The Persistent Effects of Youth Savings Reminders: Experimental Evidence from Text-Message Campaigns in Colombia.

We report on a nationwide field experiment with a commercial bank in Colombia in which low-income youth (12 years old on average) who open new accounts are randomly assigned immediately after opening the account to control or to receive one of three twelve-month text-messaging campaigns: i) monthly savings reminders, ii) semimonthly reminders, iii) monthly action-oriented financial education messages. Relative to control, monthly and semimonthly reminders groups increase account balances during the campaign as a result of reduced withdrawals, potentially through savings shifts from home to bank accounts. After the campaign youth in both reminders groups continue to use the accounts but do not deplete balances.

Disentangling Disadvantage: Can We Distinguish Good Teaching from Classroom Composition?

This paper investigates the use of teacher value-added estimates to assess the distribution of effective teaching across students of varying socioeconomic disadvantage in the presence of classroom composition effects. We examine, via simulations, how accurately commonly-used teacher-value added estimators recover the rank correlation between true and estimated teacher effects and a parameter representing the distribution of effective teaching. We consider various scenarios of teacher assignment, within-teacher variability in classroom composition, importance of classroom composition effects, and presence of student unobserved heterogeneity.