Despite the growing evidence on the negative consequences of school bullying, there is no consensus regarding the most effective strategies to fight this problem. We study the impact of a randomized intervention to reduce school bullying in urban public schools in Peru, a country where violence...

We study how non-monetary incentives, motivated by recent advances in behavioral economics, affect civil servant performance in a context where state capacity is weak. We collaborated with a government agency in Peru to experimentally vary the content of text messages targeted to civil servants...

We study the role of natural resource windfalls in explaining the efficiency of public expenditure. Using a rich dataset of expenditure and public good provision for 1,836 municipalities in Peru for the period 2001–2010, we estimate a non-monotonic relationship between the efficiency of public...

Whether allocating more resources improves learning outcomes for students in low-performing public schools remains an open debate. We focus on the effect of increased instructional time, which is theoretically ambiguous due to possible compensating changes in effort by students, teachers or...

We explore the permanent effects that recessions have on health-related outcomes of mothers and children in Peru. To account for possible self-selection in giving birth during recessions, we compare the infant mortality rates of siblings born in different phases of the economic cycle. A 1...