Information campaigns aimed at empowering the poor often fall short of meeting their desired aims. We study literacy's role in determining their efficacy. First, exploiting an RD design, we show that receipt of information increased household rice receipts by 30 percentage points. Second, we...

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises free elementary education and free choice of schools to children and their parents. International fora emphasise the first right while neglecting the second. This essay examines arguments for limiting school choice and finds each of them to be...

Insufficient resources and inadequate public expenditure management often prevent governments in low-income countries from providing quality basic education free of charge. User payments by parents are an alternative means of financing basic education. This paper assesses how user payments...

A straightforward way of keeping children in school is increasing the duration of compulsory education. Evidence of the impact of this type of policy in Western countries is abundant. However, its effectiveness has been rarely tested in low-income countries. Using panel data of low-income and...

This paper examines the effects of skill advantages at age six on different types of parental investments, and long-run outcomes up to age 27. We exploit exogenous variation in skills due to school entry rules, combining 20 years of Chilean administrative records with a regression discontinuity...

Educational inequality undermines the pivotal role of education in increasing the ability of the poor to move up the income ladder. This paper investigates educational inequality that arises from low-income students' lack of monetary resources that higher-income students invest in...

Developing and low-income economies face the challenge of increasing public spending to address sizeable infrastructure and social gaps while simultaneously restoring the fiscal discipline weakened to countervail the effect of the global recession. Increasing the efficiency of social spending...

This paper aims to analyze the sequential evolution and success stories of Korean TVE (Technical and Vocational Education) policy in order to draw implications for developing Asian countries.We characterize the Korean economic development as an educationled or TVE-led model. In particular, we...

This letter provides new evidence on the extent of the inheritance of educational inequality in the eight developing countries (Azerbaijan, China, Egypt, Iran, Kosovo, Mongolia, Nepal, Syria) where the ILO carried out the first wave of School-to-Work Transition survey. We observe different...

Financial literacy is low among young people and their uninformed choices may have costly and long-lasting consequences. This paper uses information on approximately 52,000 fifteen-year-old students participating in the 2018 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to provide...