Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India

Karthik Muralidharan and Nishith Prakash

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2017, vol. 9, issue 3, 321-50

Abstract: We study the impact of an innovative program in the Indian state of Bihar that aimed to reduce the gender gap in secondary school enrollment by providing girls who continued to secondary school with a bicycle that would improve access to school. Using data from a large representative household survey, we employ a triple difference approach (using boys and the neighboring state of Jharkhand as comparison groups) and find that being in a cohort that was exposed to the Cycle program increased girls' age-appropriate enrollment in secondary school by 32 percent and reduced the corresponding gender gap by 40 percent. We also find an 18 percent increase in the number of girls who appear for the high-stakes secondary school certificate exam, and a 12 percent increase in the number of girls who pass it. Parametric and non-parametric decompositions of the triple- difference estimate as a function of distance to the nearest secondary school show that the increases in enrollment mostly took place in villages that were further away from a secondary school, suggesting that the mechanism of impact was the reduction in the time and safety cost of school attendance made possible by the bicycle. We also find that the Cycle program was much more cost effective at increasing girls' secondary school enrollment than comparable conditional cash transfer programs in South Asia.

JEL-codes: H42 I21 I28 J16 O15 O18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
Note: DOI: 10.1257/app.20160004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (148)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20160004 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/content/file?id=4728 (application/zip)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... eJrxvnR0Q75x9nSkysyj (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... AoZIXdRrMK8PwQcmKCgh (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India (2013)
Working Paper: Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India (2013)
Working Paper: Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India (2013)
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:aea:aejapp:v:9:y:2017:i:3:p:321-50

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics is currently edited by Alexandre Mas

More articles in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().