Publications:
"When the data you have aren’t the data you need: The availability of school-related violence data in low- and middle-income countries" (with David K. Evans, Susannah Hares and DongYi Wu) World Development, 2025.
Blog post on the paper. Download our dataset. Check our map of surveys.
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.
Blog post on the paper.
“Empowering Adolescent Girls: Does it take a Village?” (with Alison Andrew, Sonya Krutikova and Hemlata Verma) R&R JEEA.
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.
Blog post on the paper.
"Advancing the measurement of violence in and around schools: Evidence from Malawi" (with Esme Kadzamira, Thi Le and Tionge Saka)
Abstract: Approximately one billion children worldwide report having experienced physical, emotional, or sexual violence, yet existing evidence suggests this figure substantially underestimates true prevalence, as individuals often avoid disclosing their experiences of violence. We study which survey methods yield more reliable measures of violence against children. We randomly assigned 6,000 children aged 8 to 12 years across 251 schools in Malawi to respond to a survey using face-to-face (F2F) interviews or audio computer-assisted self-interviews (ACASI), administered either at the child’s home or school. We find that ACASI, relative to F2F, substantially increases the disclosure of physical and emotional violence by peers and school staff, regardless of survey location. Disclosure of sexual violence more than doubles when using ACASI and when surveys are conducted at school rather than the child’s home. These effects are consistent with the greater privacy provided by ACASI and the additional reassurance offered by school settings, which provide physical spaces that may more strongly signal to respondents that their answers are unlikely to be overheard, reducing social and emotional barriers to disclosure. Our results are robust to multiple checks examining social desirability bias, lapses in attention, and misunderstanding of survey questions, and suggest that ACASI offers a cost-effective approach to reducing systematic measurement error in surveys on sensitive topics.
Blog post on the paper. Download our supplementary materials. Check a conference presentation about the paper.
Selected work in progress:
"How to Reduce School-Related Violence: A Systematic Review of What We Know and Don't Know" (with David K. Evans and Yi Ning Wong)
“Safeguarding Children Before, During and After Data Collection” (with David K. Evans and Thi Le).
"Seeds on Rocky Ground: the Role of Alignment on the Effectiveness of School Training Interventions" (with Lee Crawfurd) [Draft available on request]
Policy blogs & reports:
CGD. “A New Data Hub for School-Related Violence Statistics” (with Yi Ning Wong). April, 2025. Explore our interactive map.
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.
Full list of policy & program evaluations reports available here.