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How does territorial control by non-state actors affect long-term development This paper investigates the economic, social, and political consequences of temporary territorial control by guerrillas during the Salvadoran Civil War. During this period, the guerrillas displaced state authorities and promoted the creation of self-governing institutions that were highly representative of local values and openly distrusted the state and elites. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, the paper shows that areas once under guerrilla control have experienced worse economic outcomes about 30 years after the guerrillas first controlled them, relative to adjacent areas that were then controlled by the formal state. The results suggest that informal community institutions in guerrilla-controlled areas led to enduring land fragmentation and disengagement with the government. The paper argues that when non-state actors develop governance institutions as an alternative to the state, this can lead to negative development effects through lasting norms of distrust of out-groups.

Despite concerns that the COVID-19 economic collapse would torpedo international remittances, formal remittances to several developing countries ballooned early in the pandemic. This increase might, however, have reflected a shift from informal channels to formal ones rather than a change in actual flows. This paper employs Mexican data to explore this and finds that remittance channels did change. The rise in formal inflows was larger among municipalities that were previously more reliant on informal channels (for example, near a border crossing). Households there also experienced a disproportionate increase in bank accounts opened after lockdown measures. The paper also rules out hypotheses related to the US Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and. Economic Security Act and altruism.

Researchers and policy makers face significant challenges in selecting a method to conduct remote surveys, especially when collecting sensitive information or during turbulent life stages of hard-to-reach groups. In the context of the COVID-19 lockdown, this study randomly selected about 600 adults in El Salvador to survey using two different tools: telephone interviews or a self-completion survey via WhatsApp. The findings show that phone-based surveys increase the rate of survey completion by 42 percentage points. Even larger effects are documented for women and older adults. Although the direct costs of phone-based surveys are substantially higher—doubling implementation cost—the estimates imply that when adjusted for the probability of completion, the costs of conducting phone-based surveys can be 25 percent lower.

Non-cognitive skills can determine socioeconomic success and the transmission of economic status across generations. Yet, evidence of cost-effective interventions that aim to develop these skills for at-risk youth living in highly violent contexts is still scarce. This paper experimentally studies the social-emotional learning and protection components of an After School Program (ASP) for teenagers in the most violent neighborhoods of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. By combining administrative records and data gathered on-site via computer from task-based games and AI-powered emotion detection algorithms, this paper measures the ASP's impacts on behavior, academic performance, and non-cognitive skills. To measure the learning component, 21 public schools were randomly assigned to extracurricular activities (Clubs), a psychology-based curriculum that aims to strengthen participants' character (Virtue), or a mindfulness and relaxation technique program (Mindful). To estimate the protection component, 8 schools were selected as pure controls with a propensity score approach. Results show that the net learning component improved behavior at school by 0.46 standard deviations and reduced a proxy for stress by 0.45 standard deviations relative to the Clubs only ASP. These results were driven by the Virtue curriculum. Although the protection component negatively impacts social-emotional skills, it is, on average, more effective for students with worse behavior at baseline, indicating that the ASP curriculum and the characteristics of the population served are key in designing policies aimed at improving students' behavior.

Parenting practices are crucial for the development of children’s brains and social skills. However, parenting styles may be far from ideal, particularly those of caregivers with high stress levels. Using an individual-level experiment with male and female caregivers of young children in El Salvador, this paper evaluates the impact of a free digital stress management and positive parenting intervention. The results indicate that, for males, the intervention increased stress and anxiety and lowered caregiver-child interactions. The effect on males was concentrated among the poorer and those residing with a partner. In contrast, women’s mental health was not impacted. Yet, their use of physical violence toward children decreased by 18 percent. These results align with theories linking economic deprivation and family structure to caregivers’ cognitive overload and mental health.

Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs), lasting two or three years, capture about a quarter of higher education enrollment in the world and can play a key role enhancing workforce skills. This paper estimates the program-level contribution of SCPs to student academic and labor market outcomes, and studies how and why these contributions vary across programs. This paper exploits unique administrative data from Colombia on the universe of students, institutions, and programs to control for a rich set of student, peer, and local choice set characteristics. Results indicate that program-level contributions account for about 60–70 percent of the variation in student-level graduation and labor market outcomes. Estimates show that programs vary greatly in their contributions, across and especially within fields of study. Moreover, the estimated contributions are strongly correlated with program outcomes but not with other commonly used quality measures. Programs contribute more to formal employment and wages when they are longer, have been provided for a longer time, are taught by more specialized institutions, and are offered in larger cities.

This paper provides experimental evidence of the effect of having peers with different propensities for violence in the context of an afterschool program. By randomly assigning students to participate in the program with a set of similar or diverse peers in terms of violence, the study measures the effects of segregation or integration on students' behavioral, neurophysiological, and academic outcomes. The paper also exploits a discontinuity around the median of the propensity for violence distribution, to measure the impacts of segregation on marginal students. The results indicate that integrating students with different propensities for violence is better for highly and less violent children than segregating them. In particular, the intervention can have unintended effects on misbehavior and stress, if highly violent students are segregated and treated separately from their less violent peers.