Across many low- and middle-income countries, a sizable share of young people drop out of school before completing a full course of basic education. Early warning systems that accurately identify students at risk of dropout and support them with targeted interventions have shown results and are...

In addition to the traditional education system targeting children and youth, one potentially important vehicle to improve literacy and numeracy skills is adult literacy programs (ALPs). In many developing countries, however, these programs do not seem to achieve these hoped for, ex ante,...

How much of the income-based gaps in cognitive ability and academic achievement could be closed by a two-year, center-based early childhood education intervention? Data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), which randomly assigned treatment to low birth weight children from both...

It can be argued that just as there are different kinds of literacy, there are different kinds of illiteracy. A proximate illiterate, i.e. an illiterate who has easy access to a literate person, is clearly better off than someone without such access. The existing literature that takes account of...

Benefit incidence analysis is an extremely popular tool to assess the distribution of benefits from government expenditure in developing countries, particularly in the social sectors. The analysis describes the welfare impact of public spending on groups of people or households, typically along...

Family Rewards represents the first test of a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program in the U.S., offering families incentives for children's education, family preventive health care and parents' work and training. Using a randomized controlled trial, we find that the program led to substantial...

We estimate the impact on education outcomes of the Universal Child Allowance (AUH), a massive conditional cash transfer program targeted at young children of unemployed and informal workers launched in Argentina in late 2009. Evidence from previous works suggests that the AUH has had a...

This paper bolsters Prescott's (2004) claim that high taxes are responsible for lacklustre labor market performance in continental European countries. We develop a lifecycle model with endogenous skill formation, endogenous labor supply, and endogenous retirement. Labor taxation distorts not...

Trends in skill bias and greater turbulence in modern labor markets put wages and employment prospects of unskilled workers under pressure. Weak incentives to utilize and maintain skills over the life-cycle become manifest with the ageing of the population. Reinvention of human capital policies...

The seemingly upward trend in opting out from public services and the segregation of income groups in public and private education and health systems has raised concerns about the future of an already fragmented social contract in Latin America. In this chapter, we examine the evolution of the...