In the past two decades, Bangladesh experienced a substantial reduction in the prevalence of child labour, associated with improvements in school enrolment and completion. Despite progress, child labour persists in the country, also driven by household earning losses and school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This report addresses a timely…

Whether SMS-based nudge interventions can increase parent engagement and improve child learning outcomes across diverse contexts such as rural West Africa is unknown. We conducted a school-randomized trial to test the impacts of an audio or text-message intervention (two messages per week for one school year) to parents and teachers of second and…

Many developing countries use employment guarantee programs to combat poverty. This paper examines the consequences of such employment guarantee programs for the human capital accumulation of children. It exploits the phased roll-out of India's flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) to study the effects on…

Since 1999, one of the main strategies the Colombian government has used to mitigate coca cultivation is to spray the crops with herbicide, which is carried out from airplanes. In this paper I evaluate the consequences of this strategy for rural households in areas where coca is cultivated, specifically the effects of aerial spraying on child…

While school enrollment at the primary level has been rising in developing countries rapidly, international measures of education quality do not exhibit a parallel improvement. Since parents' expenditure is an important determinant of children's school performance, we investigate parents' investments on quality measured by their spending on books…