The Impact of Eyeglasses on the Academic Performance of Primary School Students: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Rural China

Transcription

1 The Impact of Eyeglasses on the Academic Performance of Primary School Students: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Rural China Paul Glewwe University of Minnesota Albert Park HKUST Meng Zhao Waseda University September, 2011 Abstract: About 10% of primary school students in developing countries have poor vision, yet in virtually all of these countries very few children wear glasses. There has been almost no research on the impact of poor vision on school performance in developing countries, and simple OLS estimates are likely to be biased because students who study more often are likely to develop poor vision faster. This paper presents results from a randomized trial in Western China that began in the summer of The trial involves over 19,000 students in 165 schools in two counties of Gansu province. The schools were randomly divided (at the township level) into 103 schools that received eyeglasses (for students in grades 4-6) and 62 schools that served as controls. The results indicate that, after one year, making eyeglasses available increased average test scores by 0.11 to 0.15 standard deviations (of the distribution of the test scores). For those students who accepted the glasses, average test scores increased by 0.15 to 0.22 standard deviations. Data collection for the Gansu Survey of Children and Families was supported by grants from The Spencer Foundation Small and Major Grants Programs (wave 1), by NIH Grants 1R01TW and 5R01TW (wave 2), and by a grant from the World Bank (wave 2). Travel was supported by the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. We would like to thank Kate Arnold, Esther Duflo, Karthik Muralidharan and Andrew Zeitlin for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

2 I. Introduction Most economists agree that higher levels of education increase economic growth (Barro, 1991; Mankiw, Romer and Weil, 1992; Hanushek and Kimko, 2000; Krueger and Lindahl, 2001; Sala-i-Martin, 2004; Hanushek and Woessmann, 2008), raising incomes and, more generally, the quality of life. Economists support for education is matched by strong support from international development agencies. Two of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 focus on education: first, all children should complete primary school, and second, gender equality should prevail at all education levels. Yet school enrollment may have little effect on economic growth and individuals incomes if few academic skills are obtained when children are in school. While economists and other social scientists have learned what education policies are effective at increasing school enrollment, much less is known about what policies are most effective in increasing student learning (Glewwe and Kremer, 2006). Recently, a series of randomized control trials conducted by development economists has started to produce evidence on the impact of specific interventions on student learning. But these interventions and most previous education policy reforms have focused on improving the quality of schools and teachers the supply side of education. Much less attention has been paid to increasing the capabilities of students themselves to learn. An important exception is school meal programs, now mandated nationwide in India and available to students in many countries. School meals have been found to increase student nutritional intake as well as attendance and enrolment rates (xx), but as yet there is not strong evidence that school meals or health interventions such 1

3 as deworming, increase learning as measured by test scores. This paper examines a specific intervention that may increase student learning in developing countries that, to date, has received little attention: providing eyeglasses to primary school students with vision problems. Approximately 10% of primary school age children in developing countries have vision problems, and although in almost all cases these problems can be corrected with properly fitted eyeglasses, very few children in developing countries wear eyeglasses. This paper presents results from a randomized trial in Western China that offered eyeglasses to children in grades 4, 5 and 6. More specifically, it presents estimates of the impact of being offered eyeglasses and, because about one third of those offers were turned down, estimates of the impact of wearing eyeglasses. [preview results] The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II provides information on education in China and vision problems among school-age children, and reviews the small literature on the impact of vision problems on student performance in developing countries. Section III describes the randomized trial and the data available from it. Section IV describes the estimation methodology, and Section V presents the results. Section VI presents checks of the robustness of the results, and Section VII presents exploratory estimates of factors that explain why some children did not accept the free eyeglasses. A final section summarizes the results and provides recommendations for further research. II. Background and Literature Review 2

