Supply Side School Interventions For Girls In India Effectiveness And Labour Market Outcomes

Jain, Chandan

Abstract: In this paper we analyse the joint impact of two girl specific supply side school interventions (NPEGEL & KGBV ) in India, aimed at improving girls schooling outcomes at the elementary level, on the probability of primary and upper primary school completion as well as attending educational institution for girls in rural areas. We exploit the regional variation with regard to programme implementation in order to estimate the causal impact of the treatment using a triple diff-in-diff and diff-in-diff framework. Our results suggests that exposure to both the programmes is associated with an increase in the probability of primary as well as upper primary school completion and attending educational institution. Further, different robustness checks confirm the robustness of these results to variation in primary as well upper primary school completion age as well as implementation of the mid-day meal programme. Also, we find that the benefits, in terms of greater school participation on account of exposure, have been limited to the targeted age group only and have not persisted much to older age groups. Additionally, we examine the impact of this increase in participation in schooling by girls on labour force participation for rural women (25 to 59 year age group and with less than primary level of education) on account of within household substitution with regard to responsibility of performing domestic tasks. Using programme exposure as an instrumental variable we find a negative effect of a greater participation in school by girls on labour force participation for women, while a positive effect on participation in domestic tasks for the same, heterogeneity analysis confirms that these results varies based on the economic condition of the household. Recent literature analysing the decline in rural female labour force participation in India have found little consensus on the explanations for the observed decline. Contrary to the descriptive explanations presented in the past literature our result on the other hand focuses on causal mechanism instead and presents a different explanation compared to those discussed in the past literature.

File: SNUECON_WP2016_001.pdf