School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of makingschools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decisionmakingby local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most ofthe variation in local...

In developing countries, rising incomes, increased demand for more skilled labor, and government investments of considerable resources on building and equipping schools and paying teachers have contributed to global convergence in enrollment rates and completed years of schooling. Nevertheless,...

School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision-making by local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most of the variation in local...

This paper reviews the issues surrounding the derivation of estimates of the impact of child labor on school outcomes. The paper aims to review the current state of methodological and empirical knowledge concerning the impact of child labor on learning, to review existing data sets that could be...

Child labor's effect on academic achievement is estimated, using unique data on 3rd and 4th graders in 9 Latin American countries. Cross-country variation in truancy regulations provides an exogenous shift in the ages of children normally in these grades, providing exogenous variation in...