4 This section provides an overview of primary education in rural China and a brief literature review of the extent of vision problems among primary school students in developing countries and the impact of those problems on student performance. A. Primary Education in Rural China. China has achieved nearly universal primary school enrollment. According to the 2000 census, only four percent of adults aged 25 to 29 had not attended any formal schooling (Hannum et al., 2008). The Law on Compulsory Education passed in 1986 mandates that all children complete nine years of schooling six years of primary school and three years of lower secondary school. However, the rural poor and some minority populations continue to face difficulties in meeting this compulsory schooling goal. In rural areas of Western China, nearly all children attend the nearest public primary school, located in their own village or in a nearby village. A typical primary school has one or two classes per grade level. Teachers are allocated to schools within the county by the county educational bureau, and their salaries are paid by the county government. Thus, disparities in primary school quality within counties are generally fairly modest (Li et al, 2009). This also helps explain why few students attend school while living away from home. Each county in China has a Center for Disease Control office, which conducts regular physical exams of all students, including eye exams. In principle, health exams should be conducted every year for all students, but because of budgetary and staff constraints, in many areas schools conduct physical exams only once every two or three years. The results of the physical exams are given to the school s teachers, who convey the information to parents. 3

5 B. Vision Problems and School Performance. Very little data exist on vision problems among school-age children in developing countries. Bundy et al (2003) report that about 10% of school-age (5-15 years old) children have refraction errors (myopia, hypermetropia. strabismus, amblyopia, and astigmatism), which account for about 97% of the vision problems among those children. Almost all refraction errors can be corrected with properly fitted eyeglasses, but most children with refraction problems in low income countries do not have glasses. In China, a study by Zhao et al. (2000) in one district in Beijing found that 12.8% of children age 5-15 years had vision problems, of which 90% were due to refraction errors. Only 21% of the children with vision problems had glasses. In rural areas, children with vision problems are even less likely to wear glasses, as will be seen below. In China, a commonly held (but mistaken) view is that wearing eyeglasses causes children s vision to deteriorate faster. Given the lack of data on vision problems among school-age children in developing countries, there has been very little research on the impact of poor vision on students academic performance. Only one published study exists; Gomes-Neto et al. (1997) found large negative impacts of poor vision on primary school children in Northeast Brazil. In particular, they found that children with compromised vision (less than 90 on the Sneller chart) had a 10 percentage point higher probability of dropping out of school, an 18 percentage point higher probability of repeating a grade, and scored about 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations lower on achievement tests. Yet these estimates could be biased. First, to the extent that some of these children wore glasses their vision could be correlated with unobserved factors that determine school performance, such as parental preferences for educated children. Second, even if none of these children wore 4

6 glasses, students vision can be affected by their home environment (e.g. lighting quality) and by their daily activities, including time spent studying and completing homework. Thus their vision could be correlated with unobserved factors that have a direct impact on school performance (e.g. hours spent studying), leading to biased estimation results. III. Project Description and Data Available The lack of rigorous studies on the impact of providing eyeglasses to students with visual impairments in developing countries led to the implementation of the Gansu Vision Intervention Project in 2004 in Gansu Province in northwest China. This section describes the project and the data available to evaluate its impact. A. The Gansu Vision Intervention Project. In 2004, a team of Chinese and international researchers, in cooperation with the Ministries of Health and Education in Gansu Province, implemented a randomized trial to examine the impact of providing eyeglasses to primary school students with poor vision in Yongdeng and Tianzhu counties. The project covered all students in grades 4-6 in all primary schools in these two counties. Gansu Province is located in northwestern China. Its geography is quite diverse, including areas of the flat Loess Plateau, the Gobi desert, mountainous and hilly areas, and vast grasslands. In the year 2000, its population was 25.6 million, 76 percent of whom reside in rural areas (Gansu Bureau of Statistics, 2001). Estimates of rural per capita disposable income in 2004, the year of the intervention, place Gansu at a rank of 30 out of 31 provinces, with only Tibet showing lower incomes (National Bureau of Statistics, 2005). Using per capita income data and official poverty lines, a World Bank 5

