Helping Schools Survive: Experimental Evidence on the Impact of Financial and Educational Support to Private Schools

Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, Asim Khwaja and Selcuk Ozyurt

No 34042, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Low-cost private schools have increased educational access in low-income countries, but frequent school closures lead to costly disruptions in children’s schooling. We provide experimental evidence from Pakistan that both school loans and educational products and services (EPS) are (a) commercially viable products and (b) substantially and similarly improve school survival rates. Moreover, loans decrease closure rates more for schools with larger initial enrollments and lower baseline test scores, while EPS show no such differential impact. These results demonstrate how financial and educational input constraints can significantly affect school survival while underscoring that the fungibility of entrepreneurial support matters.

JEL-codes: C93 I22 I25 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07
Note: DEV ED
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34042.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:34042

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34042
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().