Despite being the poorest or second poorest participant, Vietnam performed much better than all other developing countries, and even ahead of wealthier countries such as the U.S. and the U.K., on the 2012 and 2015 PISA assessments. We provide a rigorous investigation of Vietnam's strong...

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...

There is hardly any study on learning inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic in a low-income, multi-country context. Analyzing 34 longitudinal household and phone survey rounds from Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, we find that while countries exhibit...

Inequalities in children's learning are widely recognized to arise from variations in both household- and school-related factors. While few studies have considered the role of sorting between schools and households, even fewer have quantified how much sorting contributes to educational...

There is hardly any study on learning inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic in a low-income, multi-country context. Analyzing 34 longitudinal household and phone survey rounds from Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, we find that while countries exhibit...