The Aggregate Effect of School Choice: Evidence from a two-stage experiment in India

Karthik Muralidharan

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

Karthik Muralidharan is an assistant professor in the economics department at the University of California - San Diego, a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a research affiliate of MIT’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). He earned an A.B. in economics (summa cum laude) from Harvard, an M.Phil. in economics from Cambridge (UK), and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. His research focuses on improving education and health in developing countries, and includes a cross-country study on teacher and medical worker absence in public schools and clinics in developing countries. He has also studied the impact of performance-pay for teachers, the impact of contract teachers, the impact of low-stakes feedback to teachers on student performance, and the impact of cash grants to schools on student learning outcomes in India via large-scale randomized evaluations. Current projects include experimental evaluations of the impact of teacher certification and salary increases in Indonesia, and of school choice programs in India.