Report Cards: The Impact of Providing School and Child Test-scores on Educational Markets

Recent evidence on the impact of information provision on service delivery has been mixed, with overall outcomes even worsening in certain cases. We examine the market-wide impact of an experimental intervention that provides school and child-level learning report cards in a half of 112-educational markets (villages) in Pakistan. They track all 823 public and private primary schools, 12,000 Grade 3 schools, 5,000 teachers and a sample of 1,800 households in these villages. Report card provision improves learning by 0.10 standard deviations and decreases private school fees by 23 percent. This masks substantial heterogeneity across schools. [BREAD Working Paper No. 226] URL: [http://ipl.econ.duke.edu/bread/papers/working/226.pdf]