The background of high remittance costs and countermeasures against the issue has drawn the attention of policymakers in the Pacific island countries in maximizing the benefits of migration and remittances on their economic development. We use a newly collected household survey about temporary...

Children appear to learn better when taught in their mother tongue. This finding gives rise to an argument that mother tongue-based multilingual education could effectively improve learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. However, the challenges of implementing an effective...

We study children's access to remote learning when schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic and their parents' perceptions about learning progress in seven Southeast Asian countries. This is the first regional analysis to systematically document students' access to remote learning based...

People's trust in state and political institutions is a key foundation of a well-functioning economy. We estimate the impact of direct elections on people's trust in state and political institutions, using a major political reform in Indonesia as the source of exogenous variation. Prior to 2005,...

This paper investigates the long-term effect of child poverty on labor market outcomes using a 14-year span of data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey. Our instrumental variables estimation shows that a child who lived in a poor family when aged between eight and 17 years old suffers from an...