Unemployment rates for tertiary-educated youth in Jordan are high, as is the duration of unemployment. Two randomized experiments in Jordan were used to test different theories that may explain this phenomenon. The first experiment tested the role of search and matching frictions by providing...

This study investigates the effects of the World Bank's exogenously-determined income threshold for eligibility for concessionary International Development Association (IDA) loans on the allocations of bilateral donors. The donors might interpret the World Bank's policies and allocations across...

The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness sets targets for increased use by donors of recipient country systems for managing aid. The target is premised on a view that country systems are strengthened when donors trust recipients to manage aid funds, but undermined when donors manage aid...

Fragile and conflict-affected states face daunting challenges for development. Aid has a greater importance on development in these states than in others, and therefore aid effectiveness –management and delivery of aid – bears serious consideration. Despite its significance, aid...

This study analyzes opportunities for children in Cote d'Ivoire, where opportunities refer to access to basic services and goods that improve the likelihood of a child maximizing his or her human potential. The principle that guides this analysis is one of equality of opportunity, which is that...

This study evaluates the effect of four randomized interventions aimed at strengthening school committees, and subsequently improving learning outcomes, in public primary schools in Indonesia. All study schools were randomly allocated to either a control group receiving no intervention, or to...

This paper examines the key aspects of the practices of school-based management in Indonesia, and its effect on education quality. Using a conceptual framework of an accountability system of public service delivery, the paper explores the relations among Indonesian parents, school committees,...

This study tests two opposing hypotheses about the impact of aid fragmentation on the practice of aid tying. In one, when a small number of donors dominate the aid market in a country, they may exploit their monopoly power by tying more aid to purchases from contractors based in their own...

Wealth and gender inequity in the accumulation of cognitive skills is measured as the association between subject competency and wealth and gender using the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment. Wealth inequity is found to occur not through disparate household characteristics...

This paper offers new measures of aid quality covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors, as well as new insights about the robustness and usefulness of such measures. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the follow-up 2008 Accra Agenda for Action have focused attention on...