Teachers must hone their teaching skills on the job if the quality of primary education is to improve in developing countries. The authors of this paper use a multi-level modeling procedure to examine two policy options for improving the competence of teachers already in the system: providing...

The problem addressed in this article is the bias to income and expenditure elasticities estimated on pseudo-panel data caused by measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity. We gauge empirically these biases by comparing cross-sectional, pseudo-panel and true panel data from both Polish and...

During the 1990s, employment increased and poverty declined for single mothers in rural and urban areas. Our results suggest that, holding demographics constant, changes in welfare and social policy during this decade contributed to employment increases--but not to poverty reduction--for both...

The problem addressed in this article is the bias to income and expenditure elasticities estimated on pseudo-panel data caused by measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity. We gauge empirically these biases by comparing cross-sectional, pseudo-panel and true panel data from both Polish and...

Families originally living in public housing were assigned housing vouchers by lottery, encouraging moves to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. Although we had hypothesized that reading and math test scores would be higher among children in families offered vouchers (with larger effects...

Although non-experimental studies find robust neighborhood effects on adults, such findings have been challenged by results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) residential mobility experiment. Using a within-study comparison design, this paper compares experimental and non-experimental...

We examine long-term neighborhood effects on low-income families using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing-mobility experiment, which offered some public-housing families but not others the chance to move to less-disadvantaged neighborhoods. We show that 10-15 years...

How much of the income-based gaps in cognitive ability and academic achievement could be closed by a two-year, center-based early childhood education intervention? Data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), which randomly assigned treatment to low birth weight children from both...