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We estimate attendance gains for primary school children from a cost‐neutral change in the design of India’s school meal program. Municipal schools in the capital region of Delhi shifted from packaged food to cooked meals in 2003, with no change in payments to meal providers. Using the staggered implementation of this transition and child‐level panel data, we estimate a 3 percentage point increase in average monthly attendance, with large effects for early grades. We also find that girls are more responsive to the cooked meals, but because they attend morning schools, whereas boys attend afternoon schools, this may simply reflect benefits from better‐timed meals. Our study illustrates how better‐designed transfers can improve outcomes within tightly constrained budgets.

Microfinance groups often engage in a variety of collective activities not directly related to credit. We design a three-stage repayment game to examine how the existence of these ancillary activities affect repayment behavior and group attrition. In the first stage, the group borrows under joint liability, each member undertakes a risky project and decides whether or not to contribute to loan repayment. In the second stage, contributing members can vote to expel others from the group. Those remaining engage in a public goods game in the last stage. The public good game represents the non-credit collective activity that members can be involved in. We identify repayment equilibria with and without exclusion and show that exclusionary equilibria are most likely when loans are large and there is significant within-group heterogeneity in the gains from the public good. Results from a laboratory experiment that embodies the main features of the repayment game are consistent with the theoretical predictions. Individual decisions to contribute to loan repayment depend on gains from the public good and groups with the largest debt burdens have the highest rates of default and attrition.

We study how information to parents and schools on the performance of primary school children can improve learning outcomes in an environment where public and private schools co-exist. Contiguous village councils in the Indian state of Rajasthan are randomly assigned to either a control or one of four treatment groups in which student report cards on curriculum-based tests are provided to schools, parents or both. We find no changes in academic performance in public schools. Student performance in private schools improves by one-third of a standard deviation when parents and schools can simultaneously place themselves in the distribution of scores in the community. There is no systematic change in performance for any treatment that involves only schools, or where households are not informed about the relative performance of all schools in the community. These results highlight the importance of common knowledge of relative school quality and provider incentives in improving learning.

We adapt recently developed econometric techniques to estimate the distribution of welfare gains from public schools in rural India. Individuals have preferences over school quality and income spent on other goods. In a situation where both private and pubic schools are available, we define the cash-equivalent value of the public school as the hypothetical income sacrifice that would equate an individual’s utility to his/her utility when only the private school was available. We apply this procedure to data on income, enrollment and school quality from the Indian Human Development Survey of 2012 and estimate the distribution of implicit transfers across states and income deciles. We find these transfers are progressive. Poor households receive more on average because they have higher fertility and because their children are more likely to attend state schools. We also find however that transfers are particularly small for some of the poorest states in central and eastern India because of their low public school quality. Our methods can be generalized to measure the distribution of benefits from other types of public goods and government services.

How much of the observed segregation between black and white Americans can be attributed to income disparities between the two groups? We adopt an approach to the decomposition of segregation measures that combines the method of indirect standardization with the idea that some degree of segregation is the outcome of purely random processes. Using the dissimilarity index as a measure of segregation and data on race and income from US metropolitan areas for 2000, we find that the role played by racial income inequality in accounting for segregation is modest but varies significantly across cities.

Research on caste-based inequalities in India has generally focused on differences between large categories such as the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, and the remainder of the population. We contribute to the literature on horizontal inequalities in India by looking within these groupings, and studying differences between the individual jatis that comprise these categories. Using census data, we find evidence of persistent inequalities in educational outcomes between the jatis, suggesting that socio-economic hierarchies have proved to be stable throughout the post-Independence period. Indeed, the evidence points to divergence: communities with more education in 1961 also had higher educational attainment in 2001. Also, while numerically larger Scheduled Caste communities witnessed greater improvements in educational levels compared to smaller ones, this was not true for the Scheduled Tribes. This may be the result of their greater political mobilization.

This paper explores the manner in which race and income interact to determine patterns of residential location in metropolitan areas. We use a framework in which individuals care about both the level of affluence and the racial composition of their communities, and in which there are differences in income both within and between groups. Three main findings emerge. First, conditional on income, black households experience lower neighborhood quality relative to whites at any stable equilibrium. Second, extreme levels of segregation can be stable when racial income disparities are either large or negligible, but unstable in some intermediate range. Third, there exist multiple stable equilibria with very different levels of segregation when racial income disparities are sufficiently small. These results hold even when preferences are pro-integrationist, in the sense that racially mixed neighborhoods within a certain range are strictly preferred by all households to homogenous neighborhoods of either type.

For a large variety of data recorded by the Census of India, such as those on language, age structure, religion, and on individual Scheduled Castes and Tribes, the district is the lowest level of aggregation at which these data are published. Between 1961, when the first comprehensive census of independent India was conducted, and the Census of 2001, which is the last census for which complete data have been published, the number of districts in India increased from 339 to 593. In this paper we describe these boundary changes, and construct a set of 232 regions with consistent boundaries between 1961–2001, that span the entire country. Our methodology permits a careful construction of district-level panels between any two census years in this period, using the detailed tables provided.

This paper examines the effects of heterogeneity in school quality on high school wages, college enrolment rates and social surplus. Greater heterogeneity in school quality, combined with pooling on the labor market for high school graduates, is shown to result in lower average high school wages, inefficient college-going decisions, and, in some cases, lower social surplus. These effects of heterogeneity tend to be reinforced by technical change which raises the return to human capital. Technical change leads to bigger increases in the college-high school wage ratio when there is more underlying heterogeneity in the school system. Performance standards implemented through the mandatory testing of all high school graduates are shown to raise average high school wages and social surplus by reducing the distortion in college-going incentives.

In India, for many empirical questions, states have been the standard unit of analysis and they are a natural starting point for research using official data sources because state governments set political agendas and budgets and administer a wide range of services. The use of more disaggregated district data allows the study of outcomes across regions with similar historical contexts and political regimes. Most district-level studies, however, have relied on cross-sectional analysis because district comparisons over time are complicated by multiple boundary changes. As providing information on boundary changes across districts will facilitate the construction of district level panel data sets, this article provides data on the composition of all Indian districts over the 1971-2001 period that can enable the construction of district panels.

This Discussion Paper is issued under the auspices of the Centre’s research programme in DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Research disseminated by CEPR may include views on policy, but the Centre itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Centre for Economic Policy Research was established in 1983 as a private educational charity, to promote independent analysis and public discussion of open economies and the relations among them. It is pluralist and non-partisan, bringing economic research to bear on the analysis of medium- and long-run policy questions. Institutional (core) finance for the Centre has been provided through major grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, under which an ESRC Resource Centre operates within CEPR; the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust; and the Bank of England. These organizations do not give prior review to the Centre’s publications, nor do they necessarily endorse the views expressed therein.