Duflo (2001) exploits a 1970s schooling expansion in Indonesia to estimate the returns to schooling. Under the study's difference-in-differences (DID) design, two patterns in the data-shallower pay scales for younger workers and negative selection in treatment-can violate the parallel trends...

Bleakley (2010) finds that large-scale campaigns in the 20th century to eradicate malaria were followed by income gains for those native to historically endemic areas. I perform a pre-registered reanalysis and find these results to be largely robust. Malaria eradication efforts indeed appear to...

Through designs akin to difference-in-differences, Bleakley (2007) produces evidence that the campaign to eradicate hookworm from the American South circa 1910 boosted school enrollment in childhood and income in adulthood. This comment works to replicate and reanalyze that study. Innovations...

Duflo (2001) exploits a 1970s schooling expansion in Indonesia to estimate the returns to schooling. Under the study's difference-in-differences (DID) design, two patterns in the data-shallower pay scales for younger workers and negative selection in treatment-can violate the parallel trends...

This paper reanalyzes Khanna (2023), which studies labor market effects of schooling in India through regression discontinuity designs. Absent from the data are four dis-tricts close to the discontinuity; restoring them cuts the reduced-form impacts on schooling and log wages by 57% and 63%....

Summan, Nandi, and Bloom (2023; SNB) finds that exposure of babies to India's Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) in the late 1980s increased their weekly wages in early adulthood by 0.138 log points and per-capita household consumption 0.028 points. But the results are attained by regressing on...

Much public discussion about foreign aid has focused on whether and how to increase its quantity. But recently aid quality has come to the fore, by which is meant the efficiency of the aid delivery process. This paper focuses on one process problem, the proliferation of aid projects and the...

We replicate and reanalyse the most influential study of microcredit impacts (Pitt and Khandker, 1998). That study was celebrated for showing that microcredit reduces poverty, a much hoped-for possibility (though one not confirmed by recent randomized controlled trials). We show that the...

European countries pride themselves on being leaders in spurring development within poor countries. We find that Europe's approach to development could be characterised as energetically tackling the symptoms of poor economic opportunities for developing countries by providing effective aid,...