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...

Child labor is a pervasive practice; according to the International Labor Organization, there are 160 million child workers worldwide. That figure might, however, greatly underestimate the extent of the issue, since child labor indicators are typically based on surveys with parents – who have no...

Background: School closures due to COVID-19 have left 1.6 billion students around the world without in-person classes for a prolonged period of time. To date, no study has documented whether reopening schools in developing countries during the pandemic causally increased aggregate COVID-19...

How do parents plan to and effectively share resources with their children over time? In a lab-in-the-field experiment in Malawi, we show that, for many parents, plans become more generous the further in the future consumption is. These parents are, however, way more likely to reverse past...