Tag: Regression Discontinuity Design
Education for the Poor
Authors: Lasha Lanchava and Zurab Abramishvili, ISET and CERGE-EI.
This brief summarizes the results of a study by Lanchava and Abramishvili (2015), which investigates the impact on university enrollment of an unconditional cash transfer in Georgia, designed to help households living below the subsistence level. The program, introduced in 2005, selects recipients based on a quantitative poverty threshold, which gives us the opportunity to measure the influence on university enrollment with an econometric regression discontinuity design. We use data on program recipients from the Social Service Agency of Georgia (SSA) and university admissions from the National Examination Center (NAEC) to create a single dataset and compare the enrollment rates of applicants who are just above and below the threshold. We find that being a program recipient significantly increases a student’s likelihood of university enrollment by as much as 1.4 percentage points (while the sample mean of university enrollment is 12.7%). We also find that the impact is stronger for males and the firstborn children in a family. Our analysis also shows that the effect is equally strong across different locations in the country. Our straightforward policy recommendation is that if a government is trying to increase enrollment in tertiary education, need-based university scholarships may prove to be an appropriate instrument.
Political Islam and Women’s Rights – Evidence from Turkey
In this policy brief, I discuss how state-of-the-art econometric techniques can be used to shed light on the causal effects of Islamic rule on women’s rights. A central empirical challenge is that the identity of a politician is endogenous to voter characteristics, which in the case of Islamic political participation is particularly important due to the prevalence of banning such parties in many Muslim countries. Using a research design called Regression Discontinuity, I show that despite a negative association between Islamic rule and female participation in education in Turkey, the causal effect of an Islamic party on women’s rights is positive. In the case of Turkey, this represents the Islamic political movement’s advantage over secular alternatives in overcoming barriers to female participation in voluntary education institutions among the poor and pious.