Geeta Kingdon

• DPhil (Oxford)
• Professor and Chair at University College London

Schooling may build human capital not only by teaching academic skills, but by expanding the capacity for cognition itself. We focus specifically on cognitive endurance: the ability to sustain effortful mental activity over a continuous stretch of time. As motivation, we document that globally and in the US, the poor exhibit cognitive fatigue more...

Whether class-size reductions improve student learning outcomes is an important policy question for India. This paper investigates the issue using a credible identification strategy to address the endogeneity of class size. Pupil fixed effects combined with value-added estimation show no significant relationship between class size and student achie...

This paper examines the widespread perception in India that the country has an acute teacher shortage of about one million teachers in public elementary schools, a view repeated in India’s National Education Policy 2020. Using official DISE data, we show that teacher vacancies cannot be equated with teacher shortages: while the number of teacher va...

This paper examines the efficacy of class-size reductions as a strategy to improve pupils’ learning outcomes in India. It uses a credible identification strategy to address the endogeneity of class-size, by relating the difference in a student’s achievement score across subjects to the difference in his/her class size across subjects. Pupil fixed e...

This paper examines the size, growth, salaries, fee levels and per-pupil-costs of private schools, and compares these with the government school sector. Official data show a steep growth of private schooling and a corresponding rapid shrinkage in the size of the government school sector in India, suggesting parental abandonment of government school...

This paper asks whether gender bias in education expenditure in rural India fell over the two-decade period from 1995 to 2014. We find that instead of falling over time, the channel through which gender bias is practiced changed dramatically over the 20 years. Secondly, the paper demonstrates the usefulness of distinguishing between the two potenti...

Private fee-charging schools are a visibly ubiquitous phenomenon in both urban and rural Uttar Pradesh. Despite their preponderance and growth, and the public expectation of inclusivity from them, relatively little is known about the nature of private schools in the country, and much of the media and public discussion about them happens in a vacuum...

Public education is critically important to the human capital, social well-being, and economic prosperity of nations. It is also an intensely political realm of public policy that is heavily shaped by power and special interests. Yet political scientists rarely study education, and education researchers rarely study politics. This volume attempts t...

Many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries publish school rankings annually, based on the aggregated student performance of different schools in the (high-stakes) board examinations. The literature cites two reasons in favour of the public availability of information on school performance: first, the highly valued...

We examine the effect of attending private secondary school on educational achievement, as measured by students' scores in a comprehensive standardized math test, in two Indian states: Orissa and Rajasthan. We use propensity score matching (PSM) to control for any systematic differences between students attending private secondary schools and publi...

Using administrative data from linked private schools from one Indian district that matches 8319 pupils to their subject specific teachers at the senior secondary level, we estimate the importance of individual teachers for student outcomes in the high-stake senior secondary exam (at the end of twelfth-grade) controlling for prior achievement at th...

The present paper provides new evidence that private school growth is associated with both positive and negative externality effects respectively for literacy and enrolment rates in the Indian districts in the post liberalisation period. We exploit the district-level variation in the growth of new private schools over a decade immediately after the...

Teachers and schools do not exist in isolation of the larger world around them. Frequently, many of their actions – and the school outcomes that they are accountable for – are influenced by incentives and constraints operating outside the schooling system. Each of these factors influences different aspects of education reform, whether policy des...

Using administrative data from linked private schools from one of districts in India that matches 8,319 pupils to their subject specific teachers at the senior secondary level, we estimate the importance of individual teachers on student outcomes in the high-stake senior secondary exam (at the end of twelfth-grade). We control for prior achievement...

Using administrative data from linked private schools from one Indian district that matches 8319 pupils to their subject specific teachers at the senior secondary level, we estimate the importance of individual teachers for student outcomes in the high-stake senior secondary exam (at the end of twelfth-grade) controlling for prior achievement at th...

