Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India
Resource type
Journal Article
Authors/contributors
- Muralidharan, Karthik (Author)
- Prakash, Nishith (Author)
Title
Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India
Abstract
We study the impact of an innovative program in the Indian state
of Bihar that aimed to reduce the gender gap in secondary school
enrollment by providing girls who continued to secondary school
with a bicycle that would improve access to school. Using data from a
large representative household survey, we employ a triple difference
approach (using boys and the neighboring state of Jharkhand as
comparison groups) and find that being in a cohort that was exposed
to the Cycle program increased girls’ age-appropriate enrollment
in secondary school by 32 percent and reduced the corresponding
gender gap by 40 percent. We also find an 18 percent increase in the
number of girls who appear for the high-stakes secondary school
certificate exam, and a 12 percent increase in the number of girls
who pass it. Parametric and non-parametric decompositions of the
triple-difference estimate as a function of distance to the nearest
secondary school show that the increases in enrollment mostly took
place in villages that were further away from a secondary school,
suggesting that the mechanism of impact was the reduction in the
time and safety cost of school attendance made possible by the
bicycle. We also find that the Cycle program was much more cost
effective at increasing girls’ secondary school enrollment than
comparable conditional cash transfer programs in South Asia.
Publication
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
Volume
9
Pages
321-350
Date
2017
Citation
Muralidharan, K., & Prakash, N. (2017). Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 9, 321–350. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20160004
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