Adapting the supply of education to the needs of girls: Evidence from a policy experiment in rural India

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a large-scale government initiative (NPEGEL/KGBV) that provided earmarked funds for addressing girls' special needs to public schools in rural India. Our empirical strategy exploits local variation in program eligibility around a threshold based on the female literacy rate at the community level. The main result is that the program led to an enrollment gain of about six to seven percentage points for girls in upper primary school. Evidence of an enrollment gain for boys is tentative. Available evidence on mechanisms suggests that the program improved girl-friendly school infrastructure and services as well as gender-neutral school resources.