This paper studies the sharp increase in violence experienced in Mexico after 2006, known as The War on Drugs, and its effects on human capital accumulation. The upsurge in violence is expected to have direct effects on individuals schooling decisions, but not indirect effects, because there was...

Educated parents tend to have educated children. But is intergenerational transmission of human capital more nature, more nurture, or both? The author uses household survey data from Rwanda that contains a large proportion of children living in households without their biological parents. The...

This paper examines the effects of subsidized school meals on school participation, educational achievement, and school finance in a developing country setting. The paper uses data from a program that was implemented in 25 randomly chosen preschools in a pool of 50. Children's school...

The relationship between school inputs and educational outcomes is critical for educational policy. The authors recognize that households will respond optimally to changes in school inputs and study how such responses affect the link between school inputs and cognitive achievement. To...

Conditional cash transfers have been adopted by a large number of countries in the past decade. Although the impacts of these programs have been studied extensively, understanding of the economic mechanisms through which cash and conditions affect household decisions remains incomplete. This...

This paper investigates how reductions of barriers to migration affect the decision of middle school graduates to attend high school in rural China. Change in the cost of migration is identified using exogenous variation across counties in the timing of national identity card distribution, which...

Private tutoring is now a major component of the education sector in many developing countries, yet education policy too seldom acknowledges and makes use of it. Various criticisms have been raised against private tutoring, most notably that it exacerbates social inequalities and may even fail...

Civil war, and genocide in particular, are among the most destructive of social phenomena, especially for children of school-going age. In Rwanda school enrollment trends suggest that the school system recovered quickly after 1994, but these numbers do not tell the full story. Two...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

Many educators and policymakers have argued for lenient grade promotion policy - even automatic promotion - in developing country settings where grade retention rates are high. The argument assumes that grade retention discourages persistence or continuation in school and that the promotion of...