EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Teacher Shocks and Student Learning: Evidence from Zambia

Jishnu Das, Stefan Dercon, James Habyarimana and Pramila Krishnan

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: Following a tradition that relates household-level shocks to educational attainment, we examine the impact of teacher-level shocks on student learning. As a plausible measure for these shocks, we use teacher absenteeism during a 30-day recall period. A 5-percent increase in teacher absence rate reduced learning by 4 to 8 percent of average gains over the year, for both Mathematics and English. The estimated impacts are substantial and, in addition to the losses due to time away from class, likely reflect lower teaching quality when in class and less lesson-preparation when at home. Health problems-primarily their own illness and the illnesses of family members-account for more than 60 percent of teacher absenteeism. This suggests both that households are unable to substitute adequately for school-level teaching inputs and that, to support human capital formation, insurance at the school-level may be a policy priority that is worth exploring further.

Pages: 50
Date: 2004-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-edu and nep-ure
Note: DE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://files.econ.cam.ac.uk/repec/cam/pdf/cwpe0514.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Teacher Shocks and Student Learning: Evidence from Zambia (2007) Downloads
Working Paper: Teacher shocks and student learning: evidence from Zambia (2005) Downloads
Working Paper: Teacher Shocks and Student Learning: Evidence from Zambia (2004) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cam:camdae:0514

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Dyer ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:cam:camdae:0514