level; the number of schools randomly selected to participate in the survey in each district depended on the number of pupils attending primary school in that district.<sup>16</sup> For each school, three and seven students were randomly selected from grades three and six respectively. One teacher of the third graders and four teachers of the seventh graders were randomly selected to participate in the survey together with the parents of the selected pupils. Therefore, in each school we collected data from ten parents and five teachers, leading to total sample sizes of 1,800 parents and 900 teachers.<sup>17</sup> Besides demographics, we collected information about parents‟ involvement in the school accountability system, i.e. whether they participated in the latest elections of parent class representatives. We also elicited data on the degree to which each parent was informed about the existence of local accountability institutions, and their involvement in other aspects of their children‟s education, such as the number of meetings with the head teacher in the previous semester and how often they helped their children with homework. In designing the School Stakeholder Survey, we purposely replicated some relevant LSMS questions concerning education and social capital, with the aim to be able to check the extent to which our sample of parents is representative of the Albanian adult population. With respect to social capital, we collected information about: 1) membership in voluntary organizations; 2) participation in any community activity in the past year; 3) number of relatives and close friends among the surveyed parents (a measure of social ties in the community); 4) beliefs about community members‟ willingness to cooperate with each other in case of a water shortage; 5) a measure of generalized trust. As part of the survey, all parents and teachers were also involved in three behavioral games. In this paper we focus only on parents‟ behavior in a dichotomous public goods game.<sup>18</sup> After the games, we collected information about the existing social ties between the experimental participants.

# **3.2 The public goods experiment**

In order to generate a direct measure of individuals‟ propensities to coordinate and cooperate with others to solve collective action problems, we conducted a public goods experiment. Laboratory

> 16 The sample was drawn from the list of all public primary schools in Albania. There are 2691 public basic level schools in Albania, of which 12 percent are located in urban areas. Out of the 2691 primary schools, we defined as “eligible” those schools with five or more pupils in grade three, and ten or more pupils in grade seven. Only 1623 of the 2691 primary schools in the complete list met this eligibility criterion. However, only 9 percent of all Albanian public primary school pupils attend ineligible schools. The list of eligible schools was then divided into 36 strata according to district and either six, four or two schools was randomly sampled from each, the number depending on the number of pupils attending primary school in the district. Since the district of Tirana contained twice the percentage of pupils as well as twice the number of independent eligible schools, it was divided into two strata, Tirana Municipality and Tirana District, leading to a total of 37 strata. In all but two counties, the majority of surveyed schools where located in villages or hamlets with less than 3000 inhabitants. The average number of pupils per school is 327, although this number falls to 200 if we exclude the urban schools.

> 17 The MoES assisted in the implementation of the survey by  demanding the full cooperation of school directors and teachers in the sampled schools.

> 18 For a full description of the Albania School Stakeholder survey and behavioral experiments, see Serra, Barr and Packard (2011).

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