School Choice and Cognitive Achievement in Rural Bangladesh
This paper presents new evidence on the impact of school characteristics on secondary student achievement using a rich data set from rural Bangladesh. The authors deal with a potentially important selectivity issue in the South Asian context: the n...
Main Authors: | , , |
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Format: | Working Paper |
Language: | English en_US |
Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2006/06/7242191/school-choice-cognitive-achievement-rural-bangladesh http://hdl.handle.net/10986/17821 |
Summary: | This paper presents new evidence on the
impact of school characteristics on secondary student
achievement using a rich data set from rural Bangladesh. The
authors deal with a potentially important selectivity issue
in the South Asian context: the non-random sorting of
children into religious schools. The authors do so by
employing a combination of fixed effects and instrumental
variable estimation techniques. Additionally, the authors
use the variation between two classrooms of the same grade
within individual schools to identify causal class-size
effects. The empirical results do not reveal any difference
in test scores between religious and secular schools when
selection into religious school is taken into account. Net
of school fixed-effects, the authors do not find evidence in
support of smaller class size. However, they document
significant learning deficit by gender and primary school
type: girls and graduates of primary madrasas have a lower
test score even after controlling for school and
classroom-specific unobservable correlates of learning. |
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