7 report found that 23 percent of the rural population in Gansu is poor, compared to 6.5 percent for China as a whole (World Bank, 2001). Yongdeng and Tianzhu are adjacent counties that were selected as study sites because they are typical rural counties in Gansu, are located within several hours drive to the northwest of Lanzhou, the provincial capital (which enabled the project to be closely monitored by the provincial Center for Disease Control (CDC) under the Ministry of Health), and have capable county CDC staff to implement the project effectively. Tianzhu is a Tibetan minority autonomous district under the jurisdiction of Wuwei municipality. It had a population of 213,000 in 2006, 17% of which were in urban areas. According to the 2000 population census, 63% of Tianzhu s population were Han Chinese and 30% were Tibetan. Yongdeng is a much more populous county than Tianzhu, despite having a similar land area, and is part of Lanzhou Municipality. It had a population of 476,000 in 2006, of which 15% were in urban areas and nearly all of whom were Han Chinese. Being near Lanzhou, among counties in Gansu, both Tianzhu and Yongdeng are relatively well-off; their GDP per capita ranked 21 st and 23 rd, respectively, among 87 county-level units (including urban districts) in Yongdeng County is divided into 23 townships, of which 18 participated in the program. These 18 townships have 155 primary schools. Nine of these 18 townships were randomly chosen to participate in the eyeglasses intervention in 2004, and the remaining nine were assigned to the control group. Tianzhu county is divided into 22 townships, of which 19 participated in the program. These 19 townships have 101 primary schools. Ten of Tianzhu s 19 townships were randomly chosen to participate in the program in 2004, and the remaining nine were assigned to the control group. In both 6

8 counties, the excluded townships include the county seat, which are the main urban centers where incomes are higher and eyeglasses are easily accessible, and a few townships in remote locations that would have made program administration very costly. Random assignment was done as follows. In each county, all included townships were ranked by rural income per capita in 2003, and starting with the first two townships, one was randomly assigned to be a treated township while the other was assigned to the control group. In Tianzhu, the 19 th township (the poorest) was not paired with any other township; it was randomly drawn to the treatment group. In each township primary schools were either all assigned to the treatment group or all assigned to the control group. 1 A baseline survey that collected data on student characteristics, academic test scores, and visual acuity was conducted at the end of the school year (i.e. in the summer of 2004). This survey included both the treatment and the control schools, and covered all students finishing grades 1-5 in June of The students in the treatment schools who would be entering grades 4-6 in the fall of 2004 and had poor vision were offered free eyeglasses. Later that summer, in each county, an optometrist contracted by the project traveled to each township to conduct more in-depth eye tests for students who (with the permission of their parents) accepted the offer; if poor vision was confirmed, they were prescribed appropriate lenses. Students were given a limited choice of colors and styles for their eyeglass frames. The Gansu Province CDC then ordered all of the eyeglasses from a company with an established reputation. The fall semester of 2004 began on August 26 th, and most eligible and consenting students received their 1 Primary schools with less than 100 students were excluded from the project to avoid high travel costs to a small number of very remote schools. Students in such schools account for only 6 percent of primary students in the two counties. 7

9 eyeglasses by mid-september. At the end of academic year (late June or early July of 2005), grades for the fall semester 2004 and spring semester 2005 were collected to evaluate the impact of the eyeglasses on test scores. Unfortunately, there were a few cases where control townships were provided with eyeglasses because, after providing the eyeglasses in the treatment townships, the money remaining in the budget was used to provide eyeglasses to students with poor vision in the control schools. This occurred in two of the control townships in Yongdeng and in two control townships in Tianzhu. 2 Also, another of the control townships in Yongdeng was incorporated into a township that received eyeglasses, so that control group was also compromised. Finally, in one pair of townships in Tianzhu no one in the treatment township was offered glasses while about one third of children in the control township were offered glasses, so it appears that there was a role reversal in this pair of townships. Because this reversal may have been done deliberately, this pair is also dropped from the analysis. This leaves six pairs of townships in Yongdeng and six pairs (plus the poorest township, which was randomly assigned to the treatment group) in Tianzhu for which the randomization was carried out according to the plan. Most of the regression analysis below is limited to these 25 townships, which together contain about 19,000 students spread across 165 schools (103 of which were received eyeglasses for children in grades 4-6 and 62 of which were controls), 3 although several robustness checks are conducted that include the townships where randomization was compromised. 2 In a third control township in Tianzhu, four children in the control group received glasses, but three of these four did not have poor vision. This control township is retained in the analysis, after dropping the four children who received eyeglasses. Excluding this township, and its matched pair, has very little effect on the results. 3 The reason why 62% of schools (and 65% of students) are in the treatment group is that the two largest townships (which together have 25% of the students) were, by chance, assigned to the treatment group. 8