The Millennium Development Goals implicitly assume that the state has the prime responsibility of delivering basic education, ignoring the rapid private school growth. The present paper attempts to identify the causal effect of private school growth on youth literacy and enrolment rates, using the variation in private school growth in Indian distri...

The school governance environment is an important determinant of schooling quality and thus of development. This article explores how school governance is influenced by teacher unions and teacher politicians by presenting evidence on the political penetration of teachers, the activities of teacher unions and the stances of teachers' organisations o...

The present paper provides new evidence that private school growth is associated with both positive and negative externality effects respectively for literacy and enrolment rates in Indian districts. We exploit the district-level variation in the growth of new private schools over a period of time to show that districts with new private schools ten...

Since the development of human capital theory, countless estimates of the economic benefits of investing in education for the individual have been published. While it is a universal fact that in all countries of the world the more education one has the higher his or her earnings, it is nevertheless important to know the empirical returns to schooli...

This paper investigates some of the economic outcomes of education in Pakistan with a view to understanding if education can act as a vehicle for labour market success. Data from a purpose-designed survey of more than 1000 households in Pakistan are utilised. Earnings functions are estimated for agricultural workers, the self-employed and wage earn...

This study investigates the economic outcomes of education for wage earners in Pakistan. This is done by analysing the relationship between schooling, cognitive skills and ability, on the one hand, and economic activity, occupation, sectoral choice and earnings, on the other. In Pakistan, an important question remains largely unaddressed: what does...

Using a Hurdle model, the paper finds that although significant progress in gender equality in education was achieved during 1993-2005, pro-male gender bias still exists in the within-household allocation of educational expenditure. This bias occurs primarily through differential spending on sons and daughters in the primary and middle school age g...

Using a Hurdle model, the paper finds that although significant progress in gender equality in education was achieved during 1993–2005, pro-male gender bias still exists in the within-household allocation of educational expenditure. This bias occurs primarily through differential spending on sons and daughters in the primary and middle school age g...

It is commonly believed that labour-market returns to education are highest for the primary level of education and lower for subsequent levels. Recent evidence reviewed in this article suggests that the pattern is changing. The causes of such changes, and their implications for both education and labour-market policy, are explored. Copyright (c) Th...

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set the agenda for the attainment of universal literacy by 2015 primarily to be delivered by the state sector. This agenda tends to ignore the significant private school growth around the world since early 1990s, thus initiating the policy debate as to whether private school growth may foster 'education for all'....

Bringing together analysis across different sectors, we review the implementation and achievements of the MDGs to date to identify cross cutting strengths and weaknesses as a basis for considering how they might be developed or replaced after 2015. Working from this and a definition of development as a dynamic process involving sustainable and equi...

Using new and unique panel data, we investigate the role of long-term health and childhood malnutrition in schooling outcomes for children in rural India, many of whom lack basic numeracy and literacy skills. Using data on students’ performance on mathematics and Hindi tests, we examine the role of the endogeneity of health caused by omitted variab...

Tens of thousands of young people leave school with no or very few qualifications in England. This paper asks: what is the ethnic dimension of the low achievement problem? We focus on six aspects, using the National Pupil Database: whether the relation between ethnicity and incidence of low achievement is symmetrical with the relation between ethni...

Para-teachers, sometimes called "contract teachers", are being hired in increasing numbers in many Indian states. While hiring conditions, tenure, remuneration, and qualifications vary considerably across states, the use of para-teachers has generated debate about their impact on the quality of elementary education. Based on a critical literature r...

This paper examines the relationship between teacher unionization, student achievement and teachers' pay using a cross-section of data from private schools in India. We use differences in student mark across subjects to identify within-pupil variation in achievement and find that union membership of the teacher is associated with reduced pupil achi...

This paper uses a unique data set from 5028 primary school children in rural India to examine whether the demographic interactions between students and teachers influence student outcomes and whether social distance between student and teacher exacerbates gender, caste and religious gaps in children's achievement. One would expect this to be the ca...

