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Job Market Paper “School
Feeding Programs and Enrollment: Evidence from Sri Lanka”(pdf)
Abstract: Combating world hunger and attaining universal primary education are the top two millennium development goals. School feeding programs may have a role in both since they provide meals to children conditional on attendance. I use a data set that covers all Sri Lankan school-grades for a 12-year period to find that two targeted versions of the program fail to bring out-of-school children into school. I also conduct separate analyses for grades, schools, and groups of schools to see whether students are switching grades or even schools to take advantage of the programs. I find that a standard World Food Programme program does not raise enrollment at any level. On the other hand, a program that pays local welfare recipients a per-student payment to provide food increases enrollment by 5.9% in grades that received the program. The effect for schools is 2.1%, and there is little evidence of switching across grades within a school. When looking at groups of schools, this effect disappears. This implies that instead of inducing out-of-school children to enroll into school, the welfare program may have prompted students to switch from schools without the program to neighboring schools with the program. These effects indicate that school feeding programs may inadvertently benefit students who are not targeted by program administrators, all the while failing to improve aggregate enrollment. Working Papers “How
to Teach English in India: Testing the Relative Productivity of Instruction Methods within the Pratham English Language Education Program” with Leigh Linden (Columbia) and Margaret MacLeod(pdf)
Abstract: Using a pair of randomized evaluations, we assess the relative productivity of several modes of implementing an Indian English education curriculum. Each consists of a specially designed machine or flash card based activities implemented either by a teacher training program or externally supervised teaching assistants. The new methods are very effective and, on average, all implementation strategies yield gains of about 0.3 standard deviations in students’ knowledge of English. Weaker students tend to benefit more from interventions that include teacher directed activities while stronger students benefit more from the more self-paced machine-based implementation. Compared to an externally implemented version of the curriculum, the treatments implemented through the teacher training program improved students’ math and English scores rather than just their English scores, a result that may be due to the fact that teachers implemented the interventions more efficiently. "Teaching Pre-Schoolers to Read:
A Randomized Evaluation of the Pratham Shishuvachan Program" with Leigh Linden (Columbia) and Margaret MacLeod
"How Did Pediatricians' Labor Supply Respond to a Major Expansion in Insurance Coverage for Children?" with Chapin White (CBO) "School Libraries and Reading Skills in Indian Primary Schools: A Randomized Evaluation" with Evan Borkum (Columbia) and Leigh Linden (Columbia) |
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