In the past decade, hundreds of impact evaluation studies have measured the learning outcomes of education interventions in developing countries. The impact magnitudes are often reported in terms of "standard deviations," making them difficult to communicate to policy makers beyond education...

Social scientists frequently rely on the cardinal comparability of test scores to assess achievement gaps between population subgroups and their evolution over time. This approach has been criticized due to the ordinal nature of test scores and the sensibility of results to order-preserving...

The principal focus in the substantial literature on impediments to economic development has been on the inadequacies of policies and governance. However, successful economic development requires effectiveness of markets and incentives for investment, which in turn require trust. This paper...