Affirmative action programs are often criticized because of concerns that they result in lower worker productivity and efficiency losses. We study the relative productivity of workers benefiting from an aggressive affirmative action policy in a setting where hiring constraints are especially likely to bind. In India, colleges are required to reserve approximately 50 percent of faculty hires for individuals from disadvantaged caste and social class groups. We collect and analyze data from a nationally representative sample of 50 engineering and technology colleges in India, some of which randomly assign students to classrooms. We find that reservation category faculty have lower levels of education, lower professorial ranks and fewer years of experience in academia than general category faculty who are not hired through reservations. Yet, even with lower qualifications, we find no evidence that reservation category faculty provide lower quality instruction across a wide range of measures that include course grades, follow-on course grades, standardized test scores, dropout, attendance, graduate school plans, and graduation. In fact, we find that, at least for immediate effects on course grades, students taught by reservation category faculty perform slightly better than students taught by general category faculty. We find no evidence of positive "teacher-like-me" effects of reservation category faculty on the relative course performance and longer-term outcomes of reservation category students. Furthermore, even in the face of potential discrimination and resentment against faculty hiring quotas, general category students perform slightly better in classrooms taught by reservation category faculty than general category faculty. The findings have implications for the heated debates over affirmative action programs found in many countries around the world and in India.
Girls outperform boys in teacher-assigned course grades by more than in test scores. These grade gaps expand as students progress through school, and predict gender gaps in long-term outcomes over and above what test score gaps predict. I ask whether teachers' impacts on these two outcomes differ between boys and girls -- and if so, what explains the differences. Using administrative data from North Carolina, I estimate value-added for fifth-grade teachers separately on test scores and course grades; the two measures are weakly correlated. Teachers with high test score value-added disproportionately benefit girls' middle-school outcomes, and teachers with high grade value-added disproportionately benefit boys'. Teachers' grade value-added also raises boys' likelihood of remaining in school and graduating high school, with substantially smaller effects for girls. A simple model explains the asymmetry: if the skills measured by test scores and grades are imperfect substitutes, then teachers who are especially good at developing one of those skills have their largest impacts on the students who are relatively deficient in that skill. Consistent with this, students who enter fifth grade relatively weaker on tests gain most from test score value-added, and students relatively weaker on grades gain most from grade value-added — regardless of gender. In turn, if boys and girls enter the classroom with different relative skill mixes, then teachers' gender-differentiated impacts arise without any role for teacher-student gender match or biased grading. These findings link multidimensional teacher effectiveness with multidimensional gender gaps in student achievement, suggesting that teacher effectiveness is not a single attribute and that its multidimensionality matters for which students benefit.
Draft available upon request · Abstract ▾
Despite rising college enrollment among women, gender disparities persist in STEM fields. We leverage a large-scale setting in which STEM undergraduates are randomly assigned to instructors---a feature rarely feasible in higher education---to provide causal evidence on the effects of exposure to female faculty. Female students assigned to female faculty perform better on externally graded course exams and score higher on standardized tests administered two years later, indicating effects of female faculty that persist beyond the immediate classroom context. Gains are largest among female students who report higher uncertainty about belonging in STEM. Female students also report lower anxiety about mathematics and science. We show that these effects are unlikely to be driven by differences in teaching or grading practices, and are instead consistent with exposure to identity-relevant cues that reduce female students’ anxiety about STEM. Exposure to female faculty also shifts beliefs away from stereotypes about women’s ability in mathematics and science, especially among male students. These findings suggest that repeated exposure to female faculty improves performance among female students and fosters more inclusive beliefs about women in STEM fields.
We study whether local schooling markets in India exhibit tipping-point dynamics in student caste composition. Using near-universal administrative panel data on schools, we define villages as local schooling markets and estimate village-level composition thresholds from the relationship between baseline caste shares and subsequent enrollment flows, adapting the Card et al. (2008) fixed-point procedure to multi-school markets. We study two caste contrasts: upper-caste versus all disadvantaged groups combined, and intermediate-caste versus the most marginalized. Estimated thresholds differ sharply across contrasts and concentrate at very different baseline shares, indicating that tipping is boundary-specific rather than a generic feature of composition change. Around these thresholds, within-village school segregation rises discontinuously by 12% for the upper-caste comparison and 42% for the within-disadvantaged caste comparison. These are driven by resorting across schools within the local market rather than shifts in village composition. School inputs and public grant flows exhibit parallel discrete changes at the same thresholds, with per-student grants jumping by about 30%. Threshold locations are lower where caste identity is more salient and higher where schooling markets are thicker, though both gradients largely reflect state-level heterogeneity. Together, these findings show that institutional responses to composition amplify household sorting, generating a supply-side response that affects school quality.