Nikhil Kumar

We investigate a government-delivered socioemotional support intervention in Morocco’s public lower-secondary schools. The intervention trained existing school social specialists to deliver small-group workshops to students in grades 7 and 8. In a cluster-randomized trial across 200 schools, all of which were participating in the first year of a broader reform, 84 were assigned to the intervention and 116 to a control group. Assignment to the intervention increased workshop participation by 43.2 percentage points and students’ knowledge of their social specialist by 16.9 percentage points. Over one school year, however, this increase in exposure did not translate into detectable average effects on the pre-specified primary outcomes (interpersonal and intrapersonal skills) or on overall learning, dropout, creativity, well-being, or study habits. If anything, students’ self-control declined by 0.097 standard deviations. Grade repetition fell by 1.7 percentage points, and achievement rose in specific science and language subdomains. All of these estimates survive correction for multiple hypothesis testing with the pre-specified school-level clustering; yet with the larger standard errors from clustering by randomization stratum, only the self-control decline and the physics and chemistry subdomains reach the 10-percent threshold, so we treat the improvements as suggestive. Thus, although existing school staff can expand students’ exposure to support without additional staff or pay, a low-intensity universal protocol did not measurably improve the targeted socioemotional skills.

A property tax experiment in Ghana randomly provides tax education to property owners and frontline officials. The intervention raises tax knowledge, which spreads through social networks to untreated neighbors, but does not increase tax payments. Educated taxpayers and officials become more engaged in their interactions without developing more collaborative relationships. Taxpayers revise downward their beliefs about enforcement capacity and become more aware of legal ways to reduce their tax burden. Knowledge is a double-edged sword: it can stimulate citizens to engage with the tax system while exposing the state’s limited capacity to enforce it.