Researchers partnered with a tea company in Malawi to study the effects of a savings product that allowed workers to defer payment of a part of their wages. The deferred wages program was generally popular and increased savings; in the longer run, it helped workers improve their houses.

Researchers in France studied whether government-provided recruiting services would impact firms’ job postings and hiring by lowering recruiting costs. The recruiting services decreased firms’ hiring costs and increased firms’ job postings and hiring, including much sought-after permanent-contract hires.

Researchers randomly assigned automobile manufacturing workers to provide monthly feedback on their managers to measure the impact of feedback on worker productivity, turnover, and job satisfaction in China. Team-level productivity was higher, turnover was lower, and workers’ happiness increased when workers could provide feedback on their managers.

Researchers at the Lujeri Tea Estates in Malawi evaluated the impact of exposure to more, less, or equally productive peers on tea harvester productivity. They found that increasing the productivity of a worker’s peers meaningfully increased worker productivity, measured in kilograms of tea picked. This result was driven largely by women, whose productivity gains were much larger than those of men.

Researchers are partnering with the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) to identify barriers to a wider market for consulting and training in Bangladesh by offering high-quality manufacturing training services at randomly-assigned price points and covering different topics. They find that factories and managers are unwilling to take-up high-quality training services more as a result of high production pressures than as a result of high prices, and that there is higher demand for training to improve production planning and quality than for training on human or social resources.

In Lilongwe, Malawi, researchers provided applicants for a health interviewer job with a random chance of receiving a back-up job, regardless of their success in being hired as a health interviewer, to measure (a) the impact of uncertainty on job search performance and (b) the returns to work experience on future employment and earnings. Job seekers performed better, despite lower job search effort, when they had higher job certainty. Job seekers who received a back-up job through the program had significantly higher daily wages for at least eight months following the program.

Researchers partnered with the Punjab Safe Cities Authority to evaluate how to improve citizen’s access to and experience with police services.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of providing recently unemployed individuals informational brochures about job search strategies that motivated an active search on their labor market outcomes. Providing informational brochures improved the employment and earnings of job seekers who exhibited an increased risk of long-term unemployment but had no measurable effects on the general population.

Building on previous research, researchers in this study evaluated the impact of several targeted instruction programs on the learning outcomes of primary school students in Ghana’s public schools. Researchers found significant improvements in numeracy and literacy on average; of the four interventions, in-school and after-school remedial lessons delivered by Teacher Community Assistants had the largest impact on pupil achievement.

Researchers evaluated the long-run effects of temporary contact between individuals from different regions during military service on interregional attitudes and national identity sentiments among former Spanish male conscripts. Overall, conscription outside of one’s region of origin led to positive and long-lasting effects on interregional sentiments, and increased the sense of national identity among conscripts from regions with strong secessionists movements.

Researchers evaluated whether providing low-stakes diagnostic tests and feedback to teachers led to improved student learning outcomes in India. They found that teachers in intervention schools exerted more effort when observed in the classroom but students in these schools performed no better on independently-administered tests than students in schools that did not receive the program.

Researchers evaluated the impact of access to a package of free dental services on employment levels for urban residents of Santiago, Chile. Results found that participants with access to these services had better dental health, and that self-esteem and short-term employment increased among women, particularly those who had previously been missing front teeth or with lower levels of self-esteem.

Researchers evaluated whether an alternative teacher incentive scheme, providing rewards based on the performance of all students, could help reduce dropout and improve student math learning. Introducing the pay-for-percentile incentive scheme reduced overall student dropout rates. However, these reductions were driven almost entirely by students at intervention schools with math textbooks. Among schools with math books, the incentive scheme also improved the math achievement for higher performing students.

In Niger, researchers evaluated the impact of a training program for input distributors (agro-dealers) on smallholder access to and use of agricultural inputs. Researchers found that trainings for agro-dealers combined with a demonstration plot increased the share of farmers adopting improved seeds, but did not increase the quantity used to have an impact on agricultural output.