women back to the households they live in, the match is not exclusive: in about 40% of cases, there is more than one woman of childbearing age in a household<sup>11</sup> .

We estimate Equation (2), treating the 1998/9 NFHS-2 cohort as a baseline and the 2006 NFHS-3 cohort as the “post-program cohort”. We restrict our sample to children ages 7- 11 years in both survey waves. The outcomes of interest are an indicator for ever having schooling and number of school years completed<sup>12</sup> . As we do not have an explicit measure of dropping out across both waves, we also look at the effect on years of education conditional on ever having had schooling. As before, we control for householdlevel characteristics such as urban location, religion, BPL and SC/OBC status. We do not have mother-level characteristics or number of siblings, but we are able to include a measure of household size.

The results in Table 7 suggest consistent but statistically insignificant improvement for girls ages 7-11. The likelihood of receiving any education increases slightly (Table 7, Column 1), as do unconditional years of schooling. These findings hold in both a standard OLS specification and a Tobit regression (accounting for censoring at 0). See Table 7, Columns 2 and 3. Conditional on receiving any education, eligible girls are likely to have more years of schooling (Table 7, Columns 2 and 4), which suggest that girls in the program are more likely to continue their education once they start. This may be another effect of the long-term nature of financial incentives: although the incentives may be too weak to move the marginal child into school, they may still play a role in helping girls stay in school longer.

# **5. Further Analysis and Robustness Checks**

# **5.1 Poverty Criteria**

> 11 Several alternative strategies were considered. For the earlier NFHS, the following compromise may be proposed: from each mother’s birth history, we retrieve information on their children’s birthdate, and whether that child is still living with them. We will also be able to impute the child’s relationship to household head implied by the mother’s relationship. We are able to match mothers with the household roster by line number. We may then attempt to identify the children for each mother by matching child age, gender and relationship to household head implied by the mother’s relationship. However, in this case, there is much room for error, for many reasons: for example, the age records in the household roster are elicited in years rather than computed from birth dates as in the birth history, and much more likely to be grouped around focal years. More importantly, measurement error will be highly and systematically correlated with family structure: larger extended families with cousins of similar age living together for example (where all children are likely to be grandchildren of the household head).  Another strategy is to simply retain only the household roster entries of children of the household head in each case and match them to women who report being the wife of the household head or the household head themselves. This has the disadvantage again of keeping a sample that is highly selected on household structure.

> 12 NFHS-2 interviews were carried out from November 1998-February 1999, while NFHS-3 interviews were carried out from April to June 2006. Children born in October 1994 or later would thus be aged 11 at the time of NFHS-3. Under India’s Universal Primary Education policy, all children aged 6 and above at the time of the academic school year are entitled to school enrollment. As the school year in Haryana begins in late April, NFHS-2 potentially includes 6 year olds who were not age-eligible to enroll for that school year while NFHS-3 may include unenrolled 6 year olds whose schools begin late or late enrolles for that school year (more likely to be included in NFHS-2). Unfortunately birth date information for these children is not recorded. This makes education history measures less comparable for 6 year olds, and also has implications for comparing current enrolment across any age group (not recorded in NFHS-2, in any case). For 7 year olds, however, having any schooling is a comparable outcome between the two groups, as are completed years of previous education.

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