Publication: School Inputs, Household Substitution, and Test Scores
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Published
2011-04-01
ISSN
Date
2012-03-19
Author(s)
Dercon, Stefan
Habyarimana, James
Krishnan, Pramila
Muralidharan, Karthik
Sundararaman, Venkatesh
Editor(s)
Abstract
Empirical studies of the relationship between school inputs and test scores typically do not account for the fact that households will respond to changes in school inputs. This paper presents a dynamic household optimization model relating test scores to school and household inputs, and tests its predictions in two very different low-income country settings -- Zambia and India. The authors measure household spending changes and student test score gains in response to unanticipated as well as anticipated changes in school funding. Consistent with the optimization model, they find in both settings that households offset anticipated grants more than unanticipated grants. They also find that unanticipated school grants lead to significant improvements in student test scores but anticipated grants have no impact on test scores. The results suggest that naïve estimates of public education spending on learning outcomes that do not account for optimal household responses are likely to be considerably biased if used to estimate parameters of an education production function.
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“Dercon, Stefan; Das, Jishnu; Habyarimana, James; Krishnan, Pramila; Muralidharan, Karthik; Sundararaman, Venkatesh. 2011. School Inputs, Household Substitution, and Test Scores. Paper is funded by the Knowledge for Change
Program (KCP),Impact Evaluation series ; no. IE 49,Policy Research working paper ; no. WPS 5629. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/3395 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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