Ongoing Projects

Gender norms, violence and adolescent girls' trajectories in India

In this project we consider whether it is possible to improve women's welfare and make progress towards gender equity despite prevailing restrictive gender norms or whether real change requires a shift in norms and how they are enforced. We leverage a randomized experiment in rural Rajasthan, a highly conservative part of India, to compare two approaches to improving the outcomes of adolescent girls. Results from short-term follow-up suggest that in settings with restrictive norms, wider norm change is key to improving women's welfare and that while interventions that target women only may be effective at improving some outcomes, they may risk jeopardising overall well-being through exposing women to greater risk of sanctions. We are currently conducting a second follow-up, tracking all the young women who participated in the study in order to assess longer-rung effects of the experiment on key outcomes such as education, age at marriage, fertility and empowerment.

Improving early childhood health and development through play at scale in Ghana

The aim of this project is to inform the design of effective and scalable Early Childhood Care and Education (ECE) programmes in Lower and Middle Income Country settings. We are collaborating with Lively Minds – an NGO implementing a holistic ECCE programme which engages parents and pre-schools to achieve healthy child development of 3-5 years olds in rural Ghana. Our recently completed efficacy trial revealed that the programme has a positive impact on child health, as well as cognitive and socio-emotional development, partly mediated by improvements in parenting practices1. As a result of this evidence, over the next four years Lively Minds will be scaled by the Ghanaian Government Education Service (GES) to 60 districts and 4,000 pre-schools, reaching 1.3 million children. We are now partnering with GES and the Lively Minds to integrate a cluster randomised controlled trial into this scale-up. We will assess whether the impacts found at efficacy trial stage are sustained and investigate key mechanisms underlying these in order to determine how implementation and cost-effectiveness could be further improved.

RISE Longitudinal Study of Primary School Quality in Vietnam

The aim of the project is to understand which aspects of the Vietnamese education system lead to high educational outcomes relative to other Lower Middle Income Countries. We are collecting rich longitudinal data on 140 primary schools and just over 5,000 primary school pupils, following two neighbouring cohorts of children from second grade and until the end of primary school. We study class and teacher effects on a wide range of skills not limited to literacy and numeracy by including a rich set of assessments capturing additional cognitive and non-cognitive skills such as executive functioning, self-perception and motivation. Preliminary findings suggest that teachers have a moderate effect on learning and that variation in classroom quality is a more significant contributor to variation in pupils’ executive functioning and non-cognitive skills than in academic skills. In ongoing work we are coding videos of classroom practices as well as collecting data on school management systems is order to identify key drivers of variation in school and classroom quality in Vietnam.

Evaluation of government reforms to pre-school provision in the West Bank and Gaza

In this project we are working with the Palestinian Ministry of Education and the World Bank in designing and evaluating a portfolio of reforms aimed at improving quality of government and private pre-schools and increasing enrolment into pre-school. The reforms include the introduction of a highly innovative, adaptive quality monitoring system, as well as an in-service teacher training programme. Our aim is to support this effort through embedding rigorous evaluation into implementation of these programmes, as well as to collect longitudinal data on children growing up in conflict in order to answer a broader set of questions about mechanisms through which conflict affects child development and how these effects can be mitigated through intervention.

Work skills for life: designing a scalable work readiness programme for secondary school students in Tanzania

The aim of this project is to design and test a scalable extracurricular work readiness training programme for secondary school students. Particular attention will be paid to the importance of leveraging existing social networks and role models for enhancing the effectiveness of the programme. The experiment will be conducted across 150 secondary schools in Tanzania, will be delivered by existing government teachers who will be trained by a Tanzanian NGO Femina Hip.

The impact of COVID-19 on families' time-use, child development and gender inequalities in England

In this project we study how families with school-aged children have been adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on periods during which schools were closed. Our aim is to understand how lockdown and other isolation measures affected children’s outcomes, gaps in outcomes between children from different socio-economic groups, as well as division of labour among their parents. To this end we collected three rounds of novel time-use, socio-economic and demographic data on around 5,000 families with school-age children in England through online surveys fielded in spring 2020 and winter 2021 – the two periods of school closures.

The geography of social mobility: evidence from cross and within-country variation in Europe

We utilise several novel administrative deta-sets from Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the U.K in order to study intergenerational mobility at the regional and the national levels. We analyse how measures of well-being such as education and income, persist across generations and how this persistence varies within and across countries in order to identify the driving mechanisms of social mobility. Using within-country variation, we provide descriptive evidence of how social mobility differs across regions of residence despite being subject to the same institutional and political settings at the national level. Further, we construct fine-grained measures of regional characteristics such as segregation, income inequality, and local institutions, and study their roles as potential drivers of social mobility. We pay particular attention to the role of human capital accumulation by using longitudinal data on children’s test scores and analysing how they respond to regional and national characteristics. Comparison of Scandinavian countries and the UK offers an opportunity to gain insights into the role of the welfare state in shaping patterns of social mobility.

Tackling youth disconnectedness in Denmark through an internship-based Active Labour Market Programme

In this project we evaluate the effectiveness of a new Active Labour Market Programme in Denmark using a randomised controlled trial approach. This ALMP – called NExTWORK – seeks to improve economic and educational outcomes of disconnected youth by building work experience through rotating labour market training hosted by a network of companies. The programme has a strong focus on positive youth development activated in highly facilitated peer networks and close support to both participating youth and employers. The RCT is being conducted across 6 municipalities in which eligible youth are randomised either into the NEcTWORK programme or the “status quo” government programme. We plan to utilise administrative register data combined with implementation data to assess whether NExTWORK is more effective at improving the employment and education outcomes and reducing dependence on social assistance and engagement in crime of the participating youth than the status-quo government programme.