C. Journal articles published externally
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance: Evidence from Teacher Absence in India
(Elsevier, 2017-01)The relative return to strategies that augment inputs versus those that reduce inefficiencies remains a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, we show that the large public investments in education over the past decade have led to substantial improvements in input-based measures of school quality, but only a modest reduction in inefficiency as measured by teacher absence. In our data, 23.6% of teachers were absent during unannounced school visits, and we estimate that the salary cost of unauthorized teacher absence is $1.5 billion/year. We find two robust correlations in the nationally-representative panel data that corroborate findings from smaller-scale experiments. First, reductions in student-teacher ratios are correlated with increased teacher absence. Second, increases in the frequency of school monitoring are strongly correlated with lower teacher absence. Using these results, we show that reducing inefficiencies by increasing the frequency of monitoring could be over ten times more cost effective at increasing the effective student-teacher ratio than hiring more teachers. Thus, policies that decrease the inefficiency of public education spending are likely to yield substantially higher marginal returns than those that augment inputs. -
Publication
Impact of Private Secondary Schooling on Cognitive Skills: Evidence from India
(Taylor and Francis, 2016)We examine the effect of attending private secondary school on educational achievement, as measured by students' scores in a comprehensive standardized math test, in two Indian states: Orissa and Rajasthan. We use propensity score matching (PSM) to control for any systematic differences between students attending private secondary schools and public secondary schools, and assess the sensitivity of our estimates with respect to unobservables using the Rosenbaum bounds. We find that students in private schools in rural (urban) Rajasthan scored about 1.3 (0.4) standard deviation (SD) higher than their counterparts in the public schools. Importantly, the positive private school impact in rural (urban) Rajasthan survives a large (moderate) amount of positive selection on unobservables. We do not find statistically significant difference in urban Orissa, while a positive impact of 0.3 SD in rural Orissa is susceptible to small amount of positive selection on unobservables. -
Publication
Nix the BRICs—At Least for Higher Education Scholarship
(Taylor and Francis, 2014-09-29)Although the “BRIC” moniker for the group of emerging economic powers—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—has become ubiquitous among financial analysts, it was actually coined by former Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill as much for its clear imagery as for any actual commonalities amongst the countries (O’Neill, 2001). The bloc is even less relevant in understanding the complex higher education environments in these or other emerging economic powers such as Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey (for which O’Neill has coined another clever acronym: the MINTs). -
Publication
School Inputs, Household Substitution, and Test Scores
(American Economic Association, 2013-04)Empirical studies of the relationship between school inputs and test scores typically do not account for household responses to changes in school inputs. 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. We show that the most likely mechanism for this result is that households offset their own spending in response to anticipated grants. Our results confirm the importance of optimal household responses and suggest caution when interpreting estimates of school inputs on learning outcomes as parameters of an education production function. -
Publication
Contract Teachers in India
(Taylor and Francis, 2011-06-24)In this paper, we use non‐experimental data from government schools in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, two of the largest Indian states, to present average school outcomes by contract status of teachers. We find that contract teachers are associated with higher effort than civil service teachers with permanent tenures, before as well as after controlling for school fixed effects. And higher teacher effort is associated with better student performance after controlling for other school inputs and student characteristics. Given that salaries earned by contract teachers are one‐fourth or less of civil service teachers, contract teachers may be a more cost‐effective resource. However, contracts ‘as they are’ appear weak. Not only do contract teachers have fairly low average effort in absolute terms, but those who have been on the job for at least one full tenure have lower effort than others who are in the first contract period.