International development

An informational intervention in Western Kenya

In this paper we analyze the role of expected labor and marriage market returns as determinants of the college enrollment decisions of Mexican high school graduates. Moreover, we investigate whether the (relative) weights of these factors differ by gender. We use data on individuals’ expectations regarding future labor market outcomes which we directly elicited from the youths, and two different measures of marriage market returns. First, marriage market returns are proxied by the (net-)supply of potential partners in the youths’ local marriage markets. Second, we use data which elicits youths’ beliefs about their future spouse's earnings conditional on their own education level. We find that labor market as well as marriage market returns are important determinants of the college enrollment decision. However, boys’ and girls’ preferences differ in terms of the relative role of the two determinants, in that the relative weight of labor market versus marriage market returns is larger for boys than for girls.

The simplest form of value added tax (VAT) – and the form often advocated by international organisations – is one with a broad base and a single (‘uniform’) rate. In practise, most countries exempt and/or apply lower VAT rates on certain categories of goods and services. In this note authors summarise the pros and cons of such ‘VAT rate differentiation’ that are highlighted in the economics and taxation literatures, paying particular attention to the applicability and relevance of each factor for low- and middle-income countries.

This paper investigates whether disadvantaged children learn less than advantaged children when both types of children are enrolled in the same school, using data from Vietnam and Peru. Two different results emerge: in Vietnam, there is no evidence that schools are less effective for disadvantaged groups, while in Peru disadvantaged groups do learn less.

This briefing note, released as part of the IFS's pre-election analysis, provides key information on UK aid spending.

This article identifies some of the gaps in the existing literature pertaining to childhood development. It then introduces the Young Lives dataset, explaining the importance of such comparable data from longitudinal studies in different countries for this field of research, before exploring the contributions of each of the articles using this data in this journal's special edition.

We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to signicant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline. We estimate the determinants of material and time investments in these children and evaluate the im- pact of the treatment on such investments. We then estimate the production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills. The eects of the program can be explained by increases in parental investments, which have strong eects on outcomes and are complementary to both maternal skills and child's baseline skills.

In this paper we use high quality data from two developing countries, Ethiopia and Peru, to estimate the production functions of human capital from age 1 to age 15.

We evaluate the long-term impacts of a randomized Colombian training and job placement program.

We study how women’s choices over labor activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable trajectory out of poverty.

We estimate the effect of education on lifetime earnings by distinguishing between individuals who lived in rural or urban areas during childhood and between individuals with access to many or few books at home at age 10.

Development and validation of a 10-year mortality prediction model: meta-analysis of individual participant data from five cohorts of older adults in developed and developing countries.

Holy cows or cash cows? The economic return to livestock in rural India

FINISH Impact Evaluation Report

Adolescents make up a larger proportion of the population in lower- and middle-income countries than ever before. Given that adolescence is critical in determining later life opportunities and outcomes, this youth bulge brings both unprecedented risks and opportunities. This report presents baseline data for a large study assessing the effect of an integrated community-based programme, PAnKH, that aims to delay age at marriage, increase school retention and improve sexual reproductive health (SRH) of adolescent girls in India.