This study experimentally evaluates the short-term impacts of public per-student subsidies to partnering local entrepreneurs to establish and operate tuition-free, coeducational, private primary schools in educationally underserved villages in Sindh province, Pakistan. Two subsidy structures...

In low-income countries, private schools are perceived as superior alternatives to the public sector, often improving achievement at a fraction of the cost. It is unclear whether private schools are as effective in middle-income countries where the public sector has relatively more resources. To...

This paper presents evidence from the first three years of a randomized controlled trial of a government-administered pilot teacher performance pay program in Punjab, Pakistan. The program offers yearly cash bonuses to teachers in a sample of public primary schools with the lowest mean student...

This paper evaluates a primary school scholarship program in Cambodia with two different targeting mechanisms, one based on poverty level and the other on baseline test scores ( "merit" ). Both targeting mechanisms increased enrollment and attendance. However, only the merit-based targeting...

This study estimates the causal effects of a public per-student subsidy program targeted at low-cost private schools in Pakistan on student enrollment and schooling inputs. Program entry is ultimately conditional on achieving a minimum stipulated student pass rate (cutoff) in a standardized...

The Oaxaca-Blinder technique was originally used in labor economics to decompose earnings gaps and to estimate the level of discrimination. It has been applied since in other social issues, including education, where it can be used to assess how much of a gap is due to differences in...

Low student learning is a common finding in much of the developing world. This paper uses a relatively unique dataset of five semiannual rounds of standardized test data to characterize and explain the short-term changes in student learning. The data are collected as part of the quality...

Wealth and gender inequity in the accumulation of cognitive skills is measured as the association between subject competency and wealth and gender using the OECD?s Programme for International Student Assessment. Wealth inequity is found to occur not through disparate household characteristics...

This paper reports on a randomized experiment to investigate the long-term effects of a primary school scholarship program in rural Cambodia. In 2008, fourth-grade students in 207 randomly assigned schools (103 treatment, 104 control) received scholarships based on the students' academic...

This paper estimates the short-term, partial-equilibrium impacts of a public-private partnership program for low-cost private secondary schools in Uganda. The public-private partnership program is part of a broader strategy to absorb large increases in secondary enrollment following the...