Getting Girls to Schools! – Assessing the Impacts of a Targeted Program on Enrollment and Academic Performance
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Somdeep Chatterjee
Abstract
This is a short paper assessing the impacts of a targeted policy aimed to improve the quality of education for girls in India, i.e., the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) program. Under this program residential schools were built for girls in grades 6–8 (often known as middle school) and were unique because it is one of the few programs that exclusively focuses on improving school infrastructure for girls. The program was restricted to individuals belonging to backward castes in India which provides exogenous identifying variation. I use this eligibility criteria along with cohort variation in exposure to the program introduced in 2004 to estimate the impact of KGBV on enrollment and academic performance. I find that potentially affected cohorts are more likely to have attended school and perform better on reading tests. I run placebo regressions with data from a pre-policy year and do not find any effects along these dimensions providing confidence in the identification strategy.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Tanika Chakraborty and the seminar participants at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for valuable feedback and suggestions. I also thank Indrajit Sinha Ray and Barun Kumar Thakur for useful discussion on the topic. Finally, I thank an anonymous referee and the editor Mariapia Mendola for the very constructive and enriching comments.
References
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Articles in the same Issue
- Research Articles
- The Market Value of R&D in Emerging Economies: Evidence from India
- Are You What You Eat? Healthy Behaviour and Risk Preferences
- The Impacts of Rural Property Rights on Urban Unemployment, Wage Inequality, and Welfare in Developing Countries
- Lobbying as a Guard against Extremism
- Information Acquisition in Vertical Relations
- What Extent of Welfare Loss is Caused by the Disparity between Perceived and Scientific Risks? A Case Study of Food Irradiation
- Characteristics and Employment of Applicants for Social Security Disability Insurance over the Business Cycle
- Preferences Toward Leniency under Mandatory Criminal Sentencing Guidelines: Role-in-the-Offense Adjustments for Federal Drug Trafficking Defendants
- The Effect of Kinship Placement Laws on Foster Children’s Well-Being
- Are Immigrants in Favour of Immigration? Evidence from England and Wales
- Competition, Product Innovation and Licensing
- The Impact of Educational Mismatches on Wages: The Influence of Measurement Error and Unobserved Heterogeneity
- Education Outcomes of Children of Asian Intermarriages: Does Gender of the Immigrant Parent Matter?
- Letters
- Endogenous Leadership in Tax Competition: A Combination of the Effects of Market Power and Strategic Interaction
- Can Catastrophic Long-Term Care Insurance Policies Increase Private Insurance Coverage and Reduce Medicaid Expenditure?
- Getting Girls to Schools! – Assessing the Impacts of a Targeted Program on Enrollment and Academic Performance
Articles in the same Issue
- Research Articles
- The Market Value of R&D in Emerging Economies: Evidence from India
- Are You What You Eat? Healthy Behaviour and Risk Preferences
- The Impacts of Rural Property Rights on Urban Unemployment, Wage Inequality, and Welfare in Developing Countries
- Lobbying as a Guard against Extremism
- Information Acquisition in Vertical Relations
- What Extent of Welfare Loss is Caused by the Disparity between Perceived and Scientific Risks? A Case Study of Food Irradiation
- Characteristics and Employment of Applicants for Social Security Disability Insurance over the Business Cycle
- Preferences Toward Leniency under Mandatory Criminal Sentencing Guidelines: Role-in-the-Offense Adjustments for Federal Drug Trafficking Defendants
- The Effect of Kinship Placement Laws on Foster Children’s Well-Being
- Are Immigrants in Favour of Immigration? Evidence from England and Wales
- Competition, Product Innovation and Licensing
- The Impact of Educational Mismatches on Wages: The Influence of Measurement Error and Unobserved Heterogeneity
- Education Outcomes of Children of Asian Intermarriages: Does Gender of the Immigrant Parent Matter?
- Letters
- Endogenous Leadership in Tax Competition: A Combination of the Effects of Market Power and Strategic Interaction
- Can Catastrophic Long-Term Care Insurance Policies Increase Private Insurance Coverage and Reduce Medicaid Expenditure?
- Getting Girls to Schools! – Assessing the Impacts of a Targeted Program on Enrollment and Academic Performance
