Evaluating the intrinsic effect of institutions: theory with applications to school of governance

• In Event: What contributions can randomized experiments (RCTs) make to our understanding of education systems reforms?

Proposal

How can we best identify and separate out the effect of an institution from the effect of some associated policy? This paper develops a framework to explain how the intrinsic effect of institutions of governance (deliberation or School-Based Management) can be identified by randomized experiments. Unlike traditional experiments, the treatment is a decision-making process over a menu of policy options. We use a simple theoretical model to show how individual beliefs over alternative policies may be affected by the collective choice’s revelation mechanism. That belief change generates an effect that is specific to that collective choice or institutions. We show that the potential outcome of a community assigned to a policy under a given institution can be obtained as the sum of a component driven by the initial belief towards the policy and another component driven by the differential effort towards outcome generated by beliefs update. We propose a practical statistical approach for estimating the intrinsic causal effects of institutions, and we show that our estimator has desirable statistical properties. We apply the framework to data on school of governance.

Authors

• Leonard Wantchekon, Princeton University

• Yves Atchade, Boston University

• Pierre Nguimpeu, Georgia State University