This paper measures the causal effects of parent enrollment into voluntary health insurance on healthcare utilization among insured and uninsured children in Nicaragua. The study utilizes a randomized trial and age-eligibility cut-off in which insurance subsidies were randomly allocated to...

Social health insurance (SHI) is enjoying something of a revival in parts of the developing world. Many countries that have in the past relied largely on tax finance (and out-of-pocket payments) have introduced SHI, or are thinking about doing so. And countries with SHI already in place are...

School enrollment has universally increased over the past 25 years in low-income countries. However, enrolling in school does not guarantee that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries learn little, and they complete their primary education lacking even basic reading,...

Do teachers have accurate beliefs about their effort and ability? This paper explores this through a survey experiment in public-private partnership schools in Uganda, wherein teacher self-beliefs are contrasted with their beliefs about other teachers in the same school. The study finds that, on...

The relative return to input-augmentation versus inefficiency-reduction strategies for improving education system performance is a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, this...

The time teachers spend teaching is low in several developing countries. However, improving teacher effort has proven difficult. Why is it so difficult to increase teacher effort? One possibility is that teachers are resistant to increasing effort because they do not believe their effort is...

A cluster randomized controlled trial was undertaken, testing two sets of interventions to encourage enrollment in the Philippines'Individual Payer Program. Of 243 municipalities, 179 were randomly assigned as intervention sites and 64 as controls. In early 2011, 2,950 families were interviewed;...

The last few years have seen a growing commitment worldwide to universal health coverage (UHC). Yet there is a lack of clarity on how to measure progress towards UHC. This paper proposes a ?mashup? index that captures both aspects of UHC: that everyone?irrespective of their ability-to-pay?gets...

Providing protection against the financial risk of high out-of-pocket health spending is one of the main goals of the Philippines? health strategy. Yet, as this paper shows using eight household surveys, health spending increased by 150 percent (real) from 2000 to 2012, with the sharpest...

In the mid-2000s, India began rolling out large-scale, publicly-financed health insurance schemes mostly targeting the poor. This paper describes and analyzes Andhra Pradesh's Aarogyasri scheme, which covers against the costs of around 900 high-cost procedures delivered in secondary and tertiary...