Delivering Education to the Underserved Through a Public-Private Partnership Program in Pakistan

We contribute to the school-competition literature by evaluating a program that randomly assigned private schools to underserved villages in Pakistan. Program schools were provided a per-student subsidy to provide tuition-free primary education, with half of the treated villages receiving a higher subsidy for female students. The program increased enrollment by 30 percentage points, and test scores by 0.63 standard deviations. The effects were similar across genders, and across the two subsidy treatments. Program schools were of higher quality than nearby government schools, and a structural model for the supply and demand of school inputs indicates that program schools selected inputs similar to those of a social planner who internalizes all the educational benefits to society