School Inputs, Household Substitution, and Test Scores

Original source

Jishnu Das; Stefan Dercon; James Habyarimana; Pramila Krishnan; Karthik Muralidharan; Venkatesh Sundararaman

School Inputs, Household Substitution, and Test Scores (2013)

Published research article · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 5(2), 29–57

Permission for School’s use is unestablished.

Used in these cards

Catchment Cohort Size Instrument

"We therefore use the size of the eligible cohort in the catchment area as an instrument for school enrollment, and therefore the level of per-student cash grants..."

Credit Constraint Budget Relaxation

"With credit constraints, anticipated increases in school spending will alleviate the overall and period-specific budget constraint of the household resulting in greater current spending on all goods, including education."

Evaluation Time Horizon Bias

"...the interpretation of experimental coefficients depends on the time horizon of the evaluation and whether this was long enough for other agents to reoptimize their own inputs."

Gift Exchange and Hawthorne Counterfactuals

"There are no differences in teacher absence or teaching activity across treatment and control groups in either Y1 or Y2 or within treatment schools across Y1 and Y2."

Household Input Substitution

"Evaluated at the mean, we find that for each dollar provided to treatment schools in the second year, household spending declines by 0.76 dollars."

Income Elasticity of Education Demand

"The data suggest that parents are not behaving irrationally, and that the extent of the offset yields an estimate of income elasticity of education spending between 1.8 and 4.6..."

Inframarginal Grant Provision

"We verify this by looking at household spending on education in the control schools and find that only 12 percent of households report spending less than Rs 125/year (the value of the grant) on their child's education, suggesting that the grant was inframarginal for most households and could be offset easily."

Pedagogical Process Tracking

"Another example may be investments in improving classroom pedagogical processes, such as tracking children based on ability..."

Rule-Based vs Discretionary School Funding

"Variation in rule-based, well-publicized sources of funding are not correlated with test score gains, while less predictable funding sources are."

Teacher Input Non-Fungibility

"In a parallel experiment on the provision of an extra contract teacher to randomly selected schools in Andhra Pradesh... the impact of the extra teacher was identical in both the first and second year of the project, suggesting that teacher inputs were less likely to be substituted away."

Test Score Gain Decay

"The size of gains after two years (with point estimates below the point estimates after Y1) suggests that the second year of block grants did not add much to learning outcomes, while decay of earlier gains may explain why average gains (in terms of point estimates) after Y2 are smaller than achieved after Y1."

Unanticipated Input Shocks

"Evidence from India and Zambia shows that student test scores are higher when schools receive unanticipated grants, but there is no impact of grants that are anticipated."