Are educated leaders good for education? Evidence from India

Is economic development affected by the leaders' education levels? Evidence from India

“…First and most directly, our paper contributes to the literature exploring whether education is an important marker in determining the skill and competence of leaders holding public office. Specifically, our findings contribute to discover whether educated leaders enhance economic development in their jurisdiction by facilitating provision of public infrastructure (Bastos and Sánchez 2021;Besley et al 2011;Carnes and Lupu 2016;Curto-Grau and Gallego 2019;Lahoti and Sahoo 2020;Mitra 2020). Our estimates based on RD specification and data from a developing country adds to the existing body of evidence.…”

“…Candidate characteristics that have been found to matter include gender Bhalotra et al , 2018Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004), caste (Pande 2003), criminality (Prakash et al 2019), political affiliation (Gulzar and Pasquale 2017;Hill and Jones 2017), and political alignment (Asher and Novosad 2017). We add to this strand by considering education to be an important dimension of a leader's identity and add evidence to the related literature (Besley et al 2011;Carnes and Lupu 2016;Lahoti and Sahoo 2020).…”

“…They may drive more investment from businesses leading to higher growth (François et al 2020) or improve chances of reforms as educated leaders understand them better (Dreher et al 2009). On the other hand, education may impart human capital, but that may not transfer into political ability to carry out policy tasks efficiently (Carnes and Lupu 2016;Lahoti and Sahoo 2020), or there may be a mismatch between preferences of educated leaders and their constituents (Curto-Grau and Gallego 2019).…”

“…Our estimates based on RD specification and data from a developing country adds to the existing body of evidence. To the best of our knowledge, Lahoti and Sahoo (2020) is the only other paper that analyses the effect of educated leaders in the Indian context. They investigate the impact of graduate legislators on quality of education in schools in the legislators' constituencies.…”

Does More Schooling Imply Improved Learning? Evidence From a Conditional Cash Transfer Programme in India

“…The survey also gathered information on basic arithmetic and reading proficiency levels using well tested rigorous tools. 11 These tools are administered for all children across the districts and states and have been used extensively by other studies (Chakraborty & Jayaraman, 2018;Lahoti & Sahoo, 2020). Assessment of reading skills has four ordinal levels: recognition of letters, reading of words, reading a short paragraph (a grade 1 level text), and reading a short story (a grade 2 level text).…”