In this paper, we use a unique two-stage experiment that randomized access to school vouchers across both markets and students in rural India to estimate the revealed preference value of school choice. In the first step of the research design, we develop an empirical model of school choice...

How should recipients of publicly-provided goods and services prove their identity in order to access these benefits? The core design challenge is managing the tradeoff between Type-II errors of inclusion (including corruption) against Type-I errors of exclusion whereby legitimate beneficiaries...

Factorial designs are widely used for studying multiple treatments in one experiment. While "long" model t-tests provide valid inferences, t-tests using the "short" model (ignoring interactions) yield higher power if interactions are zero, but incorrect inferences otherwise. Of 27 factorial...

Improving "last-mile" public-service delivery is a recurring challenge in developing countries. Could the widespread adoption of mobile phones provide a scalable, cost-effective means for improvement? We use a large-scale experiment to evaluate the impact of phone-based monitoring on a program...

We present results from a large-scale experimental evaluation of an ambitious attempt to improve management quality in Indian schools (implemented in 1,774 randomly-selected schools). The intervention featured several global "best practices" including comprehensive assessments, detailed school...

This paper uses new data to study school management and productivity in India. We report four main results. First, management quality in public schools is low, and ~2σ below high-income countries with comparable data. Second, private schools have higher management quality, driven by much...

Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving education outcomes in schools, but the theoretical predictions regarding its effectiveness are ambiguous and the empirical evidence to date is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a...

Despite growing interest in improving early-childhood education in developing countries, there is little evidence on cost-effective ways of doing so at scale. We use a large-scale randomized experiment to study the impact of adding an extra worker focused on pre-school education (for children...

The idea that complementarities across policies can yield increasing returns from joint implementation has been posited in several economic settings. Yet there is limited, well-identified evidence of such complementarities in practice. We present results from a randomized experiment across a...

This paper makes the case for greater use of randomized experiments "at scale." We review various critiques of experimental program evaluation in developing countries, and discuss how experimenting at scale along three specific dimensions - the size of the sampling frame, the number of units...