Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and non-cognitive ability appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic...

Children in developing countries have deep deficits in math and language. Personalized coaching for teachers has been proposed as a way of raising teacher quality and child achievement. We designed a coaching program that focused on one aspect of teacher quality—teacher-child...

We assigned two cohorts of kindergarten students, totaling more than 24,000 children, to teachers within schools with a rule that is as-good-as-random. We collected data on children at the beginning of the school year, and applied 12 tests of math, language and executive function (EF) at the end...

I review the evidence on access to water and sanitation infrastructure and child outcomes In Latin America. I show that there are large differences in access across countries and, within countries, between households living in urban and rural areas. Many papers in the public health literature...

The human consequences of the current global financial crisis for the developing world are presumed to be severe yet few studies have quantified such impact. The authors estimate the additional number of infant deaths in sub-Saharan Africa likely due to the crisis and discuss possible mitigation...

The report shows that there is good evidence that conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have improved the lives of poor people. Transfers generally have been well targeted to poor households, have raised consumption levels, and have reduced poverty, by a substantial amount in some countries....

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for five Latin American countries using a common measure of receptive language ability. We find important differences in development in early childhood across countries and...

Using micro data for the urban areas of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, the authors document trends in men's returns to education during the 1980s and the 1990s and estimate the role of supply and demand factors in explaining the changes in skill premia. They propose a model of...

Abstract Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and non-cognitive ability appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by...