Affirmative Action, Education and Gender: Evidence from India

We use a unique natural experiment in order to assess the impact of positive discrimination in India on targeted groups’ educational attainment. We take advantage of the harmonization of the Scheduled Castes lists within the Indian states taking place in 1976 to measure the increase of the educational attainment of the new beneficiaries, taking the castes already on the list as a control group. We show that this policy had heterogenous effects across genders, with males benefiting from the SC status and females remaining essentially unaffected. We show that this translated into a differential increase in literacy and numeracy, and propose a novel method to measure the latter.