While use of contract teachers provides a low-cost way to increase teacher numbers, it raises the quality concern that these less trained teachers may be less effective.  We estimate the causal contract-teacher effect on student achievement using school fixed effects and value-added models of...

Using new and unique panel data, we investigate the role of long-term health and childhood malnutrition in schooling outcomes for children in rural India, many of whom lack basic numeracy and literacy skills.  Using data on students' performance on mathematics and Hindi tests, we examine the...

The impact of class size on student achievement remains a thorny question for educational decision makers.  Meta-analyses of empirical studies emphasise the absence of class-size efects but detractors have argued against such pessimistic conclusions because many of the underlying studies have...

This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household of education with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas.  In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to...

This paper looks at the impact of education on household economic welfare in Sri Lanka over twenty years from 1985 to 2006 using five cross section household survey datasets.  Applying quantile regression techniques the analysis finds that the incremental value to household welfare shows a...

Low enrolment and educational wastage are serious problems in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in rural areas of Ethiopia where participation in formal education is extremely poor. An aspect of both problems is late entry to primary school, which has dire consequences for educational attainment,...

This paper provides an overview of school education in India. Firstly, it places India`s educational achievements in international perspective, especially against countries with which it is now increasingly compared such as BRIC economies in general and China in particular. India does well...

This paper presents a model of school choice with peer effects and scale economies within schools. Parents` perception of school quality depends on resources and on the characteristics of the student body. A network of local schools of uniform quality will be optimal, even though different...

Pakistan has very large gender gaps in educational outcomes. While this suggests that girls may receive lower educational expenditure allocations than boys within households, this has never convincingly been tested. This paper investigates whether the intra-household allocation of educational...

This paper exploits unique data that permits the matching of students` test scores in different subjects to the teachers that teach those subjects. Within-pupil (across-subject, rather than across-time) variation is used to examine whether the characteristics of different subject teachers are...