Center for Effective Global Action

Intra-household decision-making dynamics under unequal bargaining power are commonly understood to contribute to both under-utilization of contraception and under-investment in women and children’s human capital. We focus on married adolescents in northern Nigeria, a group particularly vulnerable to such dynamics. We evaluate a life skills intervention, which also focuses on health services and reproductive health, via a cluster-randomized control trial among 1,200 married girls aged 14 to 19. We find that the intervention significantly increases contraceptive use, decreases pregnancy rates, and, according to surveys of girls and health workers, increases access to health services for women and their children. We also find large increases in involvement in household decision-making and decreases in intimate partner violence. The results suggest that life skills and negotiation capacity can alter intrahousehold decision-making, even in the absence of material changes in circumstances. JEL Codes: J12, J13, J16, I12, O15

We ran a nonrandomized, market-level experiment in Kolkata vegetable markets in which we subsidized vendors in some markets to sell additional produce. The vendors earned over 60% higher profits, excluding the value of the subsidy. Nevertheless, after the subsidy ended many vendors stopped selling the additional produce. Vendors knew about the profitable opportunity and demonstrated that they were capable of exploiting it without assistance. We conclude that their behavior meaningfully diverges from profit maximization when considering take-home pay, likely due to a combination of high marginal costs of effort and feared sanctions from breaking anti-competitive norms.

Many group identities that influence economic behavior are imperfectly observed. Individuals and institutions often conceal identity markers to limit discrimination. Yet concealment also creates uncertainty about group membership, hampering coordination in social interaction. To study this tradeoff, we paired high- and low-caste men for collaborative data entry work in North India. We randomly assigned each mixed-caste pair to either be: (i) introduced by full names, making caste common knowledge; (ii) introduced by first names only, making caste disclosure a choice; or (iii) instructed not to disclose caste. The two concealment conditions substantially reduce the accuracy of beliefs about a partner’s caste and confidence in those beliefs. They also weaken workplace relations, lowering trust, willingness to interact, and perceived productivity—consistent with identity helping structure social coordination. Evidence on mechanisms shows that identity concealment inhibits authentic interaction, making workers less able to express their “true selves,” while certainty about a partner’s identity is associated with stronger workplace ties. Concealment leaves a sizable caste disparity in higher-status role assignment intact, suggesting minimal impacts on discrimination. We conclude that where group identities are socially entrenched, reducing their legibility may undermine intergroup relations.

Cognitive skills contribute to human capital and economic growth, yet little is known about how they transmit across generations or evolve over the life course in low-income settings. Previous research on intergenerational cognitive transmission has focused predominantly on Western, high-income countries, leaving open whether those patterns generalize to low-income country settings as well. Leveraging repeated Raven’s scores, a measurement of fluid intelligence, spanning 25 years in the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS), from adolescence to midlife along with data on respondents’ children, we investigate the intergenerational transmission and stability of cognitive skills. First, the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills from parents to children is low–and lower than in higher- income countries or than predicted by expert forecasts. Second, the low correlation cannot be explained by measurement error or cognitive instability. Intraindividual rank-order stability is high over both short and long horizons. Third, regression analyses and machine learning suggest that environmental factors, which are prone to differ in low-income settings, moderate some of the transmission. Together, these findings suggest that the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills is weaker in low-income contexts than previously assumed–and that environmental factors prevalent in those settings, rather than low data quality, are a likely explanation.

Despite Africa representing nearly 20% of the world's population and facing some of its most acute development challenges, African scholars account for less than 1% of publications in economics journals (Aigner, Greenspon & Rodrik, 2025). This report presents new large-scale empirical evidence on the barriers impeding African scholars' participation in international development research, drawing on an original survey of over 500 stakeholders across the research-to-policy pipeline, a complementary survey of more than 800 African undergraduate and master's students at ten African universities, a survey of 51 anonymous faculty members, 40 qualitative interviews, and five focus-group discussions. Examining four stages of researcher development—higher education, training and mentorship, research production and publication, and policy impact and evidence use—we find that access to resources is the binding constraint at every stage: 90% of master's students cite funding as the primary barrier to doctoral training, 64% of African-educated scholars rank submission costs as the most critical factor in where they publish, and 68% report being unable to access journal articles due to paywalls, while structural challenges in African universities (including heavy faculty teaching loads, low salaries, and weak research incentives) narrow the pipeline long before a scholar submits to a journal or engages with policymakers. We conclude that African scholars' underrepresentation reflects cumulative structural inequities rather than deficits in motivation or talent, and offer targeted recommendations to universities, funders, governments, journals, and training providers toward a more inclusive and policy-relevant global research ecosystem, as well as particular use-cases where these best practices are already in effect.

