We study two early childhood programs in The Gambia for children between 0 and 3 years of age. The basic version of the program, called Baby Friendly Community Initiative (BFCI), provides parents with child health and nutrition information delivered through home visits and community meetings. A...

Balán et al. (2022) evaluate the impact of "local elites" involvement in local tax collection in a large city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using a randomized controlled trial to vary the identities of tax collectors, they find that local elites' involvement raises tax compliance and...

Understanding the developments of atmospheric ethane is essential for better identifying the anthropogenic sources of methane, a major greenhouse gas with high global warming potential. While previous studies have focused on analyzing past trends in ethane and modeling the inter-annual...

In the analysis of multivariate stochastic volatility models, many estimation procedures begin by transforming the data, taking the logarithm of the squared returns to obtain a linear state space model. A well-known series representation links the correlations between elements of the observation...

This paper introduces a novel approach to simulation smoothing for nonlinear and non-Gaussian state space models. It allows for computing smoothed estimates of the states and nonlinear functions of the states, as well as visualizing the joint smoothing distribution. The approach combines...

Adjisse, Blimpo, and Castañeda Dower (2024) reproduce the tables and figures of Balán et al. (2022) with the exception an incorrect sign on one coefficient in Table 5. Although not central to Balán et al. (2022), we are grateful to have discovered this error and have submitted a corrigendum...

The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda's entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student...

The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda's entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student...

All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for...