in partnership with South Asia Center
About the Seminar:
Professor Singh (in collaboration with Karthik Muralidharan) presents results from a large-scale experimental evaluation of an ambitious attempt to improve school management in India, which featured several global “best practices” (comprehensive assessments, detailed school ratings, and customized school improvement plans). While assessments were near-universally completed and ratings were informative, the intervention had no impact on school functioning or student outcomes. Yet, it was perceived to be successful and scaled up to cover over 600,000 schools nationally. They investigate reasons for program failure and scale-up despite ineffectiveness. Their results illustrate how ostensibly well-designed programs that appear effective based on administrative measures of compliance may be ineffective in practice.
About the Speaker:
Abhijeet Singh, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, is an applied microeconomist at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and studies topics relating to the economics of education, child nutrition, and public service delivery in developing countries. He is affiliated with the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), CESifo Economics of Education Research Network in Munich, the Center for Global Development, and the Young Lives study. Before SSE, he was based at the Department of Economics at UCL. He received his doctorate in Economics from the University of Oxford in 2015.