10 B. Data Used in the Analysis. The data used in the analysis are from four sources: 1. School records on basic student characteristics and academic grades before and after the intervention; 2. Results of health exams, including vision tests, conducted by the county Center for Disease Control in each primary school before eyeglasses were provided; 3. Information from optometrists records on students who were fitted for eyeglasses; 4. Data from Gansu Survey of Children and Household, also conducted in Gansu but separately from the Gansu Vision Intervention Project. The basic information in the school records include the grade the student was in during the school year, the students sex, ethnicity and birthdate, and the occupation and education level of the head of the household (usually the father) in which the student lives. The school academic performance data include scores on exams given at the end of each semester in each grade since the student enrolled at that school (usually grade 1). 4 Separate scores are available for three subjects: Chinese, mathematics and science. There is one important characteristic of the grade variables which has important implications for the analysis: in many, if not most, cases different exams were used in different schools, so the grades are not comparable across schools. Given random assignment of townships to the treatment and control groups, this non-comparability of exams across schools does not result in biased estimates. However, it does add noise to the data, similar to a school random effect, which must be addressed in estimation. The implications for estimation are further discussed in Section IV. The school health data include whether the student wears glasses (and if so, the grade the student was in when he or she started to wear glasses), the student s height, 4 In some schools, the exam grades are averages over two or more exams, including an end of semester exam, given in that semester. 9

11 weight and hemoglobin count, and at least one measurement of vision for each eye (students who were provided glasses have additional measurements for the purpose of fitting them with eyeglasses). In China, doctors usually conduct eye exams by asking a patient to read (with the other eye covered) a standard eye chart from 5 meters away. The chart is similar to eye charts used elsewhere. It has 12 rows of the letter E facing in different directions; the top row of the chart has very large E s, and each subsequent row has smaller E s. If the patient can read the 10 th row, the normal level, his/her eyesight is coded as 5.0. If the patient cannot read the first row, corresponding to the worst eyesight, his or her vision is coded as 4.0. If he or she can read the first row but cannot read the second row, his or her vision is coded as 4.1, and so forth. A patient who can read all 12 rows is coded as 5.2. The information from the optometrists, which exists only for children who were offered eyeglasses, includes whether the child was fitted for eyeglasses, and if not, the reason eyeglasses were not provided (about one third declined the offer to receive eyeglasses, and some students had eye conditions that could not be corrected with eyeglasses). This paper also uses rich data from the Gansu Survey of Children and Families, conducted in rural areas of Gansu province. The first wave of the Gansu Survey of Families and Children (GSCF) was conducted in 2000 for a random sample of two thousand children who were aged The second wave of the GSCF was conducted in 2004, and 131 of the 2000 sampled children were not re-interviewed due to various reasons. 5 In addition, 886 oldest younger siblings of the 2000 sampled children who were aged above 7 in 2004 were also interviewed. The GSCF collected rich information 5 The reasons include: 108 children had moved out of the counties they resided in 2000; 8 children died; 4 children were seriously sick; 2 children s parents were divorced; 1 household refused to be re-interviewed and 8 for unknown reasons. 10

