are consistent with the interpretation that improved ’top down’ administrative monitoring can have a significant and substantial impact on reducing unauthorized teacher absence.

In contrast, there is less evidence that increases in ‘bottom up’ monitoring by the community (measured by whether the PTA had met in the past 3 months) are correlated with reductions in teacher absence (Table 5). This is consistent with the experimental results reported in Olken (2007) on the impacts of monitoring corruption in Indonesia. These results should not be interpreted as suggesting that bottom-up monitoring _cannot_ be effective, since it is also likely that they reflect differences in the effective authority over teachers possessed by administrative superiors (high) versus parents (low). PTAs in India typically do not have authority to appoint or retain regular civil-service teachers, and they cannot sanction teachers for absence or non-performance. Inspectors and administrative superiors, on the other hand, do possess authority over teachers, including the ability to demand explanations for absence, to make adverse entries in teachers’ performance record, and in extreme cases to initiate disciplinary proceedings. These actions do not take place very often, but the administrative rules provide inspectors with the powers to take these actions, whereas PTAs do not have any such powers.<sup>23</sup> As in the case of the changes in STR, the stability of the estimates to the introduction of state and district fixed effects as well as a full set of controls helps mitigate concerns about omitted variables bias. To further address identification concerns, we examine the extent to which changes in inspection frequency can be explained by other observables, and find that there are no correlations between changes in inspection frequency and changes in other observable measures of school quality that are significant across our three standard specifications (Table 7). Finally, these results are also consistent with experimental evidence from India that finds significant reduction in teacher absence in response to improved monitoring and professional consequences that are linked to better attendance (Duflo, Hanna and Ryan, 2012). Since the experimental study was carried out in a small sample of informal schools fraction of teacher absence that is recorded as “official duty” and increase the fraction that is recorded as “authorized leave”. These results are consistent with head teachers and teachers colluding to some extent to record absences as being due to official duty that do not count against a teacher’s quota of authorized leave. Increased inspections may make it difficult to sustain this collusion (since the inspector will be able to verify if the teacher is away on official duty) and require more of the absences to be counted against a teacher’s official leave quota.

> 23In addition to the possibility of formal disciplinary action against absent teachers, an additional channel for the deterrence effect of increased inspections on teacher absence may stem from the possibility that inspectors can extract side payments from absent teachers in return for not making a formal adverse entry on their service record (World Bank, 2003). Social norms would make it difficult to ‘extort’ such payments from teachers who are actually present, but it would be much easier to demand a payment from an absent teacher. Thus, even if the costs of initiating formal disciplinary action are high (and the incidence of such action is low), there may be other informal channels through which more frequent inspections serve as a disincentive for teacher absence.

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