Commitment devices offer an opportunity to restrict future choices. However, if severe restrictions deter participation, weaker restrictions may be a more effective means of changing behavior. We test this using a school-based commitment savings device for educational expenses in Uganda. We...

We evaluate a program that aims to improve children's reading skills by providing classes with age-appropriate reading material and incentivizing children to read through a 31 day read-a-thon. During the read-a-thon, the program significantly increases the propensity of children to read, causing...

We evaluate the causal effects of a program that constructed high quality "girl-friendly" primary schools in Burkina Faso, using a regression discontinuity design 2.5 years after the program started. We find that the program increased enrollment of all children between the ages of 5 and 12 by 20...

We conduct a randomized evaluation of the effect of village-based schools on children's academic performance using a sample of 31 villages and 1,490 children in rural northwestern Afghanistan. The program significantly increases enrollment and test scores among all children, eliminates the 21...

Many OECD countries have implemented policies to induce couples to share parental leave. This paper investigates how responsive intra-household leave-sharing is to changes in economic incentives. To investigate this fundamental question, we are forced to look at one of the Nordic countries which...

As evidence is accumulating that subjective expectations influence behavior and that these expectations are sometimes biased, it becomes policy-relevant to know how to influence individuals' expectations. Information in the media is likely to affect how people picture the future. This paper...

For various reasons the relationship between age and productivity is a matter of policy concern. I present new empirical research showing how productivity is affected by age. I study age effects at the individual level by analyzing data on running and publishing in economic journals. Furthermore...

This paper provides evidence about the quality of retrospective childhood health histories given to respondents in the HRS and the PSID. Even though information on early life health events is critical, there is legitimate skepticism about the ability of older respondents to remember specific...

We analyze the determinants of global life satisfaction in two countries (The Netherlands and the U.S.), by using both self-reports and responses to a battery of vignette questions. We find global life satisfaction of happiness is well-described by four domains: job or daily activities, social...

In this paper we explore the impact of birth weight on children's cognitive and behavioural outcomes using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. In order to deal with the endogeneity of birth weight we use an estimator based on the eliminant method. When coupled with ordinary least squares,...