Researchers provided three years of recruiting services to help young women in randomly selected rural Indian villages get jobs in the business process outsourcing industry. Women who had access to these recruiting services were significantly more likely to be employed outside the home at the end of the three-year period and significantly less likely to have gotten married or had children.

In the Dominican Republic, researchers investigated families’ perceptions of the returns to education and whether providing information on the actual returns to education would change their schooling decisions. They found that students significantly underestimated the returns to secondary education, and providing them with information about the actual returns led them to complete 0.2 additional years of schooling.

Smoking and drinking are two of the most important risk factors explaining early mortality, accounting for an estimated 14 percent of deaths among youth worldwide. In the Dominican Republic, researchers examined the effect of increased schooling and decreased work on smoking and drinking behavior among secondary school-aged boys. Youth with more schooling were much less likely to smoke at age 18 and began drinking at a later age, although by age 18 they drank just as much as boys with less schooling.

A number of low-income countries subsidize the price of staple foods such as rice in an effort to improve nutrition, and these programs generally enjoy great public support. However, subsidizing staple foods may cause households to shift to their spending to better-tasting foods that are actually less nutritious. In China, researchers analyzed the impact of food subsidies on nutrition and found no evidence of a positive impact. In fact, the subsidies may even have caused some households to consume fewer calories and important vitamins and minerals.

Researchers introduced a mobile phone-based agricultural extension service to evaluate its impact on knowledge and adoption of effective farming methods among cotton farmers in Gujarat, India. They found that the service was highly effective in nudging farmers to adopt a number of recommended agricultural technologies, like fertilizer, pesticide, and improved seed varieties, but had no measurable impact on farmers’ yields or profits.

Researchers partnered with a commercial bank in India to study the effect of paying loan officers according to the performance of their loans on the quality of their lending decisions. Loan officers working under this incentive scheme exerted greater screening effort, approved fewer loans, and increased their average profit per loan. An alternative incentive scheme which rewarded loan volume rather than quality had opposite effects.

Researchers randomly evaluated whether well-timed access to credit would allow maize farmers in Kenya to make better use of storage and sell their output at higher prices. The loan offers allowed farmers to store more maize and earn higher revenues, with larger revenue impacts for farmers granted loans immediately following harvest and in areas where a smaller share of farmers was offered loans.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of providing financial literacy education alongside various marketing strategies to small-scale farmers in Gujarat, India, on their demand for rainfall index insurance. Financial education had a significant effect on adoption of rainfall insurance, but was not a cost-effective way to raise demand.

Researcher evaluated whether mothers’ literacy classes and home-learning participation trainings could improve children’s learning outcomes. The interventions had small positive impacts on mother and child learning levels.

Researchers found that providing microloans to purchase ITNs increased ownership and use. However, the impact of these microloans on health was mixed, likely due to insufficient coverage and low usage rates of bednets.

In Ethiopia, researchers tested whether linking microcredit and family planning services could increase contraceptive use more than either program in isolation. Neither the linked program nor the isolated programs had any detectable impact on contraceptive awareness, use, or intention to use.