the long-term effects of being exposed to rainfall shocks early in life on school achievement tests are...

This paper examines the subjective treatment effects of a negative shock created by the COVID-19 pandemic on the labour market outcomes of young adults in India, Peru, and Vietnam. We leverage subjective counterfactual outcomes at the individual-level that were purposely collected from over...

Education choices are made based on the expected returns to schooling. If individuals are badly informed, they may make inefficient choices. We directly elicit young people's subjective expectations at the age of 14-15 about earnings under different educational scenarios and find these predict...

In the last two decades, access to higher education has increased substantially in Latin America. The quantity of new programs available has created concerns about education quality, which has implications for the labor market. We use rich longitudinal data from a Peruvian cohort tracked from...

Whether allocating more resources improves learning outcomes for students in low-performing public schools remains an open debate. We focus on the effect of increased instructional time, which is theoretically ambiguous due to possible compensating changes in effort by students, teachers or...

We estimate a dynamic model of multidimensional human capital development from childhood through adolescence and into early adulthood for a Peruvian cohort born in 1994. We exploit multiple measures of cognitive and socio-emotional skills and a latent factor structure to estimate flexible skills...

We provide new estimates of the impact of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia on child cognitive achievement in the medium term. The programme is the second largest in Africa, and has been rolled out to almost 10 million beneficiaries since 2005. We exploit four rounds...