Learning profiles that track changes in student skills per year of schooling often find shockingly low learning gains. Using data from three recent studies in South Asia and Africa, we show that a majority of students spend years of instruction with no progress on basics. We argue shallow...

Using a primary school curricular standard basic mathematics competence test, this paper documents the low level of student achievement amongst 10-18 year old rural children in Bangladesh and tests the extent to which years spent in school increases learning. Our sample includes children...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The MDGs are a set of quantitative, time-bound targets for indicators such as poverty, education and mortality in developing countries adopted unanimously by the...

This paper focuses on key ways in which donors can improve the quality of foreign assistance and make it more effective in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The paper makes three central arguments. First, donors should be much more goal and results oriented in their assistance...

This paper is part of the Copenhagen Consensus process, which aims to assess and evaluate the opportunities available to address the ten largest challenges facing the world. One of these ten challenges is the “lack of education.” This paper will define “lack of education,” in terms of...

Raising school enrollment, like economic development in general, takes a long time. This is partly because, as a mountain of empirical evidence now shows, economic conditions and slowly- changing parental education levels determine children’s school enrollment to a greater degree than...

This paper studies the effects of remittances from the U.S. on child labor and school attendance in recipient Mexican households. We identify these effects using the impact of the 2008-2009 U.S. recession on remittance receipts. The methodology employed is a differences-in-differences strategy...

While typically socioeconomically disadvantaged, Mexican migrants in the United States tend to have better health outcomes than non-Hispanic Whites. This phenomenon is known as the Hispanic Health Paradox. Using data from Mexico and the United States, we examine several health outcomes for...

This document studies the effect of the homicide rate on internal migration in Mexico. Reduced form evidence shows that net migration of skilled workers decreases into local labor markets where homicide rates increased after 2007, suggesting workers prefer destinations with lower homicide rates....

In this paper we examine some economic factors that have influenced migration flows from Mexico to the United States since 1990 for the purpose of constructing scenarios on how such flows could evolve in the near term. In particular, we link the behavior of migration to changes in sectoral...