In low-income countries, educators often encourage weak primary students to drop out before reaching the end of primary school in order to avoid the negative attention they receive when their students perform poorly on primary leaving exams. We conducted an experiment in rural Uganda that sought...

This paper provides evidences of heterogeneous human-capital externality using CHIP 2002, 2007 and 2013 data from urban China. After instrumenting city-level education using the number of relocated university departments across cities in the 1950s, one year more city-level education increases...

PISA is seen as the gold standard for evaluating educational outcomes worldwide. Yet, being a low-stakes exam, students may not take it seriously resulting in downward biased scores and inaccurate rankings. This paper provides a method to identify and account for non-serious behavior in...

This paper establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has long-run impacts that are independent from underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we exploit naturally occurring differences in achievement...

Economic growth and development have improved human health in many regions, while sub-Saharan Africa continues to lag behind. Economic theory and the existing empirical evidence suggest that development may not generate large reductions in the leading cause of adult mortality in the region,...

We design and experimentally evaluate two low-cost, scalable interventions - an online preparatory module and a text-message coaching program - in a sample of over 3,000 undergraduate students at a large Canadian university. Supplementing administrative data on academic outcomes with a unique...

In 2008, Uganda granted hundreds of small groups $400/person to help members start individual skilled trades. Four years on, an experimental evaluation found grants raised earnings by 38% (Blattman, Fiala, Martinez 2014). We return after 9 years to find these start-up grants acted more as a...

Where the state is weak, traditional authorities often control the local provision of land, justice, and public goods. These authorities are criticized for ruling in an undemocratic and unaccountable fashion, and are typically quite old and poorly educated relative to younger cohorts who have...

How does international trade affect the popularity of governments and leaders? We provide the first large-scale, systematic evidence that the divide between skilled and unskilled workers worldwide is producing corresponding differences in the response of political preferences to trade shocks....

The fiscal and educational consequences of charter expansion for non-charter students are central issues in the debate over charter schools. Do charter schools drain resources and high-achieving peers from non-charter schools? This paper answers these questions using an empirical strategy that...