Improving human capital through education is a critical piece of the development puzzle.
PDEL projects have pursued innovative and cost-effective strategies to incorporate technology into the classroom and to improve incentives for successful education outcomes for students and teachers.
Past Projects
Andhra Pradesh School Choice Project
Researcher: Karthik Muralidharan (UC San Diego)
Location: India
Private schools are gaining popularity in developing countries and so are government programs that provide vouchers for poor students to attend them. In India, this project measured the impact of providing vouchers to attend private schools on student learning.
Teacher Performance Pay
Researchers: Karthik Muralidharan (UC San Diego) and Venkatesh Sundararaman (World Bank)
Location: India
Can incentives such as pay for performance improve the educational outcomes? This large-scale evaluation of a teacher performance pay program in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh provides evidence that such incentives may be an effective tool.
Leveraging Technology to Motivate Students
Researcher: Karthik Muralidharan (UC San Diego)
Graduate Student Researcher: Sarojini Hirshleifer
Location: India
This experiment tested whether student incentives can improve learning outcomes. It relies on a novel technology-based learning platform (KA Lite) as a tool to directly reward student effort through both tangible and non-tangible incentives.
Faculty
Julian Betts
Department of Economics
Karthik Muralidharan
Department of Economics