12 on the vision and eyeglass wearing of the sampled children and their parents, the lighting condition at home and at school, cost and availability of eyeglasses, and household and village environment. In addition to the self-reported vision information, the GSCF has also collected objective measure of children s eyesight through an eye exam conducted with each sampled children, as well as their newly added younger siblings, by professional trained interviewers from the Gansu Center of Disease Control. C. Descriptive Statistics. Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for the 18,915 students in grades 4-6 in in Tianzhu and Yongdeng counties in the 25 townships where the randomization was correctly implemented. Of these students, 2,528 (13.4%) had poor vision in the sense that either the left eye or the right eye (or both) had a visual acuity score below Only 2.3% of the students in these counties with vision problems (59 out of 2,528) had eyeglasses before the project began. Those without vision problems had slightly higher scores than those with vision problems for all three subjects (78.9% vs. 78.2% for Chinese, 79.1% vs. 78.5% for mathematics, and 80.8% vs. 80.6% for science) at the end of the spring 2004 semester (1-2 months before the program began). The test score data in Table 1 suggest that vision problems have little effect on students academic performance. Indeed, simple t-tests show that, for both counties as a whole and for each county separately, none of the above-mentioned small differences in test scores is significant. But this conclusion is likely to be misleading because school 6 Although children with a visual acuity score of 4.9 in one or both eyes were also offered eyeglasses, only 6.8% (17 out of 249) accepted. In contrast, 56.5% of children (109 out of 193) with a visual acuity score of 4.8 in one or both eyes accepted the glasses that were offered to them. Since the exact cutoff point between good and poor vision is somewhat arbitrary, this suggests that the cutoff point for poor vision should be below 4.9, as opposed to below 5.0. Indeed, the low take-up rate for children with a visual acuity score of 4.9 makes it impossible to estimate the impact of providing eyeglasses to those children. 11

13 performance can affect eyesight. In particular, medical studies (e.g. Angle and Wissmann, 1980; Lu et al., 2007) have shown that doing near-work, that is spending long amounts of time doing activities with the eyes focused on objects about 1 meter from one s eyes) can cause myopia. This implies that students who spend more time studying are more likely to develop myopia, the most common refractive eye problem. Indeed, the data available before the Gansu Vision Intervention Program was implemented suggest that studying does harm students vision. The first thing to realize is that, among this sample of children, very few grade 1 students have poor vision (only 2.9% are classified as having a visual acuity score below 4.8 in both eyes), but this increases dramatically as children spend more time in school (7.0% of grade 3 students and 15.5% of grade 5 students). Thus children s test scores in grade 1 are unlikely to be seriously affected by vision problems but presumably do reflect, in part, time spent studying. OLS regressions of mean (over both eyes) visual acuity on average test scores (over Chinese, math and science) in grade 1, controlling for school fixed effects, grade level, parents education and occupation (on the sample children in grades 3-5 in the school year) show a negative impact that is statistically significant at the 10% level. This suggests that visual acuity is negatively affected by increased study, so that simple comparisons of test scores across students with good vision and students with poor vision are likely to underestimate the negative impact of vision on student performance (because students with good vision, on average, study less). [Meng checked the GSCF-2 data to see whether it shows that students who studied more in 2000 are more likely to have bad eyesight in

14 Table 2 presents information on how the Gansu Vision Intervention Project was implemented for the 2,528 students with poor vision. These figures exclude the township pairs for which the randomization was not properly implemented. Of these, 1,528 were in the program schools and thus were offered eyeglasses (those who already had eyeglasses were offered new ones), while 1,000 were in the control group and were not offered glasses. Of the 1,528 students who were offered glasses, 1,066 (69.8%) accepted them and the other 462 declined. The main reasons for turning down the offer were the objection of household head (145 cases) and refusal on the part of the child (80 cases). IV. Methodology Almost all primary school age children in Gansu province are enrolled in school; the Gansu Survey of Children and Families, which collected data on 2000 children age 9-13 in the year 2000, found that only 1.4% were not enrolled in school. Thus provision of eyeglasses cannot raise school enrollment; the sole impact is on academic performance. The random assignment of schools to participate or not participate in the Gansu Vision Intervention Project allows for straightforward analysis of the impact of the project on students scores on academic tests. To ease interpretation, all estimates in the rest of this paper use standardized test scores as the dependent variable; test scores are standardized by subtracting the mean and then dividing by the standard deviation, using the mean and standard deviation of the control group schools, separately for each subject and grade. A. Estimation of the Impact of the Offer of Eyeglasses. The simplest estimate of the impact of the program on children in grades 4-6 with poor vision is to compare the mean test scores of the children who were enrolled in the program schools with the mean 13

