Research
Working papers:
"Improving School Management of Violence. Evidence from a Nation-wide Policy in Peru" Submitted
Abstract: Exposure to school violence has been proven to be detrimental to human capital formation, but there is limited rigorous evidence about how to tackle this pervasive issue. This paper examines the impacts of a large-scale government intervention that aimed to improve school leaders’ skills to manage school violence in Peru. I exploit the eligibility rules used to select beneficiary schools and use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to estimate the short-term impacts of the intervention on violence and education-related outcomes. The findings show that the likelihood of reporting violence increased by 15 percentage points and that the number of reports of violence rose among eligible schools. Combining unique administrative and primary data, I provide suggestive evidence that the documented rise in reports of violence is primarily due to shifts in reporting rather than a greater incidence of school violence. Upon exploring the short-term impacts on education-related outcomes, I find the intervention reduced students' likelihood of switching schools by two percentage points. These findings add to our understanding of the benefits of investing in school staff skills for safer learning environments.
Read blog post.
“Empowering Adolescent Girls: Does it take a Village?” (with Alison Andrew, Sonya Krutikova and Hemlata Verma) Submitted
Abstract: The social environment is key to sustaining gender inequalities but many policies and programs target only women and do not involve the wider community. Can such approaches work or, by pushing women to break accepted norms, do they expose women to stress and backlash? What are the impacts of engaging the wider community? We use a 3-armed RCT covering 5000 adolescent girls across 125 communities in rural Rajasthan to explore these questions. We assess the impacts of weekly girl groups that only worked with adolescent girls and the impacts of additionally engaging the wider community. Both models led to a reduction in school dropout and early marriage. However, targeting adolescent girls without involving the broader community led to an increase in girls adopting a ruminative thinking style and no improvements in depression and anxiety. By contrast, when the wider community was engaged, girls' symptoms of depression and anxiety fell by 0.26 SD and 0.33 SD respectively and negative impacts on rumination were reversed. We show evidence that such improvements in mental health may have resulted from the community engagement changing prevailing attitudes, norms and the sanctions girls perceived they would face for breaking norms.
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"When the Data You Have Aren’t the Data You Need: School-Related Violence Data Availability in Low- and Middle-Income Countries" (with David K. Evans, Susannah Hares and DongYi Wu) Revise and resubmit World Development.
Abstract: Low- and middle-income countries continue to lag behind high-income countries in the quantity and quality of schooling, two elements of human capital accumulation. Violence in schools—which surveys demonstrate is a challenge across countries—is associated with worse educational and life outcomes. Yet documenting the prevalence of sexual, physical, and psychological violence in schools is just the first piece of data that policymakers and partners need to act effectively against school-related violence. In this study, we review the availability of data on school-related violence from international surveys administered across low- and middle-income countries as well as national surveys in a sample of countries. We find that most countries lack data to answer simple questions that policymakers might ask as precursors to taking action against school-related violence, to understand the consequences of violence, or to monitor progress on reducing violence. For example, only one in six countries has data to measure how many children have recently experienced sexual violence from school staff. The gaps in data are biggest for younger children. We provide a dataset of international surveys with school-related violence questions and recommendations to increase the available, actionable data related to school-related violence.
Read blog post. Download our dataset. Check our map of surveys.
"Effectiveness of Conditional Cash Transfers Amid Unequal Healthcare Accessibility" Submitted.
Abstract: Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have been part of the social protection system of many low and middle-income countries for more than 20 years. This paper studies the persistence of their effects on the utilization of preventive child and maternal health services and examines the extent to which unequal geographic accessibility to health facilities determines the effectiveness of CCTs. I study this in the context of a Peruvian CCT called Juntos and exploit the variation in the timing of treatment to estimate the impacts of Juntos using a differences in differences analytical framework. I find that positive short-term effects in the utilization of health services are persistent across a period of 10 years and even become larger the longer the exposure to the CCT. I observe this both for health services directly targeted by the CCT and services that were not. I also find that the CCT had bigger effects in districts with more disadvantageous geographic accessibility to health facilities, suggesting that the CCT contributed to encouraging attendance to health facilities despite the supply conditions. My findings are partly explained by the fact that these districts had larger space for improvement at baseline.
Selected work in progress:
"Seeds on Rocky Ground: the Role of Alignment on the Effectiveness of School Training Interventions" (with Lee Crawfurd) [Draft available on request]
Impact of violence in students educational decisions. Evidence from Peru. [Status: data cleaning]
Advancing the measurement of school-related violence among young children in Malawi. [Status: preparatory field activities]
Media:
CGD. “Legislating to Prevent Violence against Children: Corporal Punishment Bans Are Necessary but Not Enough” (with Susannah Hares and DongYi Wu). April, 2024.
CGD. “What We Know (and Don’t Know) about Violence against Girls and Boys in School” (with Susannah Hares). March, 2023.
Video-Columnas Grupo REDES-Ojo Público: dissemination of recent influential research among economists and non-economists to encourage evidence-based policymaking.
Full list of blogs available here.
Selected Policy & Program Evaluation Reports:
Violence in Schools: Prevalence, Impact and Interventions (with Line Baago-Rasmussen, Susannah Hares, Dipak Naker and DongYi Wu), CGD Policy Brief, January 2024.
Promoting Adolescent Engagement, Knowledge and Health (PAnKH) in Rajasthan, India: Implementation and Cost-Effectiveness (with Sonya Krutikova, Alison Andrew, Hemlata Verma, Abhishek Gautam, Ravi Verma, Madhumita Das, Pranita Achyut, Ronak Soni and Sanjay Sharma), IFS report, December 2018.
Full list of projects available here.