This paper evaluates a government program in Malawi, which aimed to improve quality at community-based childcare centers and complemented these efforts with a group-based parenting support program. Children in the integrated intervention arm (teacher training and parenting) had significantly...

Gender gaps in education have closed in almost all countries, especially at the primary level. In fact, these gaps have reversed in many countries in secondary education, especially in Latin America, the Caribbean, and East Asia, where it is now boys and young men who are disadvantaged. Despite...

Using World Bank PovcalNet data from 1974-2018 for 135 countries, this paper approximates the identity that links growth in mean incomes and changes in the distribution of relative incomes to reductions in absolute poverty, and, in turn, examines the role of income inequality for poverty...

This paper develops a general theory of optimal income taxation with multiple dimensions of agent heterogeneity. The main technical hurdle in developing this theory is the possibility that individuals have multiple optimal incomes. Using a perturbation approach, optimal tax formulas are derived...

This paper develops a framework to bound the welfare impacts of reforms to notches using two sufficient statistics: (1) the number of households bunching at the old notch who move toward the new notch, and (2) the number of households who "jump" down to the new notch. The bounds hold in a wide...

Although the concept of randomized assignment to control for extraneous factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century, there was primarily a growing awareness of the need for careful...

Laboratory experiments were conducted to investigate how private and public information affect the selection of an innovation and the timing of adoption. The results shed light on the behavioral anomaly called the "energy-efficiency gap" in which consumers and firms delay adoption of...

The High Frequency South Sudan Survey, implemented by the South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics in collaboration with the World Bank, conducted several waves of representative surveys across seven of the ten former states between 2015 and 2017. These surveys provided a long overdue update to...

The High Frequency South Sudan Survey, implemented by the South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics in collaboration with the World Bank, conducted several waves of representative surveys across seven of the ten former states between 2015 and 2017. These surveys provided a long overdue update to...