This study explores the impact of a Smart Classroom (SCM) program on student performance in science subjects on a high-stakes national exam for lower-secondary school students in Rwanda. To do this, we leverage plausibly exogenous variations in program exposure resulting from the staggered implementation of the SCM reform across schools and students. Overall, the study finds a positive effect of the program on student performance. Specifically, we find that the SCM program has positive and significant effects on student performance in physics, biology, and geography, albeit small in magnitude. However, no effect was found for mathematics or chemistry. Our results also suggest that, while classroom technology can enhance learning, such effects may only be realized after a long exposure period.
Better understanding of inequality, including its relationship to governance and other key outcomes, is relevant both to academic researchers and to policy-makers.Nevertheless, efforts to establish causal relationships empirically remain hampered by the quality and availability of data, especially for Global South countries at the sub-national level.This paper draws on newly available data on income inequality in Viet Nam at the provincial level to show how unsupervised learning techniques might be used as tools in consideration of the relationship between inequality and governance.While previous empirical work in this area has largely used standard techniques such as regression analysis aimed at establishing causal relationships, this is often hampered by the quality and availability of data.Adopting a different approach, this paper applies K-means clustering and principal components analysis (PCA) to show how unsupervised learning techniques can provide relevant insight into structures and patterns in data.Using PCA, it identifies two groupings of provinces based on similarities in institutional quality measures.K-means analysis points to similar relative inequality levels but substantially different absolute inequality and income levels, suggesting two broad 'types' of provinces.The results are suggestive of the positive impact of initial inequality on institutions and that better quality of institutions might reduce inequality for some groups.In general, increased incomes might imply improved inequality and institutional quality outcomes in some cases.A final section considers key limits to such analysis, alongside extensions and further applications.
This paper explores two policy interventions in Zambia, a minimum wage hike in 2018 and an upward revision in the first kink in the progressive income tax schedule in 2017, to examine and compare the impact of minimum wage and tax kink changes on wages and the earnings distribution in the formal and informal sectors.The analysis builds on two thus far separate strands of literature that investigate the effects of minimum wages and bunching around tax kinks in developing countries using Zambian personal income tax data and data from the ILO Labour Force Surveys over the period 2012-21.Applying the idea that minimum wage effects, despite being targeted at the formal sector, may spill over into the informal sector to tax kinks, this paper proposes a new lighthouse effect-that is, the fact that tax kinks may serve as a reference point for wage setting in the uncovered informal sector.Results show that the minimum wage hike pushes the lower end of the earnings distribution rightward and produces significant and economically meaningful increases in wages in both the formal and informal sectors in Zambia.Interestingly, a hike in the first tax kink produces similar distributional effects and also significantly raises the wages of formal workers in the local earnings distribution around the kink.Combined with evidence of bunching of informal wages at the first and third tax kink, these results suggest that the new lighthouse effect is relevant in the case of Zambia, and underscores the need for policy-makers to take a holistic approach when formulating minimum wage and income tax policies that takes into account spillover effects into the informal sector.
