This study estimates the causal effects of a public per-student subsidy program targeted at low-cost private schools in Pakistan on student enrollment and schooling inputs. Program entry is ultimately conditional on achieving a minimum stipulated student pass rate (cutoff) in a standardized...

The school-based management (SBM) has become a very popular movement over the last decade. The World Bank's work on school-based management emerged from a need to better define the concept, review the evidence, support impact assessments in various countries, and provide feedback to project...

The case studies in this book provide useful information on the characteristics of students and the performance of various types of schools that benefit from public-private partnerships. While these case studies are empirically grounded, their results are not necessarily of universal...

The Oaxaca-Blinder technique was originally used in labor economics to decompose earnings gaps and to estimate the level of discrimination. It has been applied since in other social issues, including education, where it can be used to assess how much of a gap is due to differences in...

This paper evaluates a primary school scholarship program in Cambodia with two different targeting mechanisms, one based on poverty level and the other on baseline test scores ("merit"). Both targeting mechanisms increased enrollment and attendance. However, only the merit-based targeting...

Parental involvement programs aim to increase school-and-parent communication and support children's overall learning environment. This paper examines the effects of low-cost, group-based parental involvement interventions in Mexico using data from two randomized controlled trials. The first...

This paper reports on a randomized experiment to investigate the long-term effects of a primary school scholarship program in rural Cambodia. In 2008, fourth-grade students in 207 randomly assigned schools (103 treatment, 104 control) received scholarships based on the students' academic...

This paper presents an evaluation of multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost education in developing countries - the conditional cash transfer - with a student level randomization that allows the authors to generate intra-family and peer-network variation. The analysis tests...

Low student learning is a common finding in much of the developing world. This paper uses a relatively unique dataset of five semiannual rounds of standardized test data to characterize and explain the short-term changes in student learning. The data are collected as part of the quality...

Ghana administers multiple social protection programs. One, pensions provided by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust, has a long history, but the rest of the programs have been introduced and expanded over the past two decades. This study assesses the performance of the government...