Conditional cash transfers are programs under which poor families get a stipend provided they keep their children in school and take them for health checks. Although there is significant evidence showing that they have positive impacts on school participation, little is known about the long-term...

Socioeconomic segregation is often decried for denying poorer children the benefits of positive'peer effects'. Yet standard, linear-in-means models of peer effects (a) implicitly assume that segregation is zero sum, with gains and losses to rich and poor perfectly offsetting, and (b) rule out...

Despite impressive gains in increasing access to school over the past 20 years, an estimated 57 million children worldwide do not go to school. Abolishing school fees has increased enrollment rates in several countries where enrollments were low and school fees were high. However, such policies...

Good teachers are essential for high-quality educational systems. However, little is known about teachers'skills formation during college. By combining two standardized tests for Colombian students, one taken at the end of senior year in high school and the other when students are near...

Expanding and improving basic education in developing countries requires, at a minimum, teachers who are present in the classroom and motivated to teach, but this essential input is often missing. This paper describes the findings of a series of recent World Bank and other studies on teacher...

This paper examines inequality patterns of school and teacher resources as well as student performance in the Philippines. School and teacher resources, measured by pupil classroom and teacher ratios and per-pupil teacher salary, became more unequal over time. Strikingly, a large portion of the...

This paper examines the impact of a large supply-side education intervention in the Philippines, the Third Elementary Education Project, on students'national achievement test scores. It finds that the program significantly increased student test scores at grades 4 to 6. The estimation indicates...

This paper uses data from a post-hoc evaluation of a performance-based teacher incentive program in the Kyrgyz Republic to examine the opinions of teachers receiving different pay bonuses based on their performance as assessed by external evaluators. Overall, teacher opinions of the program were...

This paper aims to estimate the impact of school-based management on students'test scores in the Philippines. Estimation results using double differencing combined with propensity score matching show that school-based management increases the average national achievement test score by 4.2 points...

In 2003 Kenya abolished user fees in all government primary schools. Analysis of household survey data shows this policy contributed to a shift in demand away from free schools, where net enrollment stagnated after 2003, toward fee-charging private schools, where both enrollment and fee levels...