This study uses vulnerability assessment data collected by the UNHCR, WFP, and UNICEF from Syrian refugees in Lebanon, a country that hosts an estimated 1.5 million refugees from neighboring Syria and the highest per capita proportion of refugees in the world. The data are used to construct a...

A two-year randomized evaluation shows that the effectiveness of multi-tasking men- tors on schooling outcomes crucially depends on their training. While a standard training modality in highly marginalized communities in Mexico generates null results, enhanced training yields sizable treatment...

The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered an unprecedented shock to the United States and the world. It is unclear precisely how long the twin crises, epidemiological and economic, will last, and it is difficult to gauge the extent and direction of the changes in American life these crises will cause....

Measuring the performance of services and making effective use of the results are critical for designing and delivering policies to improve people’s lives. Improving user satisfaction with public services is an objective in many OECD countries and is one of the indicators in the 2030...

One of the most basic assumptions of our legal system is that when two parties face off in court, the case will be adjudicated before a judge who is trained in the law. This Essay begins by showing that empirically, the assumption that most judges have legal training does not hold true for many...

An estimated 94,000 children in Louisiana have a parent who is behind bars, with devastating effects on children and families. The entire family serves this sentence. Parental incarceration is a growing epidemic. Nationally, one in 28 children experiences parental incarceration today, compared...

Employment is key to combating poverty. Thus, detractors of social assistance programs argue that they create disincentives to work. While there is substantial evidence showing limited effects of these programs on overall labor supply, the jury is still out with respect to their impact on formal...

There is growing debate about whether consumer subsidies related to nutrition programs should be more flexible. Additional flexibility increases consumer welfare, but may hinder efforts towards achieving nutrition goals. We study how consumers would respond to subsidy designs with different...

The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dramatically alters the federal government’s approach to redistribution in 2021. Among its boldest reforms are its temporary expansions of the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit. For the first time, ARPA authorizes meaningful cash support for...

In this paper we analyze Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios Contínua (PNAD Contínua) microdata from 2012 to 2018 to document how the mid-decade economic recession reversed the trend of pro-poor growth that dated back to the early 2000s. Since the recession, there was a rise in...