Given its modest position as a lower-middle-income country, Vietnam stands out from the rest of the world with its remarkable performance on standardized test scores, school enrollment, and completed years of schooling. We provide an overview of the factors behind this exemplary performance both...

We estimate the impact of international child sponsorship on adult income and wealth of formerly sponsored children using data on 10,144 individuals in six countries. To identify causal effects, we utilize an age-eligibility rule followed from 1980 to 1992 that limited sponsorship to children...

This paper offers an evaluation of a supported women's self-help program with over 1.5 million participants in one of the poorest rural regions of the world (Uttar Pradesh, India). Methodologically, it shows how indicators from the direct capability measurement literature can be adapted for...

Computers were provided to randomly selected districts participating in a household survey in Vietnam to assess the impact on data quality of entering data within a day or two of completing the interview rather than several weeks later in the provincial capital. Provision of computers had no...

International aid agencies and almost all economists agree that economic growth is necessary for reducing poverty, yet some economists question whether it is sufficient for poverty reduction. Vietnam enjoyed rapid economic growth in the 1990s, but a modest increase in inequality during that...

This paper compares retrospective and prospective analyses of the effect of flip charts on test scores in rural Kenyan schools. Retrospective estimates that focus on subjects for which flip charts are used suggest that flip charts raise test scores by up to 20 percent of a standard deviation....

Advocates of teacher incentive programs argue that they can strengthen weak incentives, while opponents argue they lead to teaching to the test.' We find evidence that existing teacher incentives in Kenya are indeed weak, with teachers absent 20% of the time. We then report on a randomized...

A randomized evaluation suggests that a program which provided official textbooks to randomly selected rural Kenyan primary schools did not increase test scores for the average student. In contrast, the previous literature suggests that textbook provision has a large impact on test scores....