Working Paper: NBER ID: w29459
Authors: Julie Buhlwiggers; Jason T. Kerwin; Juan S. Muñoz-Morales; Jeffrey A. Smith; Rebecca Thornton
Abstract: We document substantial variation in the effects of a highly-effective literacy pro-gram in northern Uganda. The program increases test scores by 1.40 SDs on average, but standard statistical bounds show that the impact standard deviation exceeds 1.0SD. This implies that the variation in effects across our students is wider than the spread of mean effects across all randomized evaluations of developing country education interventions in the literature. This very effective program does indeed leave some students behind. At the same time, we do not learn much from our analyses that attempt to determine which students benefit more or less from the program. We reject rank preservation, and the weaker assumption of stochastic increasingness leaves wide bounds on quantile-specific average treatment effects. Neither conventional nor machine-learning approaches to estimating systematic heterogeneity capture more than a small fraction of the variation in impacts given our available candidate moderators.
Keywords: Education; Treatment Effect Heterogeneity; Literacy Program; Uganda
JEL Codes: C18; C21; I21; I25; J24
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Northern Uganda Literacy Project (NULP) (O22) | test scores (C52) |
| Northern Uganda Literacy Project (NULP) (O22) | variation in treatment effects (C22) |
| Northern Uganda Literacy Project (NULP) (O22) | some students harmed (Y40) |
| Northern Uganda Literacy Project (NULP) (O22) | students with gains exceeding 2.0 standard deviations (C46) |