The authors report on a survey of primary public and private schools in rural Pakistan witha focus on student achievement as measured through test scores. Absolute learning is low compared with curricular standards and international norms. Tested at the end of the third grade, a bare majority...

In 2005 an earthquake in northern Pakistan led to a significant inflow of international relief groups. Four years later, trust in Europeans and Americans was markedly higher among those exposed to the earthquake and the relief that followed. These differences reflect the greater provision of...

The relative return to strategies that augment inputs versus those that reduce inefficiencies remains a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, we show that the large public...

We study the impact of providing school report cards with test scores on subsequent test scores, prices, and enrollment in markets with multiple public and private providers. A randomly selected half of our sample villages (markets) received report cards. This increased test scores by 0.11...

When there are externalities across households, governments can improve economic outcomes by equitably subsidizing education. But this chain of causality works only if (1) allocated resources reach the final recipients, and (2) equity in public subsidies translates directly into equity in total...

Learning persistence plays a central role in models of skill formation, estimates of education production functions, and evaluations of educational programs. In non-experimental settings, estimated impacts of educational inputs can be highly sensitive to correctly specifying persistence when...

Evaluations of educational programs commonly assume that what children learn persists over time. The authors compare learning in Pakistani public and private schools using dynamic panel methods that account for three key empirical challenges to widely used value-added models: imperfect...

Learning persistence plays a central role in models of skill formation, estimates of education production functions, and evaluations of educational programs. In non-experimental settings, estimated impacts of educational inputs can be highly sensitive to correctly specifying persistence when...

This paper uses student answers to publicly released questions from an international testing agency together with statistical methods from Item Response Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states -Orissa and Rajasthan -on a worldwide distribution of mathematics achievement. These...