Professor Pedro Carneiro

We designed a coaching program that focused on one aspect of teacher quality—teacher-child interactions—that researchers in education and psychology have argued is critical for child development and learning.

We evaluate an intervention targeting early life nutrition and well-being for households in extreme poverty in Northern Nigeria.

We evaluate an intervention targeting early life nutrition and well-being for households in extreme poverty in Northern Nigeria. The intervention leads to large and sustained improvements in children’s anthropometric and health outcomes, including an 8% reduction in stunting four years post-intervention.

This article studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on household expenditure on non-durables.

A socially mobile country provides equal opportunities for everyone, across big cities and small towns, and regardless of whether your parents are rich or poor. This report makes use of newly linked administrative data on all state-educated pupils born between 1986 and 1988 to follow a group of sons from where they grew up, looking at their family circumstances and their educational achievement, through to the labour market.

In a randomized control trial, the precision of an average treatment effect estimator and the power of the corresponding t-test can be improved either by collecting data on additional individuals, or by collecting additional covariates that predict the outcome variable. To design the experiment, a researcher needs to solve this tradeoff subject to her budget constraint. We show that this optimization problem is equivalent to optimally predicting outcomes by the covariates, which in turn can be solved using existing machine learning techniques using pre-experimental data such as other similar studies, a census, or a household survey. In two empirical applications, we show that our procedure can lead to reductions of up to 58% in the costs of data collection, or improvements of the same magnitude in the precision of the treatment effect estimator.

We study an intensive social programme in Chile that combines home visits to households in extreme poverty with guaranteed access to social services.

We examine the labor market consequences of an exogenous increase in the supply of skilled labor in several cities in Norway, resulting from the construction of new colleges in the 1970s.

This paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non-durables. We study a policy intervention in the Republic of Macedonia, offering cash transfers to poor households, conditional on having their children attending secondary school.

This article uses a novel identification strategy to measure power in the household. Our strategy is to elicit women's willingness to pay to receive a cash transfer instead of their spouse receiving it.

In a randomized control trial, the precision of an average treatment effect estimator and the power of the corresponding t-test can be improved either by collecting data on additional individuals, or by collecting additional covariates that predict the outcome variable. We propose the use of pre-experimental data such as other similar studies, a census, or a household survey, to inform the choice of both the sample size and the covariates to be collected.

Optimal data collection for randomized control trials

This article studies the impact of permanent and transitory shocks to income on parental investments in children.

This paper studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on the structure of household expenditures on non-durables.

Using unique data from Pakistan we estimate a model of demand for differentiated products in 112 rural education markets with significant choice among public and private schools. Our model accounts for the endogeneity of school fees and the characteristics of students attending the school.