Primary school enrollments have increased rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa, spurring concerns about low levels of learning. We analyze field experiments in Kenya and Uganda that assessed whether the Reading to Learn intervention, implemented by the Aga Khan Foundation in both countries, improved early-grade literacy as measured by common assessments.…

This study examines the impacts of Child Development Accounts (CDAs) on account holding, saving, and asset accumulation for children, using data from the SEED for Oklahoma Kids experiment (SEED OK). SEED OK, a policy test of universal and progressive CDAs, provides a 529 college savings plan account to every infant in the treatment group with…

Visa policies in the United States restrict job opportunities and job mobility for U.S.-trained PhDs who hold a temporary visa, a group that accounts for 40 percent of newly graduated PhDs in science and engineering. The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 (CSPA) allowed Chinese students to be eligible for permanent residence in the United…

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We used the random assignment in Project STAR (the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio experiment) to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on…

As school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to understand what family and school factors are associated with the enrollment decisions families make. Use of restricted-access data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study allowed us to identify household location from a nationally representative sample of students and…

Evaluations of the impact of social programs are often carried out in multiple sites, such as school districts, housing authorities, local TANF offices, or One-Stop Career Centers. Most evaluations select sites purposively following a process that is nonrandom. Unfortunately, purposive site selection can produce a sample of sites that is not…

The one-child policy is the only fundamental policy in China that has been kept intact for over three decades, despite the vast socioeconomic changes emerging during this period. While the pressure of population growth still exists, the current control-focused policy has aroused problems and damages that tend to offset its gains. The legitimacy of…

Schools across the United States are facing budgetary pressures on a scale not seen in generations. Times of fiscal exigency force policymakers and education practitioners to pay more attention to the return on various categories of public investment in education. The sizes of the classes in which students are educated are often a focus of these…

School vouchers are the most contentious form of parental school choice. Vouchers provide government funds that parents can use to send their children to private schools of their choice. Here we examine the empirical question of whether or not a school voucher program in Washington, DC, affected achievement or the rate of high school graduation…

A key form of student-level accountability is the requirement for students to pass high school exit exams (HSEEs) in order to receive a diploma. In this paper, we examine the impact of HSEEs on dropout during a period when these exams became more common and rigorous. Further, we study whether offering alternate pathways to graduation for students…

When policies incentivize voluntary activities that also take place in the absence of the incentive, it is critical to identify the additionality of the policy--that is, the degree to which the policy results in actions that would not have occurred otherwise. Rebate programs have become a common conservation policy tool for local municipalities…

One of the major concerns about the one-child policy is its negative impact on the current and future labor force in China. People have talked about the Lewis Turning Point and the end of demographic dividends. Some of these arguments, however, can be misleading. The working-age population (ages 15 to 59) can be treated as the potential labor…

Government policies sometimes cause unintended consequences for other potentially desirable behaviors. One such policy is the charitable tax deduction, which encourages charitable giving by allowing individuals to deduct giving from taxable income. Whether charitable giving and other desirable behaviors are complements or substitutes affect the…

We compare the environmental performance of voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) with different attributes. Using club theory, we argue that the differential performance of VEPs is due in part to their specific design attributes that will either enhance or diminish their ability to improve both targeted and untargeted environmental impacts. We…

This analysis uses March Current Population Survey data from 1999 to 2010 and a differences-in-differences approach to examine how California's first in the nation paid family leave (PFL) program affected leave-taking by mothers following childbirth, as well as subsequent labor market outcomes. We obtain robust evidence that the California program…