The transition to a more innovation-based growth model is even more urgent in the current uncertain global context[1]. While the GDP growth rate has proven resilient in recent years, declining oil and gas output, coupled with economic shocks, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic, havedented...

Mental health, well-being and lasting economic outcomes are intimately connected. However, in geographies marked by fragility, conflict and violence, entrepreneurs of small and medium-size experience chronic stress and poor mental health on a regular basis. This paper describes the incremental...

Working with the Mexican Ministry of Education, this study piloted a scalable program to reduce high school dropout rates by focusing on socio-emotional skill development and mathematics tutoring. The intervention was evaluated through a randomized field experiment with more than 5,000 youths at...

Early childhood experiences lay the foundation for outcomes later in life. Policy makers in developing countries face a dual challenge of promoting access to and quality of early childhood development services, but evidence on how to manage this trade-off is scarce. This paper studies two...

This paper experimentally evaluates a large-scale and low-cost parenting program targeting poor families in Chile. Households in 162 public health centers were randomly assigned to three groups: a control group, a second group that was offered eight weekly group parenting sessions, and a third...

This paper documents novel evidence of positive assortative matching in African marriage markets along cognitive and socio-emotional skills, time and risk preferences, and education, using data from rural Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire, and Malawi

Human development and development are inseparable, and now new evidence emerges that brain development is the key driving mechanism behind this association. The foundations of brain architecture are established early in life. Critical aspects of its structure begin to be shaped by experience...

In this note, we examine how Cambodian youth's test score performance during lower secondary relates to their success several years later as they transition from schooling to work. Specifically, we explore the association between cognitive skills measured using math and vocabulary test scores...

Parenting interventions have the potential to improve early childhood development. Text messages are considered a promising channel to deliver parenting information at large scale. This paper tests whether sending text messages about parenting practices impacts early childhood development....