Client Capstone Projects

This project examined the efforts by Indus Action, a large NGO, to support Women’s self-help groups to access resources provided through a variety of state-funded welfare programs. The research aimed to explain the barriers that prevented groups from accessing these resources and to help Indus Action understand the additionality of their efforts. [The policy brief is attached.)

This study examined the patterns of corporal punishment during childhood, both in the home and in schools, in several countries to explore the impact of these practices on educational enrolment and psycho-social well-being later in life. (The policy brief is attached.)

This study examined the impact of USAID’s Feed the Future program in Mali, focusing on its impact on child nutrition outcomes between 2012 and 2018. Using nationally representative data and advanced econometric methods, the study assessed changes in stunting rates and Height-for-Age Z-scores across treatment and untreated areas. The findings highlight the complexity of improving nutrition outcomes in fragile contexts.

Short-term rental platforms like Airbnb have raised concerns over their impact on housing affordability, especially in cities with strong tourism industries. Buenos Aires provides a unique setting for studying this relationship, given its competitive housing markets, recent rental control policies, and rising demand for short-term rentals.

India has experienced explosive growth of private schools, with over 45% of children being enrolled in private schools, resulting in de facto segregation reflecting ability to pay. To promote educational equality, India passed the Right to Education Act in 2009, mandating private schools reserve 25% of seats for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This research examined patterns of educational status and discrimination of RTE students.

In Colombia, unrest over the past fifty years has forced millions to flee their homes, resulting in one of the world’s largest populations of Internally Displaced Persons. In this context, the USAID-funded Closing Gaps Activity (CGA) provided rental assistance to recently displaced persons aimed at enhancing financial sustainability, food security, and overall well-being. This study found that program households reported experiencing a reduction in stress, enhanced peace of mind, feelings of safety and social connection, and increased agency, among other benefits.

This project aimed to help NewGlobe to monitor and evaluate teacher behavior in classrooms of low-income schools. NewGlobe works to improve and transform educational outcomes by supporting technology-enabled education systems and have developed and implemented programs across Africa and Asia as both a technical partner to local governments and as a direct implementer. The project developed, piloted, and refined a new teacher observation instrument supported by a training manual. To assess the instructional practices of teachers, the team developed a low-inference teacher observation instrument that captured the areas that align with NewGlobe’s priorities, while minimizing potential enumerator effects.

This study evaluated the relationship between student learning and teacher quality (as measured by the World bank’s TEACH tool) using school-level data from four countries. The team explored the linkages between teaching practices and student test scores and identified which clusters of teaching practices as captured by the TEACH tool are most conducive to student learning at an aggregate and at the country-level. Finally, the project situated these results within the context of other papers estimating the relationship between teaching practices and student test scores.

Rapid economic growth in Zambia in recent years has not been accompanied by the expected decline in poverty. This project aimed to answer two key research questions: (i) What are the key correlates of subnational poverty in Zambia? and (ii) What are the characteristics of poverty-affected areas in Zambia? While there are a number of channels that influence the prevalence of poverty, this study approached these questions through four key thematic areas: agricultural output, human capital, access to markets and services and exposure to climate risks.

This study examined the role MSR capacities play in market resilience by empirically testing their relationship to firm functionality after a shock, namely, the COVID-19 pandemic. The team leveraged pre-COVID data for low and lower-middle income countries from the World Bank Enterprise Survey (ES), which includes firm information that enabled the construction of indices for sub-categories of each of the MSR capacities (referred to as sub-capacities) through factor analysis. These indices were then connected to firm functionality outcomes from the COVID-19 Follow Up Survey conducted by the World Bank using the same sample of firms.

This project estimated the anticipated change in conflict incidence in Ethiopia due to climate change. The team analysis started with the literature on the relationship between temperature change and conflict, and how this varies based on the economic livelihoods in the area. The team then created a model to project future conflict levels in different parts of Ethiopia using geographically disaggregated data on historical temperatures, expected temperature changes in the future due to climate change, the historical incidence of conflict, and the local patterns of economic livelihoods.

Using publicly-available data on civil servant salaries and manual coding of gender, this project examined the extent and sources of wage differences at MCC. The research determined that men earn 14% more than women, and that even within the same pay band salaries are 1.7% higher for men. The team scraped LinkedIn to get data on education and work experience and, using an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, found that observed characteristics explain all of the difference in starting salaries. There is no evidence that women are more/less likely to get promoted or receive raises, nor are there differences in the size of the promotion, but worker retention is higher for men.