Schools closed extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic and occur in other settings, such as teacher strikes and natural disasters. This paper provides some of the first experimental evidence on strategies to minimize learning loss when schools close. We run a randomized trial of low-technology...

Elisabeth Grewenig prepared this study while she was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2021 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of five distinct empirical essays that...

School closures in the context of COVID-19 have been shown to magnify that problem, with at least seven million additional dropouts worldwide in 2020. Despite efforts from governments around the world to mitigate learning gaps by the time in-person classes return, interventions to motivate...

School closures in the pandemic have been shown to increase student dropouts in developing countries by a factor of two or more. Having said that, interventions to motivate students to remain in school until in-person classes return have been overlooked. Using a cluster-randomized control trial...

We study the implementation of Bolsa Familia, a program that conditions cash transfers to poor families on children's school attendance. Using unique administrative data, we analyze how beneficiaries respond to the enforcement of conditionality. Making use of random variation in the day on which...

We study the implementation of Bolsa Familia, a program that conditions cash transfers to poor families on children's school attendance. Using unique administrative data, we analyze how beneficiaries respond to the enforcement of conditionality. Making use of random variation in the day on which...

The coronavirus pandemic has induced an increase in remote activity. Prior research shows that a variety of K-12 educational practices, public preferences, policies, and outcomes have changed as a result of the pandemic. This paper extends the literature on the impact of coronavirus on education...

In this paper we present a counterfactual evaluation of the effect of ICT resources at school on student achievements conducted in Italy. In 2009 156 classes at 6th grade were endowed with additional resources earmarked for purchasing ICT equipments only. By selecting an equivalent number of...