Covering the full population of applicants to the Jamaican Conditional Cash Transfer Program (PATH), we explore whether receiving PATH benefits alters the academic returns to subsequently attending a more preferred public secondary school. To uncover causal associations, we exploit exogenous...

Teachers are the most fundamental input of students' learning. For this reason, developing teaching skills is a policy priority for most governments around the world. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of "Let's All Learn to Read," a one-year professional development program that...

This paper studies a model where student effort and talent interact with parental and teachers' investments, as well as with school system resources. The model is rich, yet sufficiently stylized to provide novel implications. It can show, for example, that an improvement in parental outside...

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects' incentives are drastically...

This paper examines whether additional time in elementary and secondary school affects economic well-being in adulthood. This paper explores a large-scale reform that increased the Chilean school day by 30 percent between 1997 and 2010, with access to longer school days varying by cohort and...

Covering the full population of applicants to the Jamaican Conditional Cash Transfer Program (PATH), we explore whether receiving PATH since childhood altered the academic gains from attending a more preferred public secondary school. To uncover causal associations, we implement a double...

Credit constraints are central to development economics theory. However, there is scant direct evidence that supports the existence of such constraints. Traditional tests observe how consumption changes after an unexpected income shock. Such changes can also result from myopic behavior or...