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 in the first year of a broader reform, 84 were assigned to the intervention and 116 to control. Assignment 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. Yet, we observe improvements in two sets of secondary outcomes: grade repetition fell by 1.7 percentage points, and student achievement increased in select subjects and subdomains: physics, chemistry, and biology, written expression in Arabic and French, and oral expression in Arabic. All of these results hold under a pre-specified hierarchy of hypothesis tests that controls the false discovery rate. 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; instead, positive effects fell on academic and progression outcomes.

A property tax experiment in Ghana randomly provides tax education to property owners and officials. The intervention raises tax knowledge and generates spillovers to untreated households through conversations with more knowledgeable neighbors but has no ultimate impact on tax payments. Educated taxpayers and officials become more engaged in their interactions, but do not shift toward collaborative relationships. Taxpayers revise downward their beliefs about enforcement capacity and become more aware of legal ways to reduce their tax burden. These results highlight that tax knowledge spreads through social networks, and that its effects on tax outcomes are mediated by its ability to shape citizen-state interactions.

This study investigates whether a government-led, whole-school reform in public lower secondary schools can simultaneously reduce dropout and improve both academic and socioemotional outcomes. We employ a prospective difference-in-differences design, using machine learning on nationwide administrative data to match 200 reform schools in Morocco to 100 comparable schools. The analysis uses primary assessment data for 20,036 students and administrative enrollment records for 637,587 observations. After one year, the reform reduced end-of-year dropout by 1.6 percentage points, a 31.4 percent decline, increased learning by 0.52 standard deviations, a 3.3-fold acceleration, and improved a pre-specified index of socioemotional skills by 0.22 standard deviations. These findings demonstrate that government-led interventions can deliver multidimensional benefits during the critical lower secondary school years and highlight the potential of whole-school reform to support adolescent development.