The role of school quality in determining educational outcomes has received much research attention in the United States. However, in developing countries, where a significant part of the school age population never attends school, policymakers must consider both quality and quantity when...

Few policies are as universally accepted as raising primary school enrolment in developing countries, but the policy levers for achieving this goal are not straight forward. This paper merges household survey data with detailed school supply characteristics from official sources, in order to...

Not all policy questions can be addressed by social experiments. Nonexperimental evaluation methods provide an alternative to experimental designs but their results depend on untestable assumptions. This paper presents evidence on the reliability of propensity score matching (PSM), which...

This report provides an evaluation of the community-level effects of the Programa Nacional de Educacion, Salud, y Alimentacion (PROGRESA) using household-level data from various rounds of PROGRESA's evaluation sample (the Encuesta de Evaluacion de los Hogares [ENCEL] surveys).Other reports in...

The Mexican Government initiated two innovative programs cash transfer schemes in the last decade: PROGRESA, which is a national anti-poverty scheme directed at chronic rural poverty, and PROCAMPO, a scheme designed to compensate farmers for the negative price effects of NAFTA. The analysis of...