Research

Starting in 2001, duty-free access to U.S. markets under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) led to a brief boom in African manufacturing exports, particularly apparel, which then fizzled in the face of unfettered Chinese competition after 2005. The looming expiration of AGOA—and eroding C...

Since 2011, the World Bank’s education strategy has emphasized the need to shift focus from schooling to learning, and towards primary education with special attention to foundational skills. But this shift is not always easy to see in the actual lending data. Coding new details on 25 years of World...

Over two decades and dozens of countries, the United States Agency for International Development has refined a package of support for early-grade reading, often referred to as “structured pedagogy”, which includes textbooks, teacher training, coaching, and lesson plans.

Around half of children in low-income countries have elevated blood lead levels. What role does lead play in explaining low educational outcomes in these settings?

Education systems regularly face unexpected school closures, whether due to disease outbreaks, natural disasters, or other adverse shocks. In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of live tutoring calls from teachers using an RCT with 4,399 primary school students in Sierra Leone.

The central fact that has motivated the empirics of economic growth—namely unconditional divergence—is no longer true and has not been so for decades.

The COVID-19 pandemic led governments around the world to impose unprecedented restrictions on economic activity. Were these restrictions equally justified in poorer countries with fewer demographic risk factors and less ability to weather economic shocks? We develop, validate, and estimate a fully ...