Michelle Layvant

Primary-school dropout remains widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa, and school fees are seen as a major barrier to completion. In an experiment with 2,000 parents and children in Uganda, we study whether time inconsistency contributes to unpaid school fees and lower school participation. We first elicit parents’ willingness to pay for two restrictions on a cash transfer: (1) delaying it until fees are due and (2) earmarking it as a voucher paid directly to the school, holding timing fixed. Demand for both restrictions is substantial: 62 percent of parents are willing to pay for delay and 69 percent for earmarking. We then randomly assign parents to three treatment arms and a control group. The three arms provide the same amount as cash six weeks before fees are due, as cash when fees are due, or as a voucher, and the control group receives no transfer. The voucher more than doubles fees paid, increases school attendance, and cuts within-term dropout by more than half. Cash has smaller effects on all three outcomes, with no additional effect from delayed cash over early cash. Perhaps surprisingly, the voucher’s effects on fee payment and attendance are largest among parents with low willingness to pay for it, in part because they substantially underestimate how much it will raise their fee payment relative to cash. In a model of quasi-hyperbolic discounting, these findings are consistent with partial naïveté, in which parents anticipate their own time inconsistency but underestimate its severity.

This paper studies the long-run effects of access to secondary school in Kenya, where admission depended on a cutoff score on a national exam at the end of primary school. Using a regression discontinuity design and a panel that follows students for nearly two decades after the exam, the paper estimates effects on fertility, cognition, and economic outcomes. Scoring above the cutoff raises secondary school completion by 18 percentage points, with similar increases for women and men. Greater access to secondary schooling also leads to substantial and lasting improvements in cognition, with gains of 0.2–0.3 standard deviations into midlife. Realized fertility also declines substantially and persistently among men, by about 0.8 children on average, but, perhaps surprisingly, there are no detectable fertility effects among women. These fertility changes are not accompanied by changes in the probability of marriage. There is also suggestive evidence that these benefits extend to the next generation, as the children of female respondents who scored above the cutoff perform better on tests of academic skills.

We assess impacts of a randomized deworming intervention in Kenya on the mortality of recipients' children using 23-year longitudinal data on over 5,500 original participants and their offspring. The under-5 mortality rate fell by 22% (17 deaths per 1000 live births) for children of treatment group individuals, with larger effects when considering the in-utero period due to reduced miscarriage. A combination of improved health, education, living standards and use of health care, increased urban residence, and delayed fertility in the parent generation contributed to the reduction. The results provide evidence for meaningful intergenerational benefits of child health investments.

We estimate the short-term cognitive effects of fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) exposure using novel exposure data collected during cognitive testing in Kenya. Unlike most existing studies that rely on satellite-based or fixed monitoring station data, we measure highly localized ambient pollution using portable monitors deployed at cognitive testing sites and link these readings directly to Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol (HCAP) scores. Higher PM_2.5 exposure during testing is associated with lower cognitive performance, particularly in executive function, memory, and visuospatial tasks. Binned exposure models suggest a monotonic pattern, with more negative estimates at higher exposure levels. Notably, effects are significantly larger among more educated individuals, possibly due to greater task demands or lower chronic exposure that limits physiological adaptation. Given that cognitive impairment is evident even at PM_2.5 levels below Kenya’s mean annual regulatory threshold of 35 μg/m³, the findings suggest that short-term exposure may impose underappreciated human capital costs that current regulatory standards fail to mitigate. The results highlight the potential cognitive and economic returns to interventions that reduce air pollution exposures in low-resource settings.