Experimental results from a four-year targeted education voucher program in the slums of Delhi, India

Pauline Dixon, Anna J. Egalite, Steve Humble and Patrick J. Wolf

World Development, 2019, vol. 124, issue C, -

Abstract: We present experimental evidence from a school choice program carried out in a 20-square kilometer, highly urbanized slum area known as Shahdara, which is situated in East Delhi, India. The lottery-based allocation of vouchers allows us to structure an impact evaluation as a randomized controlled trial. We conduct an Intent-to-Treat (ITT) analysis of the impact of the offer of a voucher as well as a Treatment-on-Treated (TOT) analysis of the impact of using a voucher, employing the lottery results as an instrumental variable. Four years after random assignment, we find large positive impacts of voucher use on student test scores in English (0.31σ, p < .05). We find suggestive negative impacts of voucher use on test scores in the native language of Hindi (−0.20σ, p < .10), but this impact is not significant at the standard 95% confidence level. We find no voucher impact on student test scores in mathematics.

Keywords: Asia; India; Vouchers; Choice; Policy; RCT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X1930292X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:wdevel:v:124:y:2019:i:c:17

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104644

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().