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Publication


Featured researches published by Karthik Muralidharan.


Journal of Economic Perspectives | 2006

Missing in Action: Teacher and Health Worker Absence in Developing Countries

Nazmul Chaudhury; Jeffrey S. Hammer; Michael Kremer; Karthik Muralidharan; F. Halsey Rogers

In this paper, we report results from surveys in which enumerators make unannounced visits to primary schools and health clinics in Bangladesh, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Peru and Uganda and recorded whether they found teachers and health workers in the facilities.


Handbook of the Economics of Education | 2016

Improving Education Outcomes in Developing Countries: Evidence, Knowledge Gaps, and Policy Implications

Paul Glewwe; Karthik Muralidharan

Improvements in empirical research standards for credible identification of the causal impact of education policies on education outcomes have led to a significant increase in the body of evidence available on improving education outcomes in developing countries. This chapter aims to synthesize this evidence, interpret their results, and discuss the reasons why some interventions appear to be effective and others do not, with the ultimate goal of drawing implications for both research and policy. Interpreting the evidence for generalizable lessons is challenging because of variation across contexts, duration and quality of studies, and the details of specific interventions studied. Nevertheless, some broad patterns do emerge. Demand-side interventions that increase the immediate returns to (or reduce household costs of) school enrollment, or that increase students’ returns to effort, are broadly effective at increasing time in school and learning outcomes, but vary considerably in cost-effectiveness. Many expensive “standard†school inputs are often not very effective at improving outcomes, though some specific inputs (which are often less expensive) are. Interventions that focus on improved pedagogy (especially supplemental instruction to children lagging behind grade level competencies) are particularly effective, and so are interventions that improve school governance and teacher accountability. Our broad policy message is that the evidence points to several promising ways in which the efficiency of education spending in developing countries can be improved by pivoting public expenditure from less cost-effective to more cost-effective ways of achieving the same objectives. We conclude by documenting areas where more research is needed, and offer suggestions on the public goods and standards needed to make it easier for decentralized and uncoordinated research studies to be compared across contexts.


Archive | 2015

Quality and accountability in healthcare delivery : audit evidence from primary care providers in India

Jishnu Das; Alaka Holla; Aakash Mohpal; Karthik Muralidharan

This paper presents direct evidence on the quality of health care in low-income settings using a unique and original set of audit studies, where standardized patients were presented to a nearly representative sample of rural public and private primary care providers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Three main findings are reported. First, private providers are mostly unqualified, but they spent more time with patients and completed more items on a checklist of essential history and examination items than public providers, while being no different in their diagnostic and treatment accuracy. Second, the private practices of qualified public sector doctors were identified and the same doctors exerted higher effort and were more likely to provide correct treatment in their private practices. Third, there is a strong positive correlation between provider effort and prices charged in the private sector, whereas there is no correlation between effort and wages in the public sector. The results suggest that market-based accountability in the unregulated private sector may be providing better incentives for provider effort than administrative accountability in the public sector in this setting. While the overall quality of care is low both sectors, the differences in provider effort may partly explain the dominant market share of fee-charging private providers even in the presence of a system of free public healthcare.


Journal of Public Economics | 2017

The fiscal cost of weak governance: Evidence from teacher absence in India

Karthik Muralidharan; Jishnu Das; Alaka Holla; Aakash Mohpal

The relative return to strategies that augment inputs versus those that reduce inefficiencies remains a key open question for education policy in low-income countries. Using a new nationally-representative panel dataset of schools across 1297 villages in India, we show that the large public investments in education over the past decade have led to substantial improvements in input-based measures of school quality, but only a modest reduction in inefficiency as measured by teacher absence. In our data, 23.6% of teachers were absent during unannounced school visits, and we estimate that the salary cost of unauthorized teacher absence is


Journal of Political Economy | 2011

Teacher performance pay : experimental evidence from India

Karthik Muralidharan; Venkatesh Sundararaman

1.5 billion/year. We find two robust correlations in the nationally-representative panel data that corroborate findings from smaller-scale experiments. First, reductions in student-teacher ratios are correlated with increased teacher absence. Second, increases in the frequency of school monitoring are strongly correlated with lower teacher absence. Using these results, we show that reducing inefficiencies by increasing the frequency of monitoring could be over ten times more cost effective at increasing the effective student-teacher ratio than hiring more teachers. Thus, policies that decrease the inefficiency of public education spending are likely to yield substantially higher marginal returns than those that augment inputs.


Journal of the European Economic Association | 2005

Teacher Absence in India: A Snapshot

Michael Kremer; Nazmul Chaudhury; F. Halsey Rogers; Karthik Muralidharan; Jeffrey S. Hammer


Quarterly Journal of Economics | 2015

The Aggregate Effect of School Choice: Evidence from a Two-Stage Experiment in India

Karthik Muralidharan; Venkatesh Sundararaman


National Bureau of Economic Research | 2013

Contract Teachers: Experimental Evidence from India

Karthik Muralidharan; Venkatesh Sundararaman


Archive | 2006

Teacher incentives in developing countries : Experimental evidence from India

Venkatesh Sundararaman; Karthik Muralidharan


The Economic Journal | 2010

The Impact of Diagnostic Feedback to Teachers on Student Learning: Experimental Evidence from India*

Karthik Muralidharan; Venkatesh Sundararaman

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Paul Niehaus

University of California

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Alaka Holla

Innovations for Poverty Action

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