To examine the impact of Rwanda´s 1994 genocide on children´s schooling, the authors combine two cross-sectional household surveys collected before and after the genocide. The identification strategy uses pre-war data to control for an age group´s baseline schooling and exploits variation...

A booming literature has argued that mission-based motives are a central feature of mission-oriented labor markets. This paper shifts the focus to task-based motivation and finds that it yields significantly more effort than mission-based motivation. Moreover, in the presence of significant task...

Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children's cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households' decisions to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment....

We conducted a unique randomized experiment to estimate the impact of alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on household demand for routine preventative health services in rural Burkina Faso. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either conditional or...

Education conditional cash transfer programs may increase school attendance in part due to the information they transmit to parents about their child's attendance. This paper presents experimental evidence that the information content of an education conditional cash transfer program, when given...

Can providing information to potential migrants influence their decisions about risky and irregular migration? We conduct an experiment with over 7,000 secondary school students in Guinea, providing information through video testimonials by migrants who settled in Europe and through aggregate...

We use a lab-in-the-field experiment to explore the influence of parents and peers in shaping adolescents' beliefs on whether they are better in male-typed fields (math) versus female-typed fields (literature). We find that thinking about parental recommendation affects students' beliefs on...

This paper investigates the influence of peers on criminal behavior, using original data I collected by interviewing homeless people in Milan. Information on friends' names was elicited, which allows to map each respondent's network. Each individual was also asked to report his criminal status...

We exploit a policy designed to randomly allocate roommates in a large South African university to investigate whether inter-racial interaction affects stereotypes, attitudes and performance. Using Implicit Association Tests, we find that living with a roommate of a different race reduces white...

In this paper, we examine the impact of variation in local economic conditions on the hazard into child marriage (i.e. prior to age 18) among young women in Africa and India. We show that rainfall shocks, a major source of income variation in these areas, have similar effects on crop yields but...