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Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-income country) and the United States, including a total of 44,260 individuals. We find considerably higher willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine in our LMIC samples (mean 80.3%; median 78%; range 30.1 percentage points) compared with the United States (mean 64.6%) and Russia (mean 30.4%). Vaccine acceptance in LMICs is primarily explained by an interest in personal protection against COVID-19, while concern about side effects is the most common reason for hesitancy. Health workers are the most trusted sources of guidance about COVID-19 vaccines. Evidence from this sample of LMICs suggests that prioritizing vaccine distribution to the Global South should yield high returns in advancing global immunization coverage. Vaccination campaigns should focus on translating the high levels of stated acceptance into actual uptake. Messages highlighting vaccine efficacy and safety, delivered by healthcare workers, could be effective for addressing any remaining hesitancy in the analyzed LMICs.

This dissertation explores topics related to the determinants of investments in education, social returns to education, and human capital production. The first two chapters investigate the effect of oldest sister's schooling on the human capital accumulation of younger siblings while the third chapter estimates the impact of school quality on student achievement. Together these studies shed light on the role of home and school inputs in the human capital formulation of children in both developing and developed countries. A vast literature on the spillovers from girls' education focuses on the impact of maternal education on child outcomes. I extend this literature by investigating spillovers from girls' education on the human capital acquisition of younger siblings. In many developing countries, oldest sisters share significant child care responsibilities in the household and potentially play an important role in younger siblings' learning. I build a theoretical model to incorporate this potential impact that predicts competing effects of increasing oldest sister's schooling on younger siblings' human capital. Using an identification strategy that exploits the gender segregation of schools in Pakistan, I estimate the causal impact of oldest sister's schooling on the learning of younger brothers. I find that oldest sister's schooling has significant, beneficial impacts on younger brothers' schooling, enrollment, literacy and numeracy. These findings have important implications for policies targeting girls' education as well as the evaluations of such policies. The third chapter, co-authored with Pedro Bernal and Nikolas Mittag estimates the impact of school quality on student achievement in the US. We find significant positive impacts of school quality on test scores that have previously been obscured by the fact that commonly used indicators such as class size or teachers' schooling are noisy measures of school quality. We argue that consistent estimation of the impact of school quality is confounded by the fact that measures of school quality employed in previous studies are at best proxies of school quality that are measured with error. Using a proxy variable model that addresses this problem, we show that the effects of school quality can be identified from individual level data and are quite sizable.