This paper evaluates how Vietnam's Escuela Nueva (VNEN) program, an educational reform for primary schools supported by the World Bank, affected the cognitive (mathematics and Vietnamese) and non-cognitive (socioemotional) skills of students in that country. We use propensity score matching to...

Smallholder farming dominates agriculture in poorer countries. Yet, traditional recall-based surveys on smallholder farming in these countries face challenges with seasonal variations, high survey costs, poor record-keeping, and technical capacity constraints resulting in significant recall...

Hardly any recent study exists that broadly reviews poverty trends over time for Russia. Analyzing the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Surveys between 1994 and 2019, we offer an updated review of poverty trends and dynamics for the country over the past quarter of century. We find that poverty...

Hardly any evidence currently exists on the causal effects of mental illness on refugee labor market outcomes. We offer the first study on this topic in the context of Australia, one of the host countries with the largest number of refugees per capita in the world. Analyzing the Building a New...

Measuring the intergenerational mobility of welfare provides key inputs for policies, but very few studies examine intergenerational mobility of subjective well-being (SWB), particularly in a poorer, transitional country context. We make new contributions by analyzing rich panel SWB data from...

Despite a vast literature documenting the negative effects of climate change on various socio-economic outcomes, surprisingly hardly any evidence exists on the global impacts of hotter temperature on poverty. Analyzing a new global dataset of subnational poverty in 166 countries, we find higher...

Vietnam is widely praised for its successful fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The country has had an extremely low mortality rate of 35 deaths to date (out of a population of approximately 100 million) and currently has no community transmission. We offer the first study that examines the...

In many developing countries, the increasing public interest in monitoring economic inequality and mobility is hindered by the scarce availability of longitudinal data. Synthetic panels based on matching individuals with the same time-invariant characteristics in consecutive cross-sections have...

We offer the first study on vulnerability adaptation to subjective well-being, using rich panel data over the past two decades for Russia. We found no adaption to vulnerability for life satisfaction and subjective wealth, with longer vulnerability spells being associated with more negative...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in income and employment loss in many countries around the world. Yet, hardly any formal study exists on household finance and future economic expectations in poorer countries. To fill in this gap, we implemented and analyzed a web-based rapid assessment survey...