Children in developing countries have deep deficits in math and language. Personalized coaching for teachers has been proposed as a way of raising teacher quality and child achievement. We designed a coaching program that focused on one aspect of teacher quality - teacher-child interactions -...

The report shows that there is good evidence that conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have improved the lives of poor people. Transfers generally have been well targeted to poor households, have raised consumption levels, and have reduced poverty, by a substantial amount in some countries....

Do aggregate income shocks, such as those caused by macroeconomic crises or droughts, reduce child human capital? The answer to this question has important implications for public policy. If shocks reduce investments in children, they may have a long-lasting impact on poverty and its...

The effect of macroeconomic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. This article analyzes the impact of a profound crisis in Peru on infant mortality. It finds an increase of about 2.5 percentage points in the infant mortality rate for children born during the crisis of the...

Cash transfer programs have become extremely popular in the developing world. A large literature analyzes their effects on schooling, health and nutrition, but relatively little is known about possible impacts on child development. This paper analyzes the impact of a cash transfer program on...

This document compares three versions of the same home visiting model, the well-known Jamaica model, which was gradually scaled-up from an efficacy trial (proof of concept) in Jamaica, to a pilot in Colombia, to an at-scale program in Peru. It first describes the design, implementation and...

This document compares three versions of the same home visiting model, the well-known Jamaica model, which was gradually scaled-up from an efficacy trial (proof of concept) in Jamaica, to a pilot in Colombia, to an at-scale program in Peru. It first describes the design, implementation and...

We study the determinants of math achievement among children in early elementary school using data from a unique experiment in which children were randomly assigned to classrooms within schools for four consecutive grades. As a result, each child in our sample was exposed to four separate,...

Most evidence on the effects of policies to promote child development refers to pilot programs implemented under tightly-controlled circumstances. We provide novel evidence on the effects of home visiting delivered at scale. The program we study, Cuna Mas in Peru, was started from scratch in...