Do teachers’ stereotypes of social class bias their assessment of students? This study uses a lab-in-the-field experiment among primary school teachers to test whether they are biased against poor students. Teachers assessed a student in a video of an oral exam after watching one of two...

Parenting interventions have the potential to improve early childhood development. Text messages are considered a promising channel to deliver parenting information at large scale. This paper tests whether sending text messages about parenting practices impacts early childhood development....

This paper evaluates the academic impact of a growth-mindset intervention on students starting the secondary level in public schools in urban Peru. ¡Expande tu Mente! is a 90-minute school session aimed at instilling the notion that a person's own intelligence is malleable. Students in schools...

Rising obesity rates are one of the most challenging public health issues in many emerging economies. The extent to which the nutritional composition of food consumed away from home is behind this rise, and the links with socioeconomic status, is not yet well understood. This paper explores this...

Food consumed outside the home in restaurants or other food establishments is a growing segment of consumption in many developing countries. However, the survey methods that are utilized to collect data on expenditures on food away from home are often simplistic and could potentially result in...

Sustainability of short-term interventions may depend on whether they manage to change families’ attitudes towards the future and related social norms. This investigation shows that role female models in very low-income settings of Nicaragua have an enormous impact in raising the bar for the...

Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and noncognitive abilities appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic...

This paper evaluates the academic impact of a growth-mindset intervention on students starting the secondary level in public schools in urban Peru. ¡Expande tu Mente! is a 90-minute school session aimed at instilling the notion that a person's own intelligence is malleable. Students in schools...

Consumption of food away from home is rapidly growing across the developing world. Surprisingly, the majority of household surveys around the world haven not kept up with its pace and still collect limited information on it. The implications for poverty and inequality measurement are far from...

This paper examines the links between adverse events, depression, and decision making in Nigeria. It investigates how events such as conflicts, shocks, and deaths can affect short-term perceptions of welfare, as well as longer term decisions on economic activities and human capital investments....