This paper reviews what has been learned over many decades of foreign aid to education. It discusses what works and what does not and in this discussion draws attention to the fact that even a simple assessment requires more than providing a uniform check-list of inputs. It shows the positive...

Peers play an essential role in cognitive and non-cognitive skills formation. Ordinal rank may also change incentives and environment, impacting students' efforts. Using two rich administrative data sets and a rule of admission at one top university in Brazil, we apply a regression discontinuity...

This paper provides new evidence on the causal effect of shortening the duration of pre-university education on long-term labour market outcomes in Ghana. We use the education reform of 1987 as a natural experiment, which reduced the years of education prior to university from 17 to 12 years....

This paper examines a broad range of opportunities for addressing the pressing human development needs of low-income countries by using new oil, gas, and mineral discoveries. It assesses how much of an impact can be made on the funding gaps for health and education by new oil and gas revenues,...

Using admission lotteries and registry data linking labour market outcomes, we study the effect of a vocational training programme focused on disadvantaged individuals in Brazil. The intensive programme is an 18-month classroom training coupled with a 6-month on-the-job training provided by...

I study the impact of school consolidation on enrolment and achievement, using its staggered roll-out in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Across the years 2014, 2016, and 2017, Rajasthan merged many of its grade 1-5 schools with grade 6-10 schools to create grade 1-10 'model' schools. Twenty-three...

This paper documents the state of elementary education in India and China since the 1960s, key lessons for India from China's shift in focus from 'quantity' to 'quality', and evidencebased guidelines for effective implementation of India's New Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020). The divergent...

Standardization was the scheme that replaced meritocracy in Sri Lanka education, with positive discrimination to increase the majority Sinhalese community's university enrolment. It did so by minimizing better-qualified minority Tamils' university entry, even as the quest for Tamil separatism...

I evaluate the impact of the right to education from the passing of the Right to Education Act in India in 2009. This Act guaranteed free education to children aged 6-14 years, including children with disabilities. Given that the school participation deficit associated with disability is large,...