Estimating the Welfare Gains from Public Schools in Rural India

Debopam Bhattacharya, Anders Kjelsrud and Rohini Somanathan

Sankhya B: The Indian Journal of Statistics, 2021, vol. 83, issue 2, No 5, 430-443

Abstract: Abstract We adapt recently developed econometric techniques to estimate the distribution of welfare gains from public schools in rural India. Individuals have preferences over school quality and income spent on other goods. In a situation where both private and pubic schools are available, we define the cash-equivalent value of the public school as the hypothetical income sacrifice that would equate an individual’s utility to his/her utility when only the private school was available. We apply this procedure to data on income, enrollment and school quality from the Indian Human Development Survey of 2012 and estimate the distribution of implicit transfers across states and income deciles. We find these transfers are progressive. Poor households receive more on average because they have higher fertility and because their children are more likely to attend state schools. We also find however that transfers are particularly small for some of the poorest states in central and eastern India because of their low public school quality. Our methods can be generalized to measure the distribution of benefits from other types of public goods and government services.

Keywords: Targeting; Public programs; Binary choice; Cash equivalent; Primary 91B42; Secondary 91B82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13571-019-00213-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:sankhb:v:83:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s13571-019-00213-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/statistics/journal/13571

DOI: 10.1007/s13571-019-00213-x

Access Statistics for this article

Sankhya B: The Indian Journal of Statistics is currently edited by Dipak Dey

More articles in Sankhya B: The Indian Journal of Statistics from Springer, Indian Statistical Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().