Empirical studies of the relationship between school inputs and test scores typically do not account for the fact that households will respond to changes in school inputs. This paper presents a dynamic household optimization model relating test scores to school and household inputs, and tests...

The excellent systematic review in this week’s PLoS Medicine by Paul Garner and colleagues focuses discussion on this critical issue. Their finding of poor quality in both the public and private sectors along different dimensions (competence is similar in both, but the private sector is...

For US $17 a child can be immunized against six major illnesses. Even at this price, a country such as India would have to spend half its health budget on providing vaccinations. Given the wide variation in immunization costs it may be possible to decrease this cost to more sustainable levels,...

The relationship between poverty and mental health has received considerable attention in the recent literature. However, the associations presented in existing studies typically rely on limited samples of individuals and on proxy indicators for poverty such as education, the lack of tap water,...

This paper illustrates the central role of persistence in estimating and interpreting value-added models of learning. Using data from Pakistani public and private schools, we apply dynamic panel methods that address three key empirical challenges: imperfect persistence, unobserved heterogeneity,...

Winning"hearts and minds"inthe Muslim world is an explicitly acknowledged aim of U.S. foreign policy and increasingly, bilateral foreign aid is recognized as a vehicle towards this end. The authors examine the effect of aid from foreign organizations and on-the-ground presence of foreigners...

This paper presents asymptotic theory and Monte-Carlo simulations comparing maximum-likelihood bivariate probit and linear instrumental variables estimators of treatment effects in models with a binary endogenous treatment and binary outcome. The three main contributions of the paper are (a)...

The relationship between school inputs and educational outcomes is critical for educational policy. The authors recognize that households will respond optimally to changes in school inputs and study how such responses affect the link between school inputs and cognitive achievement. To...

Learning persistence plays a central role in models of skill formation, estimates of education production functions, and evaluations of educational programs. In non-experimental settings, estimated impacts of educational inputs can be highly sensitive to correctly specifying persistence when...