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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 first two millennium development goals. School feeding programs may help achieve both since they provide meals to children conditional on attendance. Using a data set that covers all Sri Lankan school-grades for a 12-year period, I evaluate two versions of the school feeding program. One version is a standard World Food Programme program. I find that it does not have any effect on enrollment. The second version pays local welfare recipients a per-student payment to provide food. I find that it increases enrollment by 5.9% in grades that received the program. But when the data is aggregated geographically, areas with higher percentages of treated show no gains in enrollment. This indicates that the increase in enrollment for treated grades seems to be the sole result of students switching from schools without the program to neighboring schools with the program. These results emphasize the need to consider the general equilibrium effects of school-based interventions and possible inefficiencies from targeted aid programs. 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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