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Too often governments fail to provide access to quality public services to the poor. My work focuses on this issue and the bottlenecks that impede high-quality government provision of education in sub-Saharan African countries. Chapter 1 studies whether outsourcing public services to private entities improves service delivery in fragile states. It provides experimental evidence from the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) program, which delegated management of 93 public schools to eight different private organizations. Within one academic year, outsourcing increased students scores in English and math by .18$\sigma$, relative to control schools. While the highest-performing providers generated increases in learning of \input{tables/alto_effect}\unskip$\sigma$, the lowest-performing providers had no impact on learning. Consistent with the rules of provider contracts, we find no evidence that providers engaged in student selection. However, providers were allowed to shift pupils from oversubscribed schools and underperforming teachers to other government schools. These results suggest that leveraging the private sector to improve service delivery in fragile states is promising, but they also highlight the importance of procurement rules and contracting details to aligning public and private interests.Chapter 2 studies cross-age tutoring --- in which older students tutor younger students --- as an inexpensive alternative for providing personalized instruction. Tutoring in math has a small positive effect on math test scores. The effect is concentrated among middle-ability students, suggesting that tutors are not able to help advanced learners and those lagging behind grade-level competencies.Chapter 3 studies complementarities across policies in education. While the idea that complementarities across policies can lead to increasing returns has a long tradition in economics, there is limited evidence that clearly identifies such complementarities. It presents evidence of the impact of providing schools with (a) unconditional capitation grants, (b) bonus payments to teachers based on student performance, and (c) both of the above. We find no impact on student learning from providing either the grants or teacher incentives but significant positive effects from providing both. We find strong evidence of complementarities between improving school inputs and teacher incentives, with the combined effect being greater than the sum of the individual effects.

Abstract
Outsourcing the management of ninety-three randomly-selected government primary schools in Liberia to eight private operators led to learning gains of 0.18$\sigma$ after one year, but these effects plateaued in subsequent years (reaching 0.2$\sigma$ after three years). Beyond learning gains, the programme reduced corporal punishment (by 4.6 percentage points from a base of 51%), but increased dropout (by 3.3 percentage points from a base of 15%) and failed to reduce sexual abuse. Despite facing similar contracts and settings, some providers produced uniformly positive results, while others presented trade-offs between learning gains, access to education, child safety, and financial sustainability.

Lograr una distribución justa de los recursos es uno de los objetivos clave de la política fiscal. Para hacer esto, los gobiernos a menudo transfieren recursos fiscales de áreas ricas a áreas pobres. En este articulo estudiamos si transferencias más bajas disminuyen los incentivos de las autoridades locales para frenar la evasión fiscal en el contexto de la minería en Colombia. Para superar el desafío de medir la evasión, utilizamos machine learning en imágenes satélitales. Usando una estrategia de diferencia en diferencias, encontramos que una reducción en la proporcion de ingresos transferidos a los municipios mineros condujo a un aumento de la minería ilegal. Este resultado ilustra las dificultades de redistribuir los ingresos fiscales. ; Achieving a fair distribution of resources is one of the key goals of fiscal policy. To do this, governments often transfer tax resources from rich to marginalized areas. We study whether lower transfers dampen the incentives of local authorities to curb tax evasion in the context of mining in Colombia. To overcome the challenge of measuring evasion, we use machine learning on satellite images. Using differencein-differences strategies, we find that a reduction in the share of revenue transferred back to mining municipalities led to an increase in illegal mining. This result illustratesthe difficulties of redistributing tax revenues.

Abstract
We use a nationally representative field experiment in Tanzania to compare two teacher performance pay systems in public primary schools: a 'pay-for-percentile' system (a rank-order tournament) and a 'levels' system that features multiple proficiency thresholds. Pay for percentile can potentially induce socially optimal effort among teachers, while levels systems can encourage teachers to focus on students near passing thresholds. Despite the theoretical advantage of the tournament system, we find that both systems improved student test scores across the distribution of initial learning levels after two years. However, the levels system is easier to implement and is more cost effective.