Experimentally Measuring Discrimination in Education with an Application to Caste Discrimination in India

Leigh Linden

Many historically disadvantaged groups around the world may experience discrimination in education. Rather than estimating such discrimination in a laboratory setting, Rema Hanna (Harvard KSG) uses field experiment to measure the degree to which teachers in a city in Northeast India discriminate against students from low caste backgrounds. This field experiment, built around an exam competition, allows us to assess the behavior of teachers in an environment in which both the activities performed (test grading) and incentives faced by teachers (the potential to affect student wellbeing) are similar to those that teachers face in the classroom. Specifically, we recruited children into a competition in which the winner is determined by their score on an exam covering the official state curriculum. One hundred twenty teachers were paid to grade 25 of these exams, knowing that their grades would determine the allocation of financially significant prizes. However, the individual tests that the teachers observed contain randomly generated information about the students’ caste, gender, and age along with the actual exams. The random assignment of student characteristics allows us to measure discrimination by directly comparing the scores that teacher award to tests assigned the characteristics of low caste students.

About Leigh Linden

Leigh L. Linden an Assistant Professor at Columbia University with appointments in both the Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs. As an economist, he specializes in the fields of development and labor economics, exploring the microeconomic determinants of income inequality and poverty. He is particularly interested in the use of social programs, and in particular education, to improve the well-being of children from poor families. A key component of this work is to understand the economic determinants of the well-being of children. This includes both understanding how the provision of various types of educational resources affects the development of human capital and understanding the factors that determine the demand for education by both children and their families. He is an affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a fellow of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University. He received a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 and a Bachelor or Arts in Economics and a Bachelor Science in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1997.