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# _2.b.5. Parents’ and Community Characteristics_

69. Following the existing practice, we control for the average level of education of fathers and mothers of the students enrolled in the school. We also report whether at least one parent reports being unemployed, and among the possible occupations of the employed parents, we give special attention to farming. In order to further account for parents‟ preferences for education we register the number of books kept in the households (self-reported by parents), and we ask parents whether they agree or disagree (on a 5-point Likert scale) with the following statement: “There is not much point in sending my children to school, because education won‟t help them to find a better job when they grow up.” We report the proportion of parents in each school who disagree or strongly disagree with the statement. Finally, following Filmer and Pritchett (2001) we construct an index of household socio-economic status based on parents‟ answer to 13 questions aimed at registering whether the household owned a number of assets, such as a washing machine, a fridge, an oven, a car, a mobile phone etc. We conduct principal factor analysis on the answers to the 13 questions and report the resulting first factor, which represents our index of household socioeconomic status.<sup>26</sup> 70. While ethnic fragmentation is not a problem in Albania – only 2.5% of the surveyed stakeholders speak a language different than Albanian (Greek) in their households – divisions within the community based on wealth, and/or education and/or landholding, and/or political affiliation may prevent parents from collectively participate in the school, possibly leading to lower education outcomes.<sup>27</sup> In order to measure the extent of divide within the community we asked all surveyed stakeholders the following question: _“There are often differences between people living in the same village/neighborhood. For example, difference in wealth, income, social status, ethnic or ethnic-linguistic background. There can also be differences in religious or political beliefs, or there can be differences due to age or sex. To what extent do any such differences divide your village/neighborhood?”_ 71. We then registered the answers of the different school stakeholders on a scale from 1 (to a very small extent) to 5 (to great extent) and computed the average across respondents per school. In order to proxy the value given to education in the community, or lack thereof, we report the proportion of stakeholders that agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Parents in my community still do not understand the benefits of education for their children”. We aimed to directly measure individuals‟ propensities to cooperate with other members of the community by asking respondents whether they agreed or disagreed (on a 5-point Likert scale) with the following two statements: (1) “In this village /neighborhood, there are people who want to take advantage”; (2) “most people in this village/neighborhood are willing to help if you need it”. We also asked how likely it is that if there were, for instance, a water supply problem people would cooperate to try to solve the problem. Finally, we registered whether in the past year, the respondent or any household member “participated in any community activities, in which people came together to do some work

> 26 Principal factor analysis is a technique used to summarize the information contained in a large number of variables to a smaller number by creating a set of mutually uncorrelated components of the data. The first factor is the linear index of all the observed variables that captures the most common variation among them. In the case of our index of socioeconomic status, the first factor captures 52% of the common variation among the 13 asset variables.

> 27 Retrospective studies of the relationship between education inputs and outcomes do not usually account for community characteristics among the possible determinants of school performance. However, Bjorkman and Svensson (2010), in their study – based on RCTs – of the impact of participatory programs on health outcomes in Uganda, have shown that division within the community, and particularly ethnic fractionalization, may prevent collective action for improved service provision, resulting in lower outcomes than in more homogeneous societies.  Galiani et al. (2008) in their study of decentralization efforts in Argentinean secondary schools (based on a “political natural experiment”), have shown that areas that are poorly administrated and characterized by populations that do not usually voice their preferences may be left behind and end up worse off rather than better off following decentralization.