Labor productivity - output per hour worked - is an important factor determining the wealth of national economies and their standards of living. Its growth accounts for about half of per capita GDP growth in OECD countries. Despite its importance, it has received scant attention in political...

Information campaigns aimed at empowering the poor often fall short of meeting their desired aims. We study literacy's role in determining their efficacy. First, exploiting an RD design, we show that receipt of information increased household rice receipts by 30 percentage points. Second, we...

This paper measures impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect. We use removal tendencies of child protection investigators as an instrument. We focus on young children investigated before age six and find that removal significantly increases test scores and...

Societies benefit from the delivery of inclusive education, lifelong learning and from active labour market policies. Therefore, this research presents a critical review of the relevant literature. It features a comparative analysis on the latest socio-economic policies that are currently being...

School closures as a preventive strategy for the spread of COVID-19 has led to a learning disruption among children in most countries. We study the efficacy of a set of pandemic management measures (PMM) adopted by the Government of India in dampening the adverse impact of COVID-19 on...

This paper presents findings from an experimental evaluation of Job Corps, the nation’s largest training program for disadvantaged youths. The study uses survey data collected over four years and tax data over nine years on a nationwide sample of 15,400 treatments and controls. The Job Corps...

This strategy paper by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) shows ways in which Germany once more can attain full employment in the coming decade. Much of what the previous government's "Agenda 2010" has put into motion has clearly steered labor market development in the right direction....

Education beyond traditional ages for schooling is an important source of human capital acquisition among adult women. Welfare reform, which began in the early 1990s and culminated in the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, has promoted work...

The paper estimates the impact on school attendance and child labor of conditional cash payments to poor families in Brazil. It describes Brazil's transfer programs and presents statistics on school attendance and child labor. In the second half of the 1990s, many municipalities had adopted the...

Pese a los esfuerzos realizados en los últimos años, en Colombia aún no se constituye un Sistema de Protección Social (SPS) que cumpla sus funciones primordiales: proveer asistencia social a los pobres, asegurar a la población contra choques y proteger a los pobres extremos de los efectos...