This paper tests for financial constraints as a market failure in education in a low-income country. In an experimental setup, unconditional cash grants are allocated to one private school or all private schools in a village. Enrollment increases in both treatments, accompanied by infrastructure...

Using rich panel data from Pakistan, we compute test score based measures of quality (School Value-Addeds or SVAs) for more than 800 schools across 112 villages and verify that they are valid and unbiased. With the SVA measures, we then document three striking features of the schooling...