The past decade has seen the emergence of numerous rigorous impact evaluations of teacher policies. This paper reviews the economic theory and empirical evidence on eight teacher policy goals: (1) setting clear expectations for teachers; (2) attracting the best into teaching; (3) preparing teachers with useful training and experience; (4) matching teachers' skills with students' needs; (5) leading teachers with strong principals; (6) monitoring teaching and learning; (7) supporting teachers to improve instruction; and (8) motivating teachers to perform.

Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and non-cognitive ability appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for five Latin American countries. To help with comparability, we use the same measure of receptive language ability for all five countries.

This document is a summary of the study entitled, Comparative Analysis of Labor Relations in the Latin American Civil Service: Argentina, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru. The report includes the theoretical framework, the results of the study, and contains conclusions for consideration for a "labor relations development index." This document was commissioned by the Public Management and Transparency Network of the Regional Policy Dialogue for the 2nd Hemispheric Meeting celebrated on April 4th and 5th, 2002.

Labor market institutions shape the return to workers’ skills. They define the incentives of firms and workers to invest in general and specific skills, affecting the returns to experience and tenure. This paper presents an empirical assessment of this hypothesis. We take advantage of rich administrative data from Brazil and Chile, two countries with different regulatoryframeworks. We focus on young workers as they face to a greater extent the trade-off between accumulating general or specific skills.

We review the literature on the long-term impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs in Latin America. Long-term impacts are defined as those that both: 1) are related to the accumulation of human capital, and; 2) are observed after beneficiary children have reached a later stage of the life-cycle. We focus on two life-cycle transitions. The first is children exposed to CCTs in utero or early childhood, who have then transitioned to school ages. The second is children exposed to CCTs during school ages, who have then transitioned to early adulthood. The evidence is inconclusive.

This study explores sex differences in language and socio-emotional skills. It focuses on children 7 months old to 6 years old in Chile in 2012 and Nicaragua in 2013. A focus on young children allowed for ruling out a set of environmental and identity effects to explain the gap. Females had an advantage in both countries and both dimensions. Males in Chile scored at -0.13 standard deviations (SD) in language in the distribution of females. In addition, males scored at -0.20 SD in socio-emotional skills. The gaps in Nicaragua were not statistically different to those in Chile.

The paper analyzes a new Honduran conditional cash transfer experiment (Bono 10,000) in which 150 poor villages (of 300) were treated. The transfers were much larger in size than an earlier experiment (Galiani & McEwan, 2013), but yielded smaller full-sample effects on school enrollment, child labor participation, and measures of health service use.

We study the socio-economic gradient of child development on a representative sample of low- and middle-income children aged 6-42 months in Bogota, using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, a high quality test based on direct observation of the child's abilities. We find a statistically significant difference between children in the 90th and 10th percentile of the wealth distribution in our sample of 0.33 standard deviations (SD) in cognition, 0.29 SD in receptive language and 0.38 SD in expressive language at 14 months.

This paper documents disparities in cognitive development- as measured by a receptive vocabulary test-between children from households with high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in two different phases of childhood (before and after early school years) in four developing countries: Peru, Ethiopia, India, and Vietnam. Intercontinental evidence on the timing, shape, pattern, and persistence of these disparities is provided.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have become the anti-poverty program of choice in many developing countries. Numerous evaluations, often based on rigorous experimental designs, leave little doubt that such programs can increase enrollment and grades attained--in the short term. But evidence is notably lacking on whether these short-term gains translate into longer-term educational benefits needed to fully justify these programs.