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,...

School enrollment has universally increased over the last 25 years in low-income countries. Enrolling in school, however, does not assure that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic...

In many developing countries (and beyond), public sector workers are not just simply implementers of policies designed by the politicians in charge of supervising them -- so called agents and principals, respectively. Public sector workers can have the power to influence whether politicians are...

The Delivering Service Indicators seek to provide a set of indices for benchmarking service delivery performance in education and health in Africa in order to track progress in and across countries over time. It seeks to enhance effective and active monitoring of service delivery systems and to...

The recent political economy literature on institutions for growth views low and ineffective spending on service delivery sectors as a symptom of the underlying institutional environment. But if institutions are the outcome of decisions by policymakers and serve the purpose of benefitting some...

Extension services have been implemented on a large scale in developing countries for decades. However, there is little evidence on their impact on the productivity and welfare of farmers. Our study aims to begin to fill this evidence gap with the goal of identifying and encouraging the uptake...

This paper evaluates the effect of the Rural Capacity Building Project, which aimed at promoting growth by strengthening the agricultural service systems in Ethiopia and by making them more responsive to smallholders' needs. The project intended to increase the outreach of agricultural extension...

In this paper, the authors use the lab to test a series of policy proposals designed to constrain rent-seeking behaviour in a policymaking context. The baseline governance game is conducted in the following way: subjects are randomly assigned to groups of four, with one subject randomly selected...