Date: 23rd August 2017 (Wednesday)
Time: 4:00 pm
Venue: Seminar Hall 1
Abstract
In this paper we examine whether students’ and teachers’ social identity play any role in the learning outcome of the students. More importantly, we ask if a student benefit by learning from a teacher of the same gender of his/her own gender. Unlike the existing literature which explains such interaction in terms of role model based effect, we explain such interaction in terms of gender based sorting across private and public schools. Our results are driven by two critical difference between male and female members. For male and female teachers, the difference comes from their differential opportunity costs of teaching in schools at remote locations. For students, the difference between male and female members come from their difference in the return to human capital – for girls, a lower fraction of their return come to their parental families after they are married off. These factors create a sorting pattern which give rise to an impact of gender matching. We then test our theoretical results using survey data collected from Andhra Pradesh.