One of the many changes in India since economic liberalisation began in 1991 is the increased use of private schooling. There has been a growing body of literature to assess whether this is a positive trend and to evaluate the effects on child achievement levels. The challenge is to identify the true private school effect on achievement, isolating...

This study investigates the relationship between parental schooling on the one hand, and child health outcomes (height and weight) and parental health-seeking behaviour (immunisation status of children), on the other. While establishing a correlational link between parental schooling and child health is relatively straightforward, confirming a caus...

While use of contract teachers provides a low-cost way to increase teacher numbers, it raises the quality concern that these less trained teachers may be less effective. We estimate the causal contract-teacher effect on student achievement using school fixed effects and value-added models of the education production function, using Indian data. We...

The effectiveness of the arrangements governing an educational system depends on the motivations of key actors. This paper analyses the state of education in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and the role that teachers have played in the political process. It describes how teachers have become embedded in the political system and the way teacher as...

Happiness is generally considered an important if not the ultimate goal of life. Religion, by giving a prescription for living, purports to give the key to happiness. It prescribes a pattern for living to promote the happiness of individuals and collectively of humankind. There are numerous references in religious writings in general, and in Baha'i...

This chapter examines unemployment trends since the time of the democratization of South Africa. It argues that the rise in unemployment is best explained by the rapid growth in the labour force relative to the growth of formal sector employment, as a result of which the burgeoning residual labour force was absorbed either into the informal sector,...

This chapter begins with a discussion of the social and economic legacy of the apartheid era. It then discusses the evolution of economic policy thinking in South Africa, international reintegration, trends in inequality and poverty, and growth and the reduction of unemployment.

This study investigates public-private sector wage differentials for male and female waged employees in Pakistan. This is done using latest nationally representative data from the Pakistan Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM) 2005. We adopt three methodologies to obtain robust estimates of the wage differential and the results reveal that pub...

The pattern of economic returns to education can help us to understand the poverty-reducing potential of different levels of education. It is commonly believed that labour market returns to education are highest for the primary level of education and lower for subsequent levels. Recent evidence suggests that the pattern is changing. The paper explo...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

Analysis of education in India in general and of private and public schools in particular is hampered by the lack of available data. Despite recent improvements, there is a serious dearth of reliable educational data in India. First, the official data collection exercise on schools (both annually and in the periodic All India Education Survey) coll...

While it might be expected that demand for schooling will depend positively on the economic returns to education (ER) in the local labor market, in fact there is theoretical ambiguity about the sign of the schooling-ER relationship when households are liquidity-constrained. Whether the relationship is positive or negative depends on which effect do...

Pakistan has very large gender gaps in educational outcomes. One explanation could be that girls receive lower educational expenditure allocations than boys within the household, but this has never convincingly been tested. This article investigates whether the intra-household allocation of educational expenditure in Pakistan favours males over fem...

This paper explores the extent and nature of gender differences, by age, in household health expenditure allocation. Using South African data, we adopt a hurdle methodology, constructing a sequence of decision stages (reporting sickness, consulting medical practitioner, incurring positive medical expenditure, and the conditional amount of expenditu...

This paper examines an issue of overwhelming importance in South Africa-unemployment and its rise. It explains the factors behind the sharp rise in unemployment in the post-apartheid period, investigates the role of labour legislation and the system of labour market governance, evaluates the impact of the government's active labour market policies,...

In this paper data from a school survey in India is used to ask whether there is evidence for the payment of performance related pay and whether such pay structures do impact on student achievement. It is shown that—after controlling for student ability, parental background and the resources available—private schools get significantly better academ...

Tens of thousands of young people leave school with no or very few qualifications in England. This paper seeks to build a fuller picture of Key Stage 4 low achievement and its correlates than available hitherto. We focus on three aspects. Firstly, the role of students' personal characteristics, especially gender, ethnicity and past achievement, in...

