199 villages to correct for errors made in determining whether a given village qualified for the program. SEF’s corrections were orthogonal to the assigned program status of the village. The effective evaluation sample consisted of 82 villages under the gender-uniform subsidy treatment, 79 under the gender-differentiated one, and 38 as controls. Mean household and child characteristics, at baseline and follow-up measurement in the 199 villages, were similar across the experimental groups. Follow-up measurement was conducted after program schools had completed about 1.5 school years.

The program appears to have been highly effective. It increased school enrollment for children aged 6–10, the program’s stated target age group, by 30 percentage points, and that for children aged 11–17 by 12 percentage points. The program also raised total test scores by 0.63 standard deviations, and by two standard deviations for children induced by the program to enroll in school. The gender-differentiated subsidy treatment had similar impacts on girls’ enrollment and test scores as the gender-uniform one. Program-village households were more likely to voice aspirations for their boys to become doctors and engineers, rather than security personnel; and for their girls to become teachers, rather than housewives. Program-village households also expressed desire for their boys and girls to attain higher levels of education.

The relative effectiveness of government versus private schools on student learning has been the subject of significant interest in the education-economics literature. This literature includes growing empirical evidence from developing countries (Angrist et al., 2002; Newhouse and Beegle, 2006; Desai et al., 2009; French and Kingdon, 2010; Bold et al., 2014; Muralidharan and Sundararaman, 2015; Singh, 2015), including from Pakistan based on cross-sectional and panel observational data (Andrabi et al., 2010, 2011; Amjad and MacLeod, 2014). The main general concern, however, is the extent to which the estimates of privateschool effectiveness are due to household selection—that is, by the types of children that enroll in private schools—rather than actual private-school productivity.

We contribute to the literature on private-school effectiveness by comparing the test-score performance of program schools and proximate government schools, and assessing the degree to which changes in student composition are behind the result. We do this by comparing government-school students in program and control villages at follow-up, which serves as our measure of potential sorting. We find that program-school students performed better than government-school students, scoring 0.16 standard deviations higher in the total test, despite coming from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. We also find that the composition of government-school students remained largely unchanged in program villages. Education-production estimates show that student test scores were driven by precisely those school inputs that SEF and individual program-school operators can, and do, adjust – such as the characteristics of teachers. These inputs lie outside the control of individual government schools, given their centralized administration by provincial and district education 2