Tax authorities often use low-cost communication with taxpayers to encourage voluntary compliance and avoid other costly interventions. This paper reports findings from an experiment with more than 30,000...
Evidence from high-income countries suggests that judges often exhibit in-group bias, favoring litigants that share an identity with the judge. However, there is little evidence on this phenomenon from...
This paper describes a randomized experiment that used a sample of men and women who were eligible for a vocational training program in the Republic of Congo to test the effect of providing information...
Although research has established the importance of state capacity in economic development, less is known about how state capacity comes about and the role of external partners in the process. This paper...
Parenting practices are crucial for the development of children’s brains and social skills. However, parenting styles may be far from ideal, particularly those of caregivers with high stress levels. Using...
This paper examines the drivers of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and tests various means of increasing people’s willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. The study draws on data collected through a broadly...
This paper studies whether a particular socio-emotional skill —grit (the ability to sustain effort and interest toward long-term goals)—can be cultivated and how this affects student learning. The paper...
Recent work draws attention to the fragility of domestic tax revenues—a vital resource for the developing world—to illicit financial flows. To cope with two major challenges in the illicit financial flows–tax...
Long-acting reversible contraceptives are highly effective in preventing unintended pregnancies, but take-up remains low. This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of interventions addressing two...
Remote schools in developing countries are costly to supervise, resulting in low teacher accountability and poor education outcomes. This paper reports the results of a randomized evaluation of three treatments...
This paper evaluates the effects of interventions based on behavioral science on measures of early childhood socio-cognitive development (and related household-level outcomes) for children from households...
This study estimates the impacts of two interventions implemented as field experiments in informal settlements by Nairobi’s water and sanitation utility to improve revenue collection efficiency and last...
This paper evaluates the short-term causal effects of a high-quality, intensive, part-time computer coding bootcamp for women on skill acquisition and employment outcomes. Spots were offered in an oversubscribed...
Widespread adoption of efficient irrigation technologies, including drip irrigation, has been proposed as a means of limiting groundwater overexploitation, especially in the intensively farmed and water-stressed...
Payments for environmental services are a nature conservation policy in which landowners receive financial compensation conditional on verified environmental service delivery. Contracts for payments for...
Across many low- and middle-income countries, a sizable share of young people drop out of school before completing a full course of basic education. Early warning systems that accurately identify students...
Since 2010, Lesotho has implemented legal and institutional changes to allow female land ownership, established a new land agency, reduced the cost of registering land, and carried out systematic urban...
This paper studies the impact of foreign direct investment on domestic firms’ innovation in China. It provides causal evidence by exploiting China’s foreign direct investment deregulation in 2002 and employs...
This paper reports on a randomized evaluation of two teacher incentive programs, which were conducted in a nationally representative sample of 420 public primary schools in Guinea. In 140 schools, high-performing...
This paper provides new insights on the science of scaling. The authors study an educational mentoring program with a home visit component implemented at scale in Mexico, under different modalities (original...