The Value Added Tax (VAT) system, which generates a paper trail on transactions between firms, facilitated tax enforcement by spreading the impact of enforcement measures up the production chain in a study with over 400,000 firms in Chile.

The estimated impacts of charter schools have varied widely. In Massachusetts, students who won lotteries for charter schools located in urban areas often did substantially better than students who lost, while students who won lotteries for charter schools in nonurban areas fared, on average, about...

Student participation is sensitive to the perceived costs and benefits of education. Although the costs are immediate and easy to observe, school quality and the long-run benefits of education are more difficult to perceive. Children, not only their parents, are important to consider when designing...

In India, a biometrically authenticated payment system reduced corruption and substantially improved the delivery of government social assistance programs despite partial implementation.

While past approaches to helping students transition to college have focused on increasing financial aid, the college application process itself presents a barrier to college access. J-PAL's new policy bulletin summarizes five randomized evaluations of interventions designed to improve college...

Summer youth employment programs that provided minimum wage summer jobs to mainly disadvantaged youth in New York City and Chicago reduced arrests for violent crimes, incarceration, and premature deaths.

Across a range of programs, interventions that successfully changed the calculus of costs and benefits of unprotected sexual activity and childbirth delayed pregnancy among adolescents. Some programs directly altered costs and benefits while others shifted perceptions of them.

Disadvantaged students who attended France’s first “boarding school of excellence” had large improvements in math scores after two years. Students initially experienced reductions in well-being, but adjusted to their new environment by the second year.

Parent meetings with school principals that provided guidance on selecting academic tracks helped reduce grade repetition and high school dropout among low-achieving students in France.

Offering tutoring and career counseling to high-performing immigrant students closed the educational gap between native-born and immigrant boys in Italy.

In Uganda, an incentivized community health promoter program increased health care access, knowledge, and health-promoting behaviors among households, leading to a 27 percent reduction in child mortality.

A series of interactive classroom discussions about gender equality over two and a half years increased students’ support for gender equality and led students to enact more gender-equitable behavior in the state of Haryana, India.

In Indonesia, sending households official identification cards with information about the benefits they were eligible to receive from a national subsidized rice program led to a 26 percent increase in the benefits that eligible households received and a large reduction in leakage.

Offering small rug producers in Egypt opportunities to export rugs to high-income markets increased firm profits through improvements in firms’ technical knowledge, efficiency, and product quality.

An randomized evaluation found that adding sessions with role models and individualized assistance to intensive training courses for microentrepreneurs increased their household incomes, mainly through improved business practices and performances