In low-income countries, educators often encourage weak primary students to drop out before reaching the end of primary school in order to avoid the negative attention they receive when their students perform poorly on primary leaving exams. We conducted an experiment in rural Uganda that sought...

The canonical consumer demand model predicts that as the price of a substitute decreases, quantity demanded for a good decreases. In the case of demand for sexual activity and availability of alternative leisure activities, popular culture expresses this prediction as “television kills your...

The single largest item in the United States foreign aid health budget is antiretroviral therapy (ART) for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Many supply- and demand-side factors in sub-Saharan Africa could cause smaller than expected epidemiological effects of this at scale drug provision. We provide...

Economic growth and development have improved human health in many regions, while sub-Saharan Africa continues to lag behind. Economic theory and the existing empirical evidence suggest that development may not generate large reductions in the leading cause of adult mortality in the region,...

Using two RCTs in middle schools in Pakistan, we show brief, expert-led, curriculum based videos integrated into the classroom experience improved teaching effectiveness–student test scores in math and science increased by 0.3 standard deviations, 60% more than the control group, after 4...

Providing health information is a non-pharmaceutical intervention designed to reduce disease transmission and infection risk by encouraging behavior change. But does knowledge change behavior? We test whether coronavirus health knowledge promotes protective risk mitigation behaviors early in the...

In 2007, approximately one in five children in Zambia lived with an HIV positive adult. We identify the effect of adult antiretroviral therapy (ART) availability at scale on children's educational outcomes by combining data on the expansion of ART availability with two national household surveys...

Students often make school choice decisions with inadequate information. We present results from delivering information to randomly selected students (and some randomly selected parents) across 900 junior high schools in Ghana, a country with universal secondary school choice. We provided...

We partnered with the Ghanaian government to test simultaneously four methods of increasing achievement in schools with low and heterogeneous student achievement| assistant led remedial pull-out lessons, assistant led remedial after school lessons, assistant led smaller class sizes, or teacher...

This chapter analyzes the design of incentive schemes in education while reviewing empirical studies that evaluate performance pay programs for educators. Several themes emerge. First, it is difficult to use one assessment system to create both educator performance metrics and measures of...