We review the empirical evaluation of three school-management interventions: school decentralization, tracking and contract teachers. We provide stylized models to organize the discussion of the results. We look at the average and distributional effects of the policies and stress the possible...

The Honduran PRAF experiment randomly assigned conditional cash transfers to 40 of 70 poor municipalities, within five strata defined by a poverty proxy. Using census data, we show that eligible children were 8 percentage points more likely to enroll in school and 3 percentage points less likely...

This paper examines the short and long-run average causal impact of catastrophic natural disasters on economic growth by combining information from comparative case studies. The counterfactual of the cases studied is assessed by constructing synthetic control groups, taking advantage of the fact...