This paper investigates the education-earnings relationship in Ghana, drawing on the Ghana Living Standards Survey for 1998-99. The analysis has three main goals: to examine the labor market returns to education amongst wage-employed, self-employed and agricultural workers; to examine the labor market returns to literacy and numeracy skills for the...

South Africa experienced a momentous change of government from the Apartheid regime to its first democratic government in 1994. This book provides an up-to-date assessment of South Africa's economic policies and performance under democracy. The book includes a stand-alone introduction and economic overview, as well as chapters on growth, monetary a...

This paper examines an issue of overwhelming importance in South Africa--unemployment and its rise. It explains the factors behind the sharp rise in unemployment in the post-apartheid period, investigates the role of labour legislation and the system of labour market governance, evaluates the impact of the government's active labour market policies...

This paper provides an overview of school education in India. First, it places India's educational achievements in international perspective, particularly against countries with which it is now increasingly compared, especially China. Second, the paper examines schooling access in terms of enrolment and school attendance rates, and schooling qualit...

Improving weak teaching may be one of the most effective means of raising pupil achievement. However, teachers' classroom practices and the teaching 'process' may matter more to student learning than teachers' observed résumé characteristics (such as certification and experience). There may also be important differences in teacher characteristics a...

This paper provides an overview of how African labour markets have performed in the 1990s. It is argued that the failure of African labour markets to create good paying jobs has resulted in excess labour supply in the form of either open unemployment or a growing self-employment sector. One explanation for this outcome is a lack of labour market ‘f...

Are jobless persons who want work but are not actively searching, unemployed or out of the labour force? Previous research on this issue has focused on North America and used as the test whether the probability of transition to employment is similar for searching and non-searching jobless persons. This paper develops three new tests as to whether t...

Our data allow us to examine whether the salaries of different subject teachers are related to a student's marks across those subjects within a school. We find that teacher salary and student achievement are very significantly positively correlated both across and within schools. However, the coefficient on teacher pay falls a great deal when movin...

The conventional approach of economists to the measurement of poverty is to use measures of income or consumption. This has been challenged by those who favour broader criteria, such as fulfilment of 'basic needs' and the 'capabilities' to be and to do things of intrinsic worth. This paper asks: to what extent are these different concepts measurabl...

It is commonly claimed that the South African labor market is unusually inflexible owing to the strength of the country's unions and the system of centralized collective bargaining. One sign of labor market inflexibility is low responsiveness of wages to local unemployment. Analyzing data from the South African Living Standards Survey, the authors...

This paper exploits unique data that permits the matching of students' test scores in different subjects to the teachers that teach those subjects. Within-pupil (across-subject, rather than across-time) variation is used to examine whether the characteristics of different subject teachers are related to a student's marks across subjects. There are...

This paper critically reviews conventional quantitative methods in educational research and asks the reasons for their inability to provide a basis for reliable policy advice on how to improve schooling outcomes of children. It then discusses methodological approaches that have been developed and used more recently and assesses their strengths and...

Abstract: The conventional approach of economists to the measurement of poverty in poor countries is to use measures of income or consumption. This has been challenged by those who favour broader criteria for poverty and its avoidance. These include the fulfilment of ‘basic needs’, the ‘capabilities’ to be and to do things of intrinsic worth, and s...

The reliability of the household consumption-based (Engel curve) methodology in detecting gender bias has been called into question because it has generally failed to confirm bias even where it exists. This article seeks to find explanations for this failure by exploiting a data set that has educational expenditure information at the individual lev...

Using South African data, the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well-being. Much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts. We find that comparator income, when measured as the average income of others in the local residential cluster, enters the household's utility function positively (close neighbor...

The conventional approach of economists to the measurement of poverty in poor countries is to use measures of income or consumption. This has been challenged by those who favour broader criteria for poverty and its avoidance. These include the fulfilment of basic needs, the capabilities to be and to do things of intrinsic worth, and safety from ins...

