Education and health care in developing countries

This thesis is a collection of three essays on education and health in developing countries. Chapter 1 shows that increasing perceived returns to education strengthens incentives for schooling when agents underestimate the actual returns. I conducted a field experiment in Madagascar to study alternative ways to provide additional information about the returns to education. I randomly assigned schools to the role model intervention, the statistics intervention, or a combination of both. I find that providing statistics reduced the large gap between perceived returns and the statistics provided. As a result, it improved average test scores and student attendance. For those whose initial perceived returns were below the statistics, test scores improved by 0.37 standard deviations. Seeing a role model of poor background has a larger impact on poor children's test scores than seeing someone of rich background. The key implication of my results is that households lack information, but are able to process new information and change their decisions in a sophisticated manner. Chapter 2, joint work with Gerard Lassibille, evaluates several interventions in Madagascar that sought to promote top-down and local monitoring of the school to improve education quality. Randomly selected school districts and sub districts received operational tools to facilitate their supervision tasks. Randomly selected schools in these treated districts were reinforced with teacher tools and parent-teacher meetings centered around a school report card. We find little impact of targeting district and sub-district administrators.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Nguyen, Trang V

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/45902

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/45902