TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hanna,Rema
AU  - Linden,Leigh
TI  - Measuring Discrimination in Education
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15057
PY  - 2009
Y2  - June 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15057
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15057.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Rema Hanna
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/496-1140
Fax: 617/496-5747
E-Mail: rema_hanna@ksg.harvard.edu

Leigh L. Linden
Department of Economics
The Univesrity of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
BRB 1.116, C3100
Austin, Texas 78712
E-Mail: leigh.linden@austin.utexas.edu
AB  - In this paper, we illustrate a methodology to measure discrimination in educational contexts.  In India, we ran an exam competition through which children compete for a large financial prize.  We recruited teachers to grade the exams. We then randomly assigned child "characteristics" (age, gender, and caste) to the cover sheets of the exams to ensure that there is no systematic relationship between the characteristics observed by the teachers and the quality of the exams.  We find that teachers give exams that are assigned to be lower caste scores that are about 0.03 to 0.09 standard deviations lower than exams that are assigned to be high caste.  The effect is small relative to the real differences in scores between the high and lower caste children.  Low-performing, low caste children and top-performing females tend to lose out the most due to discrimination.  Interestingly, we find that the discrimination against low caste students is driven by low caste teachers, while teachers who belong to higher caste groups do not appear to discriminate at all.  This result runs counter to the previous literature, which tends to find that individuals discriminate in favor of members of their own groups.
ER  -