Essays on Education Policies in Developing Countries

Maeba, Kensuke

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-vaye-pd94

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Essays on Education Policies in Developing Countries

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This dissertation consists of three chapters about education policies in developing countries. The first chapter examines two extrapolation approaches to make out-of-sample predictions using cash transfer experiments in Malawi and Morocco. The second chapter evaluates India's workfare program in terms of targeting efficiency and effects on school enrollment, in comparison with counterfactual cash transfer programs. The third chapter, coauthored with Eduardo Campillo Betancourt, quantifies the influence of a corporatist teacher union on the implementation of a performance-pay program in Mexico. Predicting the effects of a new policy often relies on existing evidence of the same policy in other contexts. However, cross-contexts predictions may fail because those contexts may have distinct characteristics and the same policies may function differently across contexts. In such cases, one might want to make predictions based on similar policies in one's own context to hold local factors constant. The first chapter of this dissertation compares these approaches using cash transfer programs in Malawi and Morocco. By predicting the treatment effect of Moroccan CCTs on school enrollment rates based on either Malawi CCTs or Moroccan labeled cash transfers (LCTs), I show that predictions based on the Moroccan LCTs (across policies) are more accurate than the Malawi CCTs (across contexts). To shed light on the sources of the difference, I estimate a dynamic model of schooling decisions under each intervention separately and compare the estimated parameters across the interventions. I find that perceived returns to schooling relative to outside options explain the differential predictions. I suggest that differences in the underlying mechanisms of the Malawi and Moroccan CCTs are reflected in the cross-contexts variation of the relative returns. Workfare is a common anti-poverty policy in developing countries that involves hiring poor individuals for public construction work. One advantage of workfare is that participants voluntarily enroll in the program, which mitigates targeting errors that are often observed in other targeting methods such as proxy-means tests. However, despite its targeting efficiency, workfare may have unintended adverse effects on school enrollment. This raises the question of how to evaluate workfare as an anti-poverty policy when considering these dimensions. The second chapter of this dissertation aims to quantify this trade-off for a large workfare program in India by comparing it with hypothetical cash transfer programs that employ a less accurate targeting approach but improve school enrollment. I find that under fixed program expenditures, the workfare program has lower household welfare and lower school enrollment rates than the cash transfer programs. I also find that the workfare program would need to yield unreasonably high rates of social returns to achieve the same levels of household welfare generated by the cash transfer programs. These results suggest that the cash transfer programs are preferred over the workfare program, despite their less precise targeting. Teacher unions play an important role in determining the quality of public education, especially when they have political power. However, the effects of the unions on education outcomes are theoretically ambiguous and empirical evidence is limited, particularly in developing countries. The third chapter of this dissertation studies how politically powerful teacher unions affect public education, focusing on the largest corporatist teacher union in Mexico and a performance-pay program regarded as the union's patronage tool for rewarding teachers based on their electoral support. We show that the number of public secondary school teachers who got promoted in the program increased in the municipalities supporting the union-affiliated candidate during the 2006 presidential election, compared to less supportive municipalities, after that election. However, we also show that the increased promotion was not associated with improved learning outcomes, suggesting that the implementation of the program was distorted by the political influence of the union.

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