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A common strategy for increasing school attendance is to offer cash rewards or other incentives to households, usually to the parents, when their children attend or perform well in school. In Gurgaon, India, researchers tested whether giving education incentives to parents or children influenced the...

Researchers analyzed the impact of a program that provided students in California with a home computer on students’ academic achievement. The program had no effect (either positive or negative) on any educational outcome, including grades, standardized test scores, and attendance.

In Nicaragua, researchers compared the cognitive and health outcomes of boys whose families received conditional cash transfers in the first three years of their lives to those who received the transfers later. Exposing boys to the program during the first 1,000 days of life led to better cognitive...

Town hall meetings in Benin reduced the ability of the most popular presidential candidate in that village to garner political support using clientelist tactics, and still appear to be effective for motivating people to attend the polls.

School choice programs offer students more opportunities to attend schools with higher achievement and graduation levels. In partnership with the Chicago Public Schools, researchers examined the effects of a school choice program on several traditional student achievement outcomes. They used a...

In Afghanistan, researchers evaluated the impact of a Targeting the Ultra Poor program on poverty reduction. The cost-effective program generated large positive impacts for women participants across key outcomes: consumption, assets, psychological well-being, total time spent working, financial...

Researchers are investigating how important these differences are when it comes to increasing the use of irrigation pumps in western Kenya, and whether subsidies for experimentation can be targeted based on certain skills or traits to more effectively increase technology adoption.