Newhouse, David, and Kathleen Beegle. 2006. “The Effect of School Type on Academic Achievement: Evidence from Indonesia.” Journal of Human Resources 41(3): 529–557.
Using Indonesian data, this paper evaluates the impact of school type on the academic achievement of junior secondary school students (grades 7–9). Public school graduates, after controlling for a wide variety of characteristics, score 0.17 to 0.3 standard deviations higher on the national exit exam than their privately schooled peers. This finding is robust to OLS, fixed effects, and instrumental variable estimation strategies. Students attending Muslim private schools, including Madrassahs, fare no worse on average than students attending secular private schools. Our results provide indirect evidence that higher-quality inputs at public junior secondary schools promote higher test scores.
David Newhouse is a technical assistance advisor in the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund. Kathleen Beegle is a senior economist in the Development Economics Research Group at the World Bank. The material and views expressed here are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the IMF or the World Bank or their member countries. The authors thank Elizabeth King, Joe Newhouse, two anonymous referees, and participants of seminars at the World Bank Resident Mission in Jakarta, Minnesota Development Economics Conference, and Cornell University for useful comments. David Newhouse will assist any scholar in seeking access to these data between January 2007 and December 2010. He may be contacted at: International Monetary Fund, 700 19th Street NW, Washington, DC 20431 Phone: 202-623-5682; E-mail: dnewhouse@imf.org.