Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India

By K. Muralidharan, N. Prakash. Social Science Research Network, 2013

389 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the impact of an innovative program in the Indian state of Bihar that aimed to reduce the gender gap in secondary school enrollment by providing girls who continued to secondary school with a bicycle that would improve access to school. Using data from a large representative household survey, we employ a triple difference approach (using boys and the neighboring state of Jharkhand as comparison groups) and find that being in a cohort that was exposed to the Cycle program increased girls' age-appropriate enrollment in secondary school by 30% and also reduced the gender gap in age-appropriate secondary school enrollment by 40%. Parametric and non-parametric decompositions of the triple-difference estimate as a function of distance to the nearest secondary school show that the increases in enrollment mostly took place in villages where the nearest secondary school was further away, suggesting that the mechanism for program impact was the reduction in the time and safety cost of school attendance made possible by the bicycle. We find that the Cycle program was much more cost effective at increasing girls' enrolment than comparable conditional cash transfer programs in South Asia, suggesting that the coordinated provision of bicycles to girls may have generated externalities beyond the cash value of the program, including improved safety from girls cycling to school in groups, and changes in patriarchal social norms that proscribed female mobility outside the village, which inhibited female secondary school participation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research

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Citations in the corpus

Education, Marriage, and Fertility: Long-Term Evidence from a Female Stipend Program in Bangladesh (2017, background): “47 years, corresponding to 0.1 years for each year of exposure for Cohort 1, and 0.3 years, corresponding to 0.15 years for each year of exposure for girls in Cohort 2 (col. 4). The effect on age at first birth is slightly lower but is similar to the effect on age at first marriage, indicating that ”
Educational Investment Responses to Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Indian Road Construction (2017, positive): “For example, Muralidharan and Prakash (2013) find that the provision of bicycles made girls more likely to attend middle and high school.”
Improving Educational Outcomes in Developing Countries: Lessons from Rigorous Evaluations (2014, background): “Muralidharan and Prakash (2013) evaluated a program in Bihar, India that provided girls who enrolled in secondary school with a bicycle to travel to school.”
The Roots of Gender Inequality in Developing Countries (2015, background): “Muralidharan & Prakash (2013) show that a programthat gave girls bicycles to travel to school in India similarly had a sizable impact on girls ’ school participation.”
Improving Education in Developing Countries (2016, background): “For example, Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2011) compared two teacher incentive programs in Andhra Pradesh, India, in 2005.”
Financial Constraints and Girls' Secondary Education: Evidence from School Fee Elimination in the Gambia (2016, neutral): “To date, only a handful of countries in the region, such as South Africa, Ghana, and The Gambia, offer large-scale tuition-free secondary education or some form of financial aid through various scholarship programs.”
Education in Africa: What Are We Learning? (2020, background): “Second, we can examine the principles behind the success of interventions rather than focusing on specific point estimates (Muralidharan, 2017).”
Do rural roads create pathways out of poverty? Evidence from India (2018, background): “More generally, both Muto and Yamano (2009), and Goyal (2010) find supply responses by farmers to a reduction in search costs due to the introduction of mobile phones.”