A randomized control trial was conducted to study whether providing 10th grade students with information about the returns to upper secondary and tertiary education, and a source of financial aid for tertiary education, can contribute to improve student performance. The study finds that the...

In 2009, the Mexican state of Colima implemented a low-stakes accountability intervention with diagnostic feedback among 108 public primary schools with the lowest test scores in the national student assessment. A difference-in-difference and a regression discontinuity design are used to...

Despite the recent growth in the number of large-scale student assessments, there is little evidence on their potential to inform improvements in school management and classroom instruction in developing countries. This study conducted an experiment in the Province of La Rioja Argentina, that...

Using all the household survey data available in Latin America during the period 1992 to 2013, this paper estimates that in 2015, 20 million youth ages 15 to 24 years in the region were out of school and not working (making them ninis, for "ni estudian ni trabajan"). The share of...

This paper seeks to understand what drove the trends in learning outcomes in Argentina between 2000 and 2012, using data from four rounds of the Program for International Student Assessment. A year-specific education production function is estimated and its results used to decompose the changes...

This paper uses a sample of 73 developing countries to estimate the change in the cost of alleviating urban poverty brought about by the recent increase in food prices. This cost is approximated by the change in the poverty deficit, that is, the variation in financial resources required to...

The author implements several inequality decomposition methods to measure the extent to which total household income disparities can be attributable to sectoral asymmetries and differences in skill endowments. The results show that at least half of total household inequality in Mexico is...

Over the past 20 years, aggregate measures of global inequality have changed little even if significant structural changes have been observed. High growth rates of China and India lifted millions out of poverty, while the stagnation in many African countries caused them to fall behind. Using the...

This paper identifies and estimates the strength of the reduction in poverty linked to improved opportunities for women in the expanding maquila sector. A simulation exercise shows that, at a given point in time, poverty in Honduras would have been 1.5 percentage points higher had the maquila...

The present study uses the GIDD, a CGE-microsimulation model for Global Income Distribution Dynamics, to understand the ex-ante dynamics of global income distribution. Three main robust results emerge. First, under a set of realistic assumptions, there will be a reduction in global income...