Improving Access and Quality in Early Childhood Development Programs: Experimental Evidence from The Gambia

We evaluate two experiments of early childhood development (ECD) programs in The Gambia: one increasing access to services, and another improving service quality. In the first experiment, new community-based ECD centers were introduced to randomly chosen villages that had no pre-existing structured ECD services. In the second experiment, a randomly assigned subset of existing ECD centers received intensive provider training. We find no evidence that either intervention improved average levels of child development. Exploratory analysis suggests that the first experiment, which increased access to community-based ECD services, led to declines in child development among children from less disadvantaged households

A Survey of Experimental Research on Contests, All-Pay Auctions and Tournaments

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rankorder tournaments. This survey provides a review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the contest success function, number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review research on sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, and contests between groups, as well as real-effort and field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests to the study of legal systems, political competition, war, conflict avoidance, sales, and charities, and suggest directions for future research. (author's abstract

Roads and Rural Development in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper assesses the relation between access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa. Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades (1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant positive association between increased market accessibility and local cropland expansion. It also finds that cropland expansion, in turn, is associated with a small but significant increase in local gross domestic product. These results are suggestive of agricultural activities that develop at the extensive margin, which are mostly to serve local demand, but are not indicative of commercial agriculture that serves external markets. Document type: Boo