The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance : Evidence from Teacher Absence in India

The relative return to strategies that augment inputs versus those that reduce inefficiencies remains a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, we show that the large public investme...

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Main Authors:	Muralidharan, Karthik, Das, Jishnu, Holla, Alaka, Mohpal, Aakash
Format:	Journal Article
Published:	Elsevier 2018
Subjects:	EDUCATION TEACHER ABSENTEEISM GOVERNANCE STATE CAPACITY MONITORING RURAL SCHOOLS
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29313

id	okr-10986-29313
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-293132021-05-25T10:54:43Z The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance : Evidence from Teacher Absence in India Muralidharan, Karthik Das, Jishnu Holla, Alaka Mohpal, Aakash EDUCATION TEACHER ABSENTEEISM GOVERNANCE STATE CAPACITY MONITORING RURAL SCHOOLS The relative return to strategies that augment inputs versus those that reduce inefficiencies remains a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, we show that the large public investments in education over the past decade have led to substantial improvements in input-based measures of school quality, but only a modest reduction in inefficiency as measured by teacher absence. In our data, 23.6% of teachers were absent during unannounced school visits, and we estimate that the salary cost of unauthorized teacher absence is $1.5 billion/year. We find two robust correlations in the nationally-representative panel data that corroborate findings from smaller-scale experiments. First, reductions in student-teacher ratios are correlated with increased teacher absence. Second, increases in the frequency of school monitoring are strongly correlated with lower teacher absence. Using these results, we show that reducing inefficiencies by increasing the frequency of monitoring could be over ten times more cost effective at increasing the effective student-teacher ratio than hiring more teachers. Thus, policies that decrease the inefficiency of public education spending are likely to yield substantially higher marginal returns than those that augment inputs. 2018-02-05T17:08:10Z 2018-02-05T17:08:10Z 2017-01 Journal Article Journal of Public Economics 0047-2727 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29313 CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 World Bank Elsevier Publications & Research :: Journal Article Publications & Research South Asia India
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
topic	EDUCATION TEACHER ABSENTEEISM GOVERNANCE STATE CAPACITY MONITORING RURAL SCHOOLS
spellingShingle	EDUCATION TEACHER ABSENTEEISM GOVERNANCE STATE CAPACITY MONITORING RURAL SCHOOLS Muralidharan, Karthik Das, Jishnu Holla, Alaka Mohpal, Aakash The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance : Evidence from Teacher Absence in India
geographic_facet	South Asia India
description	The relative return to strategies that augment inputs versus those that reduce inefficiencies remains a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, we show that the large public investments in education over the past decade have led to substantial improvements in input-based measures of school quality, but only a modest reduction in inefficiency as measured by teacher absence. In our data, 23.6% of teachers were absent during unannounced school visits, and we estimate that the salary cost of unauthorized teacher absence is $1.5 billion/year. We find two robust correlations in the nationally-representative panel data that corroborate findings from smaller-scale experiments. First, reductions in student-teacher ratios are correlated with increased teacher absence. Second, increases in the frequency of school monitoring are strongly correlated with lower teacher absence. Using these results, we show that reducing inefficiencies by increasing the frequency of monitoring could be over ten times more cost effective at increasing the effective student-teacher ratio than hiring more teachers. Thus, policies that decrease the inefficiency of public education spending are likely to yield substantially higher marginal returns than those that augment inputs.
format	Journal Article
author	Muralidharan, Karthik Das, Jishnu Holla, Alaka Mohpal, Aakash
author_facet	Muralidharan, Karthik Das, Jishnu Holla, Alaka Mohpal, Aakash
author_sort	Muralidharan, Karthik
title	The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance : Evidence from Teacher Absence in India
title_short	The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance : Evidence from Teacher Absence in India
title_full	The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance : Evidence from Teacher Absence in India
title_fullStr	The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance : Evidence from Teacher Absence in India
title_full_unstemmed	The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance : Evidence from Teacher Absence in India
title_sort	fiscal cost of weak governance : evidence from teacher absence in india
publisher	Elsevier
publishDate	2018
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29313
_version_	1764469029933678592

The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance : Evidence from Teacher Absence in India

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