Motivated by extremely low levels of basic reading skills in sub-Saharan Africa, we experimentally evaluate two interventions designed to enhance students' early-grade literacy performance in rural Mozambique: a relatively light-touch teacher training in early-grade literacy along with the...

Explanations for the West's escape from premature mortality have focused on chronic malnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoring the multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors' harvests, we are underestimating the contribution of modern...

This paper is the first to provide, in the European context, credible causal estimates for the impact on educational achievement of a means-tested programme that subsidises school lunches. We use administrative data from the city of Barcelona for the whole universe of applications to the...

This paper examines the causal impact of a large-scale Turkish language training program on the academic performance, school participation, and mental well-being of Syrian refugee children in T¨urkiye. Using rich administrative data and a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that...

In this paper, we explore the interplay between personality traits, socio-emotional skills, and key life outcomes across education, employment, social connectedness, health, and civic participation. Drawing on a rich body of research, we highlight the significant impact of socio-emotional...

Campus closures due to COVID19 created uneven student-level exposures to the challenges of home-based virtual learning. Using university administrative data, and exogenous class-level differences in pre-pandemic on-campus housing assignments for parallel trend validation, this paper unpacks...

The literature on assignment mechanisms largely focuses on efficiency based on agents' preferences, though policymakers may prioritize different goals. In assigning teachers to classrooms, a school district might prioritize student learning but must also consider teacher welfare. This paper...

We estimate the causal effect of exposure to math during high school on university major choice and performance, using a unique administrative dataset of 1,396 twins extracted from the entire student population enrolled between 2011 and 2021 at an Italian university. We apply a Twin Fixed Effect...

After growing substantially during the 1980s through the early 2000s, the college wage premium more recently has been largely unchanged, or stagnant. We extend the canonical production-function model of skill premiums to assess supply and demand contributions to the slowdown in the college wage...

This study examines the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on employment, wages, and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The paper identifies tasks and occupations most exposed to AI using comprehensive individual-level data alongside AI exposure indices. Unlike...