School Inputs, Household Substitution, and Test Scores

By Jishnu Das, Stefan Dercon, James Habyarimana, P. Krishnan, K. Muralidharan, V. Sundararaman. 2011

278 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 naive 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.

Subfields: Education, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/031be5bbccbe22857b90d6f8a4b8a4859319b0f6

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Citations in the corpus

Do Labor Market Opportunities Affect Young Women's Work and Family Decisions? Experimental Evidence from India (2012, background): “Consistent with these gains, and the high costs of schooling in India (Das et al. 2010), in Online AppendixTableBweshowthat thetreatment ledtoanincreasein the budget share devoted to schooling in households with schoolaged girls.15 Column (3) shows that the treatment also resulted in an average…”
Improving Learning in Primary Schools of Developing Countries (2015, background): “The cited article includes results on two performance incentive treatments, whereas Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2010a) and Das et al. (2011) report evidence on a contract teacher treatment and a block grant treatment, respectively.”
Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment* (2018, unknown): “Similarly, the negotiation treatment could have led teachers to devote more resources to treated girls at the expense of their classmates or led parents to reallocate investments within the household (Das et al., 2013).”
What Really Works to Improve Learning in Developing Countries? An Analysis of Divergent Findings in Systematic Reviews (2015, background): “Conn (2014) found interventions providing school supplies to have a low average effect (0.02 standard deviations), for example, yet unanticipated school grants for textbooks in Zambia (Das et al. 2013) are roughly ﬁve times more effective than the mean of this category.”
Identifying Effective Education Interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Meta-Analysis of Impact Evaluations (2017, background): “Additionally, the effects of one school supply intervention were moderated by household behavioral responses; Das et al. (2013) found that unanticipated school supply grants had a slightly greater effect on student performance than anticipated grants, partially due to the fact that households were m”
Children's schooling and parents' behavior: Evidence from the Head Start Impact Study (2013, unknown): “In a developing country context, Pop-Eleches and Urquiola (2012) and Das et al. (2011) find evidence consistent with substitutability between parent and schooling inputs.7 Our analysis builds on studies that have empirically examined aspects of HS and its impact on children.”
Improving Early-Grade Literacy in East Africa: Experimental Evidence from Kenya and Uganda * (2014, background): “A first generation of school-based experiments, mostly in Kenya, found that delivering textbooks and instructional materials to classrooms produced no achievement gains (Glewwe et al., 2004; Glewwe, Kremer, & Moulin, 2009; Kremer, Moulin, & Namunyu, 2003).”
Improving Education in Developing Countries (2016, background): “Interestingly, however, Das et al. (2013) found that school grants in Andhra Pradesh, India, and Zambia had a positive impact on student outcomes when they were unexpected, but had no impact when they were expected.”
Inputs, Incentives, and Complementarities in Education: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania* (2018, unknown): “Consistent with the results documented by Das et al. (2013), we see an insignificant reduction in household spending by ∼1,000 TZS per child in the first year, and a larger significant reduction of ∼2,200 TZS per child in the second year (p=0.”
Corrupting Learning: Evidence from Missing Federal Education Funds in Brazil (2012, unknown): “2 See Todd and Wolpin (2003), Das et al. (2011), Pop-Eleches and Urquiola (2011).”