Research in development, labor, and health economics increasingly relies on indices to summarize the complex dimensions of human well-being—such as health, wealth, aspirations, and social inclusion—into single measures. Yet too often index construction is often driven by convention and precedent rather than by a clear conceptual framework, leaving little guidance on selecting the appropriate type of index for a given context, the data used to construct it, or the variables included. This paper provides a guide to index construction in applied microeconomics. It categorizes different index types and their appropriate uses, clarifies the tradeoffs between measurement and statistical power, and offers a decision tree to guide selection among approaches such as factor analysis, principal components, and aggregation-based indices. The paper also outlines principles for variable selection via machine learning in high dimensional settings and concludes with an example of index construction in a three country randomized trial with an entrepreneurial aspirations intervention. By linking conceptual foundations to applied practice, the paper aims to improve the transparency and rigor of index-based measurement in applied research.

Much recent research has sought ways to raise the impact of microcredit in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). One set of interventions has addressed hard skills, often aimed at promoting business skills and financial literacy among microentrepreneurs. Another set of interventions has addressed socio-emotional skills such as the development of self-efficacy, entrepreneurial confidence, and aspirations. We present results from three small randomized controlled trials in India, Peru, and Uganda, each with four treatment arms in which we randomized a mobile-phone-based app designed to teach financial literacy, a video documentary intervention designed to boost entrepreneurial aspirations and goal-setting, the combination of these two interventions, and a control group. Results show positive and significant effects from both interventions, where the financial literacy app increased overall financial literacy by approximately 0.28σ both as a solo intervention and when combined with the aspirations intervention. The aspirations intervention increased an overall aspirational hope index by 0.33σ and by 0.30σ when combined with the financial literacy intervention. Increases in aspirational hope among microentrepreneurs were driven by statistically significant increases in aspirations, agency, and clearer visualizations of pathways out of poverty. Future research seeks to scale up this combined intervention.

This study investigates whether a government-led, whole-school reform in public lower secondary schools can simultaneously reduce dropout and improve both academic and socioemotional outcomes. We employ a prospective difference-in-differences design, using machine learning on nationwide administrative data to match 200 reform schools in Morocco to 100 comparable schools. The analysis uses primary assessment data for 20,036 students and administrative enrollment records for 637,587 observations. After one year, the reform reduced end-of-year dropout by 1.6 percentage points (a 31.4 percent decline), increased learning by 0.52 standard deviations (a 3.3-fold acceleration), and improved a pre-specified index of socioemotional skills by 0.22 standard deviations. These findings demonstrate that government-led interventions can deliver multidimensional benefits during the critical lower secondary school years and highlight the potential of whole-school reform to support adolescent development.

This study examines how controlling misinformation on a social media platform in Pakistan affects users’ exposure to both accurate and false information. It combines an intervention to disseminate official information about the COVID-19 pandemic across the platform with a randomized experiment that measures the impact of fully controlling access to pandemic-related misinformation. The treatments rely on a higher-intensity, ex ante approach to moderating misinformation on the platform relative to the control, which relies on a typical ex post approach to moderation. Fully controlling misinformation, as in the treatments, reduces the number of daily users by 19%, indicating a distaste for moderation. Furthermore, the treatments reduce exposure to official information by 29% more than they reduce exposure to misinformation. A conceptual framework posits that these findings can be explained by the fact that, in this setting, official information is more trusted, and thus is more widely disseminated, relative to misinformation.