College Quality and Who it Matters for: Evidence from Centralized Admissions in India
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About the talk:
Muralidharan estimates the academic value-added of college–major programs in a large
Indian higher-education system that combines a standardized entrance exam, centralized
preference-based program assignment with affirmative-action cutoffs, and standardized
university semester examinations. The setting allows us to measure learning on a common
scale within majors and to identify the effects of marginal admission at program-specific
admission cutoffs using a regression discontinuity (RD) design. Admission to a more
selective program increases academic achievement by about 0.11 standard deviations
and raises graduation rates by roughly 3-4 percentage points for marginal admits.
Muralidharan benchmarks these RD estimates against observational, ordinary least squares
(OLS) value-added measures constructed with rich baseline controls. OLS and RD estimates
align closely for students not targeted by affirmative action policies but diverge
for affirmative action students. He further develops a framework that decomposes program
value-added into an academic-environment component and an ordinal-rank component.
Admission to a more selective program improves peer quality and institutional inputs
while lowering a student’s relative standing within the cohort. Exploiting multiple
category-specific cutoffs within the same program, he separately identifies these
effects. Findings show that in selective admissions systems, academic value-added
is inherently margin-specific, reflecting the joint effects of peer composition, institutional
environment, and ordinal rank induced by admission.
About the speaker:
Karthik Muralidharan is the Tata Chancellor's Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. Prof. Muralidharan's primary research interests include development, public, and labor economics. Specific topics of interest include education, health, and social protection. His recent work has focused on state capacity and scaling evidence-based programs to improve human development. He is a global TED speaker and the author of the book Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance, which won the Crossword Book Award 2024 and the Gaja Capital Book Prize 2025.He is also the Founder and Scientific Director of the Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS), a non-profit organization working with state governments in India to support governance reforms to accelerate development.
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