We analyze the impact of child labor on school achievement using Brazilian school achievement test data from the 2003 Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Básica (SAEB). We control for the endogeneity of child labor using instrumental variable techniques, where the instrumental...

Empirical research has shown that cultural values matter for economic growth and has specifically identified the achievement motivation as an aspect of culture that engenders economic growth. If specific cultural values engender economic growth, how then can societies promote them? This paper...

What makes workers consider it fair for wages to be indexed on job performance or efficiency? In this paper we attempt to answer this question using the 2005 wave of the World Values Survey data for 43 countries to investigate what socio-economic characteristics condition employees’ preference...

This paper examines the effect of prior participation in early childhood developmental programs, considered endogenous, upon 7-19 years olds' school enrollment and grade progression in rural North India. It hopes both to extend to less developed countries recent influential research on the...

This study documents the size and nature of "Hindu-Muslim" and "boy-girl" gaps in children's school participation and attainments in India. Individual-level data from two successive rounds of the National Sample Survey suggest that considerable progress has been made in decreasing the...

Bangladesh has experienced the largest mass poisoning of a population in history owing to contamination of groundwater with naturally occurring inorganic arsenic. Prolonged drinking of such water risks development of diseases and therefore has implications for children's cognitive and...

This paper traces the human capital development of 14 Asian countries for the period of 1900-60, using the age-heaping method. We place special emphasis on the gender gap in numeracy and its determinants. In particular, we test the validity of a "U-hypothesis of gender equality", implying that...

While many studies examine the effect of primary education quality on labor market outcomes in developing countries, little is known about the effects at higher levels. We exploit the quasi-experiment provided by a large-scale education reform launched in Senegal in 2000 to investigate how...

Large scale tracking policies, allowing academically apt pupils to enter a select group of secondary schools, can be found in many Sub-Saharan countries. However, evidence on the impact of these policies on school outcomes, especially school participation, is limited. This paper fills this gap...

Student performance in Sub-Saharan Africa is tragically low. We study the importance of teacher subject knowledge for student performance in this region using unique international assessment data for sixth-grade students and their teachers. To circumvent potential bias due to unobserved student...