This study reports evidence from an unusual policy intervention – The Reaching Out of School Children (ROSC) project – in Bangladesh where school grants and education allowances are offered to attract hard-to-reach children to schools comprised of a single teacher and a classroom. The...

The barriers faced by Chinese rural-urban migrants to access social services, particularly education, in host cities could help explain why the majority of migrants choose to leave their children behind. This paper proposes a theoretical framework that allows for an explicit discussion of the...

Using a four-round panel data set from the first phase of the Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction – Targeting the Ultra Poor (CFPR – TUP) programme of BRAC, we investigate whether a one-off transfer of livestock assets improves well-being of the very poor women in Bangladesh....

Governments around the world have introduced a variety of programs aimed at facilitating distance learning in the home setting during school closures due to COVID-19. However, given the cross-country variations in state capacity, these programs differ significantly in terms of design, delivery,...

Since its onset in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has globally disrupted school operations, leading to a shift to some form of homeschooling arrangements. After two years, in March 2022, the government of Malaysia officially reopened all schools, ending its homeschooling program. This relatively...

This paper studies how wealth and health inequalities have interacted with the Covid-19 epidemic in a way that has reinforced inequalities in income, savings, epidemic risk and even individual preventive behaviors. We present in more detail two papers and their theoretical and empirical results....

This paper evaluates how Vietnam's Escuela Nueva (VNEN) program, an educational reform for primary schools supported by the World Bank, affected the cognitive (mathematics and Vietnamese) and non-cognitive (socioemotional) skills of students in that country. We use propensity score matching to...

The barriers faced by Chinese rural-urban migrants to access social services, particularly education, in host cities could help explain why the majority of them choose to leave their children behind. We identify the causal impacts of school fees by instrumenting for it with unexpected shocks to...

Little evidence currently exists on the effects of COVID-19 on air quality in poorer countries, where most air pollution-linked deaths occur. We offer the first study that examines the pandemic's impacts on improving air quality in Vietnam, a lower-middle income country with worsening air...