A nationwide unconditional cash transfer (UCT) rolled out in Colombia in March 2020 is evaluated to understand how emergency cash affected households during the COVID-19 pandemic. The program delivered US$19 per payment (PPP US$55.6) to 1 million households in poverty, with payments occurring every five to eight weeks.
This paper asks whether a teacher’s measured value added (VA) depends on the VA of the teacher in the previous grade and how that dynamic affects decisions that rely on VA. Using administrative records for North Carolina classrooms, the authors estimate how last grade’s mean teacher VA relates to a teacher’s own VA and evaluate how standard VA approaches would perform under a dismissal policy that targets the bottom 5% of teachers.
This paper asks whether local government policy priorities shape women’s decisions to run for office and offers evidence on how municipal spending patterns relate to women’s emergence as candidates. Using Brazilian municipal-level variation, the authors link policy outputs and communal spending to the number and composition of entrants, arguing that women’s interest in running varies across place and time rather than being uniform.
Many elderly people in the Global South lack official proof of age and identity and thus long reside in the blind spot of states—especially those who are poor, indigenous, live in rural areas, or worked outside the formal sector. This study asks how states can "go the last mile" to incorporate these marginalized elders and what prompts them to register births decades after the fact.
This paper asks how people form assumptions about who benefits from public policies and shows that concrete elements of policy design can change those assumptions. Using a pre-registered survey experiment, the author manipulates policy features (for example, whether a program includes a work requirement) and measures respondents’ assumptions about beneficiaries’ race and national origin and their policy evaluations. The study emphasizes that these design-driven assumptions influence policy attitudes even when respondents do not report stereotype-consistent beliefs.