Adapting the Supply of Education to the Needs of Girls: Evidence from a Policy Experiment in Rural India

• BSE Working Paper: 110286 | September 15
• Keywords: Gender Gap , regression discontinuity , school resources , girls' education , school enrollment , impact evaluation
• JEL codes: H75, I21, I28, J16, O15, O22
• Gender Gap
• regression discontinuity
• school resources
• girls' education
• school enrollment
• impact evaluation

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a large-scale government initiative (NPEGEL/KGBV) that provided earmarked funds for addressing girls’special needs to public schools in rural India. Our empirical strategy exploits local variation in program eligibility around a threshold based on the female literacy rate at the community level. The main result is that the program led to an enrollment gain of about 6-7 percentage points for girls in upper primary school. Evidence of an enrollment gain for boys is tentative. Available evidence on mechanisms suggests that the program improved girl-friendly school infrastructure and services, as well as gender-neutral school resources.