“In 2016, 61 million children of primary school age…were not in school, along with 202 million children of secondary school age.” That’s a tragic number, and it’s also a concrete image. While we may have trouble envisioning 61 million children, we have a clear picture in our heads as to what a child not in …

A new collection of papers – Towards Gender Equity in Development – sets out to “explore key sources of female empowerment and discuss the current challenges and opportunities for the future” in three categories: marriage, outside options, and laws and cultural norms. The final published book is available for free, and the individual chapters are …

Teachers are crucial to the learning process. Every year, we get new evidence from a new country on how much value an effective teacher adds. This is one area where the evidence lines up with intuition: Even without a bunch of value added measures, most of us would readily admit that without good teachers, we wouldn’t …

How much does financing matter for education? The Education Commission argued that to achieve access and quality education “will require total spending on education to rise steadily from $1.2 trillion per year today to $3 trillion by 2030 (in constant prices) across all low- and middle-income countries.” At the same time, the World Bank’s World …

Before we begin new posts next week, here are the 10 Development Impact posts published in 2018 that were most popular (by number of page views).   10. The latest research in economics on Africa: The CSAE round-up 9. What’s new in education research? Impact evaluations and measurement – January 2018 round-up 8. What do …

How to use evidence to influence policy? Oxfam Great Britain has some experience in this area, and in a new paper by some of their team – “Using Evidence to Influence Policy: Oxfam’s Experience” – they lay out the lessons they’ve learned over the years. Here are 8 lessons we gleaned from their experience.  1. “One …

Last weekend, the North East Universities Development Consortium held its annual conference, with more than 160 papers on a wide range of development topics and from a broad array of low- and middle-income countries. We’ve provided bite-sized, accessible (we hope!) summaries of every one of those papers that we could find on-line. Check out this …

Teachers are important. And many teachers in low- and middle-income countries would benefit from support to improve their pedagogical skills. But how to do it? Again and again, evidence suggests that short teacher trainings – usually held in a central location – don’t do much of anything to improve teacher practice. Likewise, much teacher training …

Many researchers hope that their research will have some impact on policy. Research can impact policy directly: A policymaker uses the results of your study in making a policy decision. For direct policy impact, policymakers – or the people who advise them or the people who vote for them – have to know about your …

Just about every article or report on education that we read these days – and some that we’ve written – bemoan the quality of education in low- and middle-income countries. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2018 devoted an entire, well-documented chapter to “the many faces of the learning crisis.” Recent reports on education in …

Dear readers: We are taking a break for August, but we’ll back in September with more posts on new methods, new evidence, and new data in the world of impact evaluations. See you soon! Best, The Development Impact Team PS We may post an occasional set of links if we get antsy. 

Across low-income countries, fewer than one in every three girls are enrolled in secondary school. Many interventions to improve girls’ access to school provide cash, such as cash transfers in Malawi or Nepal. But what if girls had better skills to advocate for their own interests? In a recent experiment in Zambia, Nava Ashraf, Natalie …

Here are 30+ studies on the economics of education and health that I’ve encountered and found interesting recently. Add your own in the comments!EducationTeachers and Teaching How much scripting is too much scripting? Piper et al. review the evidence and find that “structured teachers’ guides improve learning outcomes, but that overly scripted teachers’ guides are …

This post is co-authored with Mũthoni Ngatia. Many education investments focus on the first years of primary education or – even before that – early child education. The logic behind this is intuitive: Without a solid foundation, it’s hard for children and youth to gain later skills that use those foundations. If you can’t decipher …

A child has a fever. Her father rushes to his community’s clinic, his daughter in his arms. He waits. A nurse asks him questions and examines his child. She gives him advice and perhaps a prescription to get filled at a pharmacy. He leaves. How do we measure the quality of care that this father …

  From the DIME Analytics Weekly newsletter (which I recommend subscribing to): applyCodebook – One of the biggest time-wasters for research assistants is typing “rename”, “recode”, “label var”, and so on to get a dataset in shape. Even worse is reading through it all later and figuring out what’s been done. Freshly released on the …

When John Maynard Keynes wrote that “In the long run we are all dead,” he probably didn’t mean a few days or months, notwithstanding a recent “long-term experimental” social psychology study that shows results over a whopping three days. Keynes lived an additional 23 years after publishing his famous statement, so I’ll call 23 years …

Sylvain Chabé-Ferret from the Toulouse School of Economics takes stock in The Empirical Revolution in Economics: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead. He proposes 8 knowledge achievements of the empirical revolution in economics, 4 methodological advances, 3 major challenges, and 3 proposed solutions.  Sue Dynarski from University of Michigan has a talk on “how to communicate …

Sometimes, finding nothing at all can unlock the secrets of the universe. Consider this story from astronomy, recounted by Lily Zhao: “In 1823, Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers gazed up and wondered not about the stars, but about the darkness between them, asking why the sky is dark at night. If we assume a universe that is …

In Gaile Parkin’s novel Baking Cakes in Kigali, two women living in Kigali, Rwanda – Angel and Sophie – argue over the salary paid to a development worker: “Perhaps these big organisations needed to pay big salaries if they wanted to attract the right kind of people; but Sophie had said that they were the …

This post was co-authored with Katrina Kosec of IFPRI. Cash transfers seem to be everywhere. A recent statistic suggests that 130 low- and middle-income countries have an unconditional cash transfer program, and 63 have a conditional cash transfer program. We know that cash transfers do good things: the children of beneficiaries have better access to …

Here is a selected round-up of recent research on education in low- and middle-income countries, with a few findings from high-income countries that I found relevant. This is mostly but not entirely from the “economics of education” literature. If I’m missing recent articles that you’ve found useful, please add them in the comments!What is education …

Money matters in education. Recent evidence from the United States shows that increased education spending results in more completed years of schooling and higher subsequent wages for adults. Spending cuts during the Great Recession – also in the U.S. – were associated with reduced student test scores and graduation rates. Indeed, the most common critique …

Before we begin new posts next week, here are the 2017 Development Impact posts that were most popular over the last year. In this case, popular = most page views. 10 journals for publishing a short economics paper When should you cluster standard errors? New wisdom from the econometrics oracle What’s the latest in development …

Yesterday I posted a round-up of the research presented at NEUDC, a major conference on development economics. Although most economic research aspires to uncover principles relevant across multiple contexts, empirical research happens at a place and time. I mapped out the distribution of research presented at NEUDC, fully recognizing that this makes no claim to …

Did you miss this year’s Northeast Universities Development Consortium conference, or NEUDC? I did, unfortunately! NEUDC is a large development economics conference, with more than 160 papers on the program, so it’s a nice way to get a sense of new research in the field. Thankfully, since NEUDC posts submitted papers, I was able to …

We are pleased to launch for the seventh year a call for PhD students on the job market to blog their job market paper on the Development Impact blog.  We welcome blog posts on anything related to empirical development work, impact evaluation, or measurement. For examples, you can see posts from past years (2016, 2015, 2014,  2013, and 2012). We will …

Richer countries have more research published about them on average, which means that African countries tend to have fewer studies about them. But South Africa far outstrips the rest of the continent. In the sample of Das et al. (1985-2005, so a bit dated now), 46 percent of all publications from Sub-Saharan Africa were from …

Every year, a child lives 8,760 hours (that’s 24 hours times 365 days). Let’s say she sleeps 9 hours a night. That leaves 5,475 hours awake. How many of those does she spend in school? Official compulsory instructional time for primary school ranges from under 600 hours (Russia) to nearly 1,200 hours (Costa Rica) in …