Where _i_ indexes schools, _X_ includes baseline socioeconomic characteristics, _FSSP_ is a binary variable that takes the value 1 for a stipend-eligible school and 0 otherwise. measures the net impact of the stipend program.

Therefore, the school-level analysis measures whether the increase in enrollment experienced by a cohort when they first joined the program (the short-term impact) is continued through successive grades relative to the trend observed for the comparison cohort. A sustained increase in net enrollment could be due to increased transition across grades (the push effect), reduction in drop-out rates, and/or influx of new entrants (including both rejoiners and those who switch schools). Yet, the school-level approach cannot distinguish these channels of impacts since the school censuses do not provide information to measure them separately. However, preprogram and post-program data from household surveys indicate that female rejoining (new entrants) and grade repetition at the middle school level is very low.<sup>19</sup> This suggests that net changes in female enrollment (if they happen) are largely driven by the combined effects of the program on both transition and dropout rates.

# **_Household-level Analysis_**

The units of observation used for this analysis consist of girls expected to be exposed to the program for at least one year between 2003-04 and 2007-08. Although the household survey data used for this analysis provide rich information on a wide variety of indicators, they do not contain explicit information on the treatment status and length of exposure of girls to the FSSP.

Therefore, some steps were taken to select the girls who fall within an age range and are likely to have been exposed to the program for at least one year. The motivation for constructing synthetic cohorts based on age and grade criteria, as opposed to only an age based criterion, was to arrive at a cohort that is more reflective of actual participants<sup>20</sup> Annex B explains more fully

> 19 Both rejoiners and repeaters constituted around 0.5 percent of total enrollment in middle school at baseline. Not only were these rates similar between stipend and non-stipend districts in 2003-04, there has been no differential growth in these rates between 2003-04 and 2007-08. School switching is another source of compositional change within the cohort. At baseline, around 2 percent of all children enrolled in middle schools switched from private to public schools while a similar proportion switched from public to private (the difference is statistically insignificant). So at baseline, compositional shifts stemming from re-entry, repetition and school switching accounted for some 5 percent of total enrollment in middle school level. There are no comparable data on school switching in the 2007-08 survey, but the change in repetition and rejoining rate at the middle school level remained comparable between stipend and non-stipend districts between 2003-04 and 2007-08.

> 20 The previous impact evaluation of the FSSP (Chaudhury and Parajuli 2008) used cohorts of children 10-14 years old from cross-sectional household surveys to triangulate the findings derived from school data. However, an examination of the age-grade

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