village level.<sup>8</sup> Enumerators first conducted school censuses in each village, from which we sampled up to three schools per village for the absence surveys. During fieldwork, enumerators made three separate visits to each sampled school over a period of 10 months from January - October 2010.<sup>9</sup> Data on school infrastructure and accessibility, finances (income and expenditure), and teacher demographics were collected once for each school (typically during the first visit, but completed in later visits if necessary), while data on time-varying metrics such as teacher and student attendance and dates of the most recent inspections and PTA meetings were collected in each of the three visits. We also assessed student learning with a test administered to a representative sample of fourth grade students in sampled schools. See Appendix A and Appendix Tables 1-3 for further details on sampling and construction of the village-level panel data set.

Teacher absence was measured by direct physical verification of teacher presence within the first fifteen minutes of a survey visit. Data collected during the school census were used to pre-populate teacher rosters for the sampled schools, so that enumerators could look for teachers and record their attendance and activity immediately after their arrival at the school.<sup>10</sup> Once teacher attendance was recorded, all other data were collected using interviews of head teachers and individual teachers.<sup>11</sup> We record teachers as absent on a given visit if they were not found anywhere in the school in the first fifteen minutes after enumerators reached a school. We consider all the teachers in the school to be absent if the school was closed during regular working hours on a school day, and respondents near the school did not know why the school was closed or mentioned that the school was closed because no teacher had arrived or they had all left

> 8This is also why the 2010 wave did not include urban areas. Since school-level identifiers from the 2003 survey were not preserved (for confidentiality reasons), the panel needed to be constructed at the town/village level. However, since the fraction of urban schools covered in 2003 (relative to the total number of schools in the sampled towns) was very small, it was not possible to construct a credible panel-data estimate of school quality in towns. In rural areas, this was not a concern because we typically covered all the public schools in a village (in 84.2 percent of the cases) and had a mean coverage rate of 82.7 percent of public schools in the sampled villages.

9While the exact timing of the school year is not identical across states, the typical school year runs from mid-June to mid-April. The three visits therefore spanned two academic years, with the first visit being made during January - March 2010, the second visit being made during June - August, and the third visit during August - October 2010.

> 10This was important given the widespread possession of cell phones among teachers, which would allow them to call up absent colleagues as soon as they saw external visitors in the school who were measuring teacher absence.

> 11Not all interviews could be completed. Most non-responses were at the teacher as opposed to the school level (since absent teachers could not be interviewed, whereas school data could be obtained from either the head teacher or any other senior teacher). These non-responses are unlikely to affect the analysis in this paper because the panel-data analysis will focus on aggregated data at the village level as opposed to the individual data at the teacher level.

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