The background of high remittance costs and countermeasures against the issue has drawn the attention of policymakers in the Pacific island countries in maximizing the benefits of migration and remittances on their economic development. We use a newly collected household survey about temporary...

This study quantifies the economic effects of two major immigration policies aimed at legalizing undocumented individuals that entered the United States as children and completed high school: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the DREAM Act. The former offers only temporary legal...

This study evaluates the effect of four randomized interventions aimed at strengthening school committees, and subsequently improving learning outcomes, in public primary schools in Indonesia. All study schools were randomly allocated to either a control group receiving no intervention, or to...

Children around the world largely rely on the formal educational system to teach them foundational mathematics and reading skills. The inability of an educational system to do so may indicate it has structural constraints. In this paper, we take advantage of three rounds of a nationally...

This paper examines the relationship between the type of senior high school attended by Indonesian youth and their subsequent labor market outcomes. This topic is timely in light of a recent policy shift that aims to dramatically expand vocational education. The analysis controls for an...

We provide causal evidence from a developing country context that children exposed to lead at a young age exhibit worse cognitive outcomes. We exploit variation in exposure to leadcontaminated toxic sites in Indonesia and estimate a two-way fixed effects model using variation in age at first...

This paper examines the relationship between the type of senior high school attended by Indonesian youth and their subsequent labor market outcomes. This topic is timely in light of a recent policy shift that aims to dramatically expand vocational education. The analysis controls for an...

People's trust in state and political institutions is a key foundation of a well-functioning economy. We estimate the impact of direct elections on people's trust in state and political institutions, using a major political reform in Indonesia as the source of exogenous variation. Prior to 2005,...

We study children's access to remote learning when schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic and their parents' perceptions about learning progress in seven Southeast Asian countries. This is the first regional analysis to systematically document students' access to remote learning based...

Children appear to learn better when taught in their mother tongue. This finding gives rise to an argument that mother tongue-based multilingual education could effectively improve learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. However, the challenges of implementing an effective...