Developing countries strongly emphasize enhancing foundational reading skills, with the expectation that such improvements will catalyze the development of new cognitive abilities and lead to improved life outcomes. However, the relationship between early educational gains and later-life achievement...

A global economy moving towards low-carbon production is going to dramatically shift demand for subsoil resources, from fossil fuels toward metals and minerals. Which countries may be winners and losers from the process?

Enrolling in preschool at age three has large positive impacts on vocabulary in children’s mother tongue, which is the primary language of instruction in preprimary in Kenya. However, these short-term gains do not necessarily translate into persistent advantages in vocabulary or other measures of c...

Many public policies create (perceived) winners and losers, but there is little evidence on whether redistribution can support new political economy equilibria that raise aggregate welfare. We study a Ugandan policy that redistributes 30 percent of foreign aid for refugees to Ugandans while allowing...

The Korean model of development that flowered in the final third of the twentieth century remains a fertile source of lessons for countries in sub-Saharan Africa attempting to achieve sustainably high rates of growth. Korea relied on two principal drivers. One was a high level of investment in manuf...

Institutionalized conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs may affect important aspects of pre-existing, informal safety nets such as inter-household transfers and trust among community members. We use a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of CCTs on various measures of trust and informal...

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...