Asia region, one of the constraints to improving education outcomes seems to be the amount of effort that teachers exert. For example, throughout India but particularly in its low income states, teacher absenteeism averages over 20 percent and the fiscal cost of teacher absence is estimated to be around 1.5 billion US dollars per year (Chaudhury et al., 2006, and Muralidharan et al., 2014).<sup>3</sup> More tangibly, interventions targeting individuals on the supply-side of the education sector usually center on an improvement in resources or inputs allocated to teachers or are motivated by an incentives-based approach in the spirit of the 2004 World Development Report (World Bank, 2004). Additionally, some aim to change teachers’ behaviors based on insights derived from behavioral economics. Maybe the most traditional input-based approach is to hire better-educated and more experienced teachers in the hope that this will improve students’ learning outcomes. For a while, the conventional wisdom has been that such standard measures of teacher quality usually fail to influence learning outcomes. In fact, experimental or quasi-experimental evidence on this topic is rather scarce. But regressions controlling for observable variables and pupil fixed effects indeed show that in Punjab, Pakistan, variables such as teacher certification and experience had no bearing on students’ standardized marks (though they were important determinants of teachers’ pay). In contrast, teaching “process” variables like lesson planning, involving students through asking questions during class and quizzing them on past material significantly influenced children’s learning (Aslam and Kingdon, 2011). Similar regressions for India demonstrate that measures such as a teacher’s MA qualification, preservice teacher training and a first division in the teacher’s own Higher Secondary exam could actually have payoffs in terms of higher student achievement, but that these payoffs depended very much on the school environments. In this particular context, the level of unionization appeared to be an especially important variable (Kingdon and Teal, 2010).

One sub-group of interventions focused on individuals on the supply-side of the education sector for which positive influences on learning outcomes have consistently been found supplements regular teachers with volunteers. A study for Uttar Pradesh, India, demonstrates that training volunteers to hold remedial reading camps significantly increased the reading skills of camp participants. The same study showed that hiring a _balsakhi_ , i.e. a young woman from the community, to teach students lagging behind in basic literacy and numeracy skills proved successful as well. The _balsakhi_ intervention increased average test scores in treatment schools by 0.14 standard deviations in the first cohort exposed to the program and by 0.28 standard deviations in another group of children that was exposed to it one year later. The positive learning impacts were mostly due to large gains experienced by children at the bottom of the test-score distribution and at costs of about two US dollars per child per year the intervention was relatively economical (Banerjee et al., 2007). In a different randomized control trial in Andhra Pradesh, India, volunteers were again trained to hold remedial lessons. In addition to that, children were also provided with learning materials. At costs of between 48 US dollars

> 3 Besides teachers’ effort, a wide range of other aspects of teachers’ behaviors might have a positive or negative influence on education outcomes. One of these aspects is whether teachers are fair instead of biased towards certain groups of students. In this context, an RCT designed to test for discrimination in grading in India found that teachers gave exams purportedly coming from lower cast students scores that were 0.03 to 0.08 standard deviations lower than those they gave to exams that had been labeled as coming from high cast students (Hanna and Linden, 2012).

- 14 -