The Aggregate Effect of School Choice: Evidence from a two-stage experiment in India
Karthik Muralidharan
About the research
Award
NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship
Award Year
2011
Institution
University of California, San Diego
Primary Discipline
Economics
The Andhra Pradesh School Choice Project aims to provide disadvantaged children in rural areas of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh with opportunities for school choice that are similar to those available to other non-disadvantaged children. This is being done by offering scholarships that allow children to shift to a private school of their choice (if they wish to) in addition to the option of continuing in the existing government school. The project features a rigorous randomized evaluation of the impact of school choice both on children who receive the scholarships as well as the aggregate impact on education outcomes for all children in villages where the school choice program is implemented. This will be done by comparing the outcomes of the children and villages selected (by a random lottery) for the scholarships with the outcomes of children and villages who did not receive the scholarship. In addition to being the first experimental evaluation of a voucher-based school choice program in India, the project also aims to contribute to the global literature on the impact of school choice programs by using a unique two-stage randomization design to experimentally quantify spillovers and estimate the aggregate impact of such programs.
About Karthik Muralidharan
N/A