South Africa's unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, and it has important distributional implications. The paper examines both entry into and duration of unemployment using data for the mid-1990s. A probit model of unemployment shows an important role for race, education, age, gender, home-ownership, location, and numerous other var...

Twenty-First Century India is the first study of India’s development giving a fully integrated account of population and development. It is built on new projections of the population for fifty years from the Census of 2001. India’s population then had already passed 1 billion. Twenty-five years later it will exceed 1.4 billion, and will almost cert...

Unemployment in South Africa is so widespread that it demands an explanation. This paper examines two questions about South African unemployment. Firstly, why do the unemployed not enter the informal sector, as is common in other developing countries? Secondly, why do the unemployed not enter wage employment more readily? The findings provide littl...

The reliability of the household consumption based (Engel curve) methodology in detecting gender bias has been called into question recently because it has generally failed to confirm bias even where there are large gender differences in outcomes. This paper seeks to find explanations for this failure. To do this, it utilises a large dataset from I...

Incl. bibl., index.

Differential treatment of sons and daughters by parents is a potential explanation of the gender gap in education in developing countries. This study empirically tests this explanation for India using household survey data collected in urban Uttar Pradesh in 1995. We estimate educational enrolment functions and selectivity-corrected educational att...

Unemployment in South Africa is so widespread that it demands an explanation. This paper examines why the unemployed do not enter the informal sector, as is common in other developing countries. The findings provide little support for the idea that unemployed people choose to be unemployed: the unemployed are substantially worse off, and less satis...

In this paper, we pose the question: to what extent is education responsible for the differential labour market outcomes of women and men in urban India? In particular, we investigate the extent to which education contributes to women's observed lower labour force participation and earnings than men, and whether any contribution of education to the...

This paper summarises the findings of four recent papers by the authors on different aspects of unemployment in South Africa. Based on statistical analysis using household d atasets, the papers are c oncerned with the impact of local unemployment on local wages; the a ppropriate definition and measure of unemployment in the particular circumstances...

This paper presents an analysis of the determinants of school participation in rural north India, based on a recent household survey that includes detailed information on school characteristics. School participation, especially among girls, responds to a wide range of variables, including parental education and motivation, social background, depend...

and seminar participants at Oxford for comments on an earlier draft. The research for this paper was funded by the Department for International Development. Electoral competition can have a significant influence on government decisions regarding public spending. In this paper I examine whether the move to multiparty elections in many African countr...

ABSTRACT: Broadly and narrowly measured unemployment rates differ very markedly in certain countries, and the measure chosen to be the 'official' unemployment rate affects perceptions about the extent of the problem. The appropriate measure of the unemployment rate depends on whether jobless persons who say they want work but who are not actively s...

ABSTRACT: A large amount of recent evidence finds a negative relationship between local unemployment and wages in OECD countries, a relationship christened a 'wage curve'. This contradicts the conventional model of the labour market in which high unemployment regions have higher wages to compensate for search and other costs. This paper discovers a...

Are school characteristics more important to student achievement than pupils’ home background? We are provoked to address this question because of Heyneman and Loxley’s (1982, p18) dramatic conclusion that in India, the overwhelming proportion (90%) of the variance in students’ science achievement is explained by school and teacher variables and on...

Labour market discrimination against women and parental discrimination against daughters are two of the most commonly cited explanations of the gender gap in education in developing countries. This study empirically tests the labour market explanation for India using household survey data collected in urban Uttar Pradesh in 1995. It estimates workf...

Published educational statistics in India ignore 'unrecognised' private schools and include only the 'recognised' private schools, though all government-funded schools are included. Moreover, enrolments in government-funded schools are greatly over-reported in education data. The paper argues that, as a result, official education statistics are ser...

Recent evidence of a substantial link between quality of schooling and individual productivity suggests that, from an economic efficiency perspective, quality aspects of education deserve attention. This paper presents empirical evidence on the relative quality and efficiency of private and government-funded schools in urban India, using data from...