Does private tutoring increase parental choice and improve student achievement, or does it exacerbate social inequalities and impose heavy costs on households, possibly without improving student outcomes? Private tutoring is now a major component of the education sector in many developing...

Computers were provided to randomly selected districts participating in a household survey in Vietnam to assess the impact on data quality of entering data within a day or two of completing the interview rather than several weeks later in the provincial capital. Provision of computers had no...

Despite a growing literature on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, scant evidence currently exists on its impacts on air quality. We offer the first study that provides cross-national evidence on the causal impacts of COVID-19 on air pollution. We assemble a rich database consisting of daily,...

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havocs on economies around the world. Yet, barely any evidence currently exists on the distributional impacts of the pandemic. We provide the first study that offers new theoretical and empirical evidence on the distributional impacts of the pandemic on...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in income and employment loss in many countries around the world. Yet, hardly any formal study exists on household finance and future economic expectations in poorer countries. To fill in this gap, we implemented and analyzed a web-based rapid assessment survey...

Hardly any literature exists on the relationship between equivalence scales and poverty dynamics for transitional countries. This paper offers a new study on the impacts of equivalence scale adjustments on poverty dynamics in the Russian Federation, using equivalence scales constructed from...

Private tutoring is now a major component of the education sector in many developing countries, yet education policy too seldom acknowledges and makes use of it. Various criticisms have been raised against private tutoring, most notably that it exacerbates social inequalities and may even fail...

During Vietnam's two decades of rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallen sharply at the same time that its educational attainment has risen rapidly -- macro trends that are consistent with the hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing. This paper investigates whether...

Panel data conventionally underpin the analysis of poverty mobility over time. However, such data are not readily available for most developing countries. Far more common are the "snap-shots" of welfare captured by cross-section surveys. This paper proposes a method to construct synthetic panel...