We study the effects of two dimensions of teacher quality, subject knowledge and didactic skills, on student learning in francophone Sub-Saharan Africa. We use data from an international large-scale assessment in 14 countries that include individual-level information on student achievement and...

This study provides novel evidence on the relative effectiveness of computer-assisted learning (CAL) software and traditional teaching. Based on a randomized controlled trial in Salvadoran primary schools, we evaluate three interventions that aim to improve learning outcomes in mathematics: (i)...

Education is one of the key resources in the fight against poverty. While substantial progress has been made in terms of school enrollment, evidence suggests that educational quality is still alarmingly low in many developing countries. Various explanations have been suggested, but one very...

In nonparametric instrumental variables estimation, the mapping that identifies the function of interest, g say, is discontinuous and must be regularised (that is, modified) to make consistent estimation possible. The amount of modification is contolled by a regularisation parameter. The optimal...

In a treatment effect model with unconfoundedness, treatment assignments are not only independent of potential outcomes given the covariates, but also given the propensity score alone. Despite this powerful dimension reduction property, adjusting for the propensity score is known to lead to an...

We derive general, yet simple, sharp bounds on the size of the omitted variable bias for a broad class of causal parameters that can be identified as linear functionals of the conditional expectation function of the outcome. Such functionals encompass many of the traditional targets of...