The Philippines committed to Millennium Development Goals and Education for All (EFA) targets that include universal primary education. However, various data sources, including the Department of Education's Basic Education Information System and household surveys conducted by the National...

In 2008, about 12 percent of five- to fifteen-year-old children were not in school, five years later this had gone down to about 5 percent. Adjusted net primary school attendance rates have increased from 90.8 percent in 2008 to 96.45 percent in 2013. In this paper, we examine this decline in...

From 2012 to 2015, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) released a full report, two discussion papers, and two policy notes on Out of School Children (OOSC) in the Philippines. These PIDS papers examined the magnitude of the problem, comparative trends across subgroups of...

Commitment devices offer an opportunity to restrict future choices. However, if severe restrictions deter participation, weaker restrictions may be a more effective means of changing behavior. We test this using a school-based commitment savings device for educational expenses in Uganda. We...

Concerns over the perceived negative impacts of computers on social development among children are prevalent but largely uninformed by plausibly causal evidence. We provide the first test of this hypothesis using a large-scale randomized control experiment in which more than one thousand...

Concerns over the perceived negative impacts of computers on social development among children are prevalent but largely uninformed by plausibly causal evidence. We provide the first test of this hypothesis using a large-scale randomized control experiment in which more than one thousand...

We study how attendance rates of primary school children respond to cost neutral changes in the design of India's school meal program. Municipal schools in the capital region of Delhi switched from packaged food to on-site cooked meals in 2003, with insignificant changes in the budget available...

Commitment devices offer an opportunity to restrict future choices. However, if severe restrictions deter participation, weaker restrictions may be a more effective means of changing behavior. We test this using a school-based commitment savings device for educational expenses in Uganda. We...

We exploit the exogenous variations of arsenic contamination across regions in Cambodia and apply two-period difference-in-differences (DID) to examine the impact of arsenic-contaminated groundwater on school participation among children aged 5-17. We find that conditional on the DID assumption,...

Using data from BRIGHT, an integrated program that aims to improve school participation in rural communities in Burkina Faso, we investigate the impact of school subsidies and increased access to education on child work. Regression discontinuity estimates demonstrate that, while BRIGHT...