Low tax compliance in low- and middle-income countries around the world limits the ability of governments to offer effective public services. This paper reports the results of a randomly rolled out text message campaign aimed at promoting tax compliance among landowners in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. L...

To hear talk of it, you might think educating girls is a silver bullet to solve all the world’s ills. A large and still growing collection of research demonstrates the wide-ranging benefits of girls’ education. Recent research has nuanced some of those findings, but the fundamental result stands: Ed...

Following the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 in 2020, schools around the world closed for significant periods of time. Many scholars provided projections of the likely impacts on educational outcomes, with potentially dire impacts on learning loss and—especially in low-income contexts–dropout rates...

Student attendance at school is a necessary condition for learning and for other benefits derived from schooling, yet absenteeism is a significant issue for students in many countries. Policies, programs, and research seeking to reduce absenteeism need to measure it accurately. This article describe...

Although research has established the importance of state capacity in economic development, less is known about how state capacity comes about and the role of external partners in the process. This paper estimates the impact of an external project designed to build state capacity in a low-income cou...

Media coverage and country-level studies have highlighted violence—including sexual and physical abuse—against girls in schools as an important problem in need of immediate attention. This study characterizes rates of physical and sexual violence against adolescent girls and compares rates of violen...

Recruiting and retaining teachers for schools in rural areas or in areas with high concentrations of poverty is a challenge around the world, and many governments have implemented policies to make working in hard-to-staff schools more attractive, either to teachers overall or to the most effective t...