15 test scores of the children who were enrolled in the control schools. Technically, this estimates the impact of the offer to receive eyeglasses (the intention to treat effect), not the impact of the eyeglasses themselves, because (as explained above) about 30% of the children who were offered eyeglasses did not accept them. This t-test can be calculated by regressing the (standardized) test score variable (T) on a constant term and a dummy variable for enrollment in a program school (P): T = α + βp + u (1) where u is a residual that is uncorrelated with P due to randomized program assignment. Reflecting the sampling design, in all regressions we also add a set of dummy variables, one for each pair of townships within which randomization was done (suppressed in the equations). See Bruhn and McKenzie (2009) for a justification of this approach. Estimates of β in equation (1) use only students who have poor vision. More precise estimates of that parameter can be obtained by using an estimation method that also includes students with good eyesight. The intuition for this double difference estimation method is that it compares the difference in test scores of children with poor vision across treatment and control schools with the same difference for children with good vision. This estimator is obtained from the following econometric specification: T = α + πpv + τp + βpv*p + u (2) 14

16 where PV is a dummy variable indicating poor vision. In this specification the impact of the program on students with good vision (PV = 0) will be τ, which one would expect to equal zero, and the impact of the program on students with poor vision will be τ + β, which should equal β since τ should equal zero. The τ coefficient also serves as a check on the random design of the intervention; if the schools that participated in the program were better (worse) than average, then τ would be positive (negative). 7 Finally, the estimate of π is a (biased) estimate of the impact of poor vision on test scores, which one would expect to be negative (ignoring the bias). 8 The bias arises because students who study more (which is part of u) are likely to have worse vision, as explained above. For both equations, in principle more precise estimates can be obtained by adding additional explanatory variables, such as child characteristics (e.g. sex) and parental background. Several child and parent characteristics were tried, but in the end they did not increase precision, and so those variables are not included in the analysis. A much more promising set of covariates for the purpose of increasing precision is baseline test scores; the test scores of students in the spring of 2004, before eyeglasses were provided, are highly correlated with test scores in 2005 and are uncorrelated with the program variable. As will be seen below, these have strong explanatory power, and including them increases the precision of the estimates of the impact of the program. Note that conditioning on pre-intervention test scores is a generalization of a regression in which the dependent variable is a change in test scores over time that specification 7 Even if randomization was perfectly implemented, τ could be different from zero if there were spillover effects of the program onto children with good vision. This is investigated in Section VI. 8 This correlation between PV and u does not lead to biased estimates of β. One way to see this is to assume that the correlation takes the form u = θpv + ε, where ε is uncorrelated with both PV and P. Then equation (1 ) becomes T = α + πpv + τp + βpv*p + θpv + ε = α + (π+θ)pv + τp + βpv*p + ε; it is clear that this regression will not yield unbiased estimates of π, but the estimate of β will still be unbiased. More generally, in equation (1 ) u is not correlated with PV*P after conditioning on PV. 15

17 essentially forces the coefficient on the pre-intervention score to be equal to one, while conditioning on that score in effect moves it to the left side of the regression equation and does not place any constraints on the coefficients. A third possible set of covariates that could lead to more precise estimates are school fixed effects, which can soak up variation in school quality and in the difficulty of the tests across schools. This can be done only for equation (2), since in equation (1) the set of school fixed effects would be perfectly correlated with the program variable (P). This is also the case for equation (2), but the program effect in that equation is measured by the interaction of the program variable and the poor vision dummy variable, which varies within schools. By focusing on within-school variation, this specification is also less subject to bias from imperfect randomization of treatment across schools, since all unobserved school differences are absorbed in the fixed effect. Non-random assignment only causes bias in this context if treated and untreated schools differ systematically in the differential performance of children with good and poor vision. A final issue to confront is obtaining correct standard errors for the estimates of program effects. Standard errors should allow for heteroscedasticity of unknown form, as well as the fact that the error terms could be correlated across children in the same schools, and even children in the different schools but in the same townships. Indeed, as explained above schools often use their own tests, as opposed to county-wide or province-wide tests, which generates correlation of test scores among students within the same school, causing the error term (u) to be correlated across children in the same school. More generally, unobserved school, and even township, characteristics could lead to correlation of error terms within the same school or township. 16

