The impacts of COVID-19 reach far beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to the disease; in particular, the pre-existing learning crisis is expected to be magnified during school shutdown. Despite efforts to put distance learning strategies in place, the threat of student dropouts,...

School closures in the pandemic have been shown to increase student dropouts in developing countries by a factor of two or more. Having said that, interventions to motivate students to remain in school until in-person classes return have been overlooked. Using a cluster-randomized control trial...

School closures in the context of COVID-19 have been shown to magnify that problem, with at least seven million additional dropouts worldwide in 2020. Despite efforts from governments around the world to mitigate learning gaps by the time in-person classes return, interventions to motivate...

The impacts of COVID-19 reach far beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to the disease; in particular, the pre-existing learning crisis is expected to be magnified during school shutdown. Despite efforts to put distance learning strategies in place, the threat of student dropouts,...

Conditional cash transfers boosted a major reduction in poverty and a significant decrease in inequality in developing countries over the past decade. However, their success in promoting economic development is challenged by the claim that they deal with short-term poverty relief without...

Entrepreneurship is usually indentified as an important determinant of aggregate productivity and long-term growth. The determinants of entrepreneurship, nevertheless, are not entirely understood. A recent literature has linked entrepreneurship to the development of the justice system. This...

Poverty involves both low income levels and high income uncertainty. Do both these dimensions of being poor capture attention in ways that distort decision-making and trap people in poverty? We examine these issues using real-life shocks faced by farmers in Brazil: random payday variation...

Informational interventions have been shown to significantly change behavior across a variety of settings. Is that because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction? Or, alternatively, is it to a large extent because they increase the salience of the decision they...