18 The best approach to address this correlation is to use covariance matrices that allow for such clustering of the error terms, as explained in Wooldridge (2010, Chapter 20). However, for the purposes of this paper the standard clustering formula have two disadvantages. First, OLS estimation of equations (1) and (2) that allows for correlation of unknown form at the township level loses information in a way that could lead to less precise estimates. This occurs because these covariance matrices do not distinguish between two students in the same school and two students in the same township but in different schools. One would expect that the correlation of the error terms would be much stronger for the first pair of students. To account for this differential correlation, we estimate specifications that allow for school random effects, which distinguish between students in the same school and students in a different school, but we also allow for correlation of unknown form of the error terms at the township level. Note that this specification is consistent even if the error terms in equations (1) and (2) do not follow the classical random effects form (see Wooldridge, 2010, pp ). The only exception to using school random effects are estimates that used school fixed effects; yet both sets of estimates allow for heteroscedasticity and correlation of unknown form at the township level. The second problem is that covariance matrices that allow for such clustering of the error terms are asymptotically valid only if the number of clusters, in our case the number of townships, goes to infinity. Our preferred estimates, which drop township pairs for which the randomization was not properly implemented, are based on only 25 townships, and several authors have shown that these covariance matrices can yield misleading results when the number of clusters is 30 or fewer (see the discussion in 17

19 Cameron, Gelbach and Miller, 2008). To check whether our estimates suffer from this problem, we also present standard errors estimated using the wild bootstrap method, as suggested by Cameron, Gelbach and Miller (2008). B. IV Estimates of the Impact of Providing Eyeglasses. The methods presented in the previous subsection estimate the impact of being offered the eyeglasses, not the impact of receiving eyeglasses. In general, the impact of being offered eyeglasses will be less than the impact of receiving them because those students who are offered but do not accept the eyeglasses do not benefit from the offer. Direct OLS estimation of the benefit of receiving eyeglasses may yield biased estimates because parents and/or students who accept the offer of eyeglasses may differ in unobserved ways from students for whom the offer is turned down. For example, the parents of students who take up the offer may have more favorable attitudes toward education and so may do other things that raise the test scores of their children. Fortunately, instrumental variable (IV) estimation can be used to obtain consistent estimates. In particular, one can estimate the impact of actually receiving eyeglasses (impact of the treatment on the treated) using the same equations presented above, replacing P (the offer to receive eyeglasses) with G, actually receiving the eyeglasses. 9 While G is likely to be correlated with the residual, P can be used as an instrumental variable for G; P is, by definition, uncorrelated with u and also has strong explanatory power for G. Note that G = 1 not only for students who agreed to accept glasses in the 9 Strictly speaking, the IV estimates are local average treatment effects (LATE), i.e. estimates of the impact of wearing glasses for those students that were induced by the program (by the offer of free eyeglasses) to wear eyeglasses. Yet since very few students were wearing eyeglasses before the program, LATE estimates are almost identical to the impact of receiving eyeglasses on those who actually received them (impact of the treatment on the treated). 18

20 program school but also for the small number of students who wear their own glasses, either in the program schools or in the control schools. While IV estimates for equation (1) are straightforward in that one needs only to replace P with G and use P as an instrument for G, there is one complication with IV estimates of equation (2). To see the problem, note that automatically replacing P with G in that equation yields T = α + πpv + τg + βpv*g + u. Although it is possible to be in a program school if one does not have poor vision, it does not make sense to wear glasses if one does not have poor vision, which implies that G = 0 whenever PV = 0, and thus that G and PV*G are perfectly correlated. While this correlation is not exactly equal to 1 in the data (it is 0.86), this is only due to the fact that there are a very small percentage of students who report wearing classes even though they have good vision. Thus in IV estimates of (1 ) and (1 ) the term τg is dropped. Note that IV estimation is valid even if the randomized trial was not strictly implemented according to the randomized plan. Quite simply, as long as the plan was randomized then the instrument is uncorrelated with all possible confounding factors and will be a valid instrument as long as it has explanatory power for the use of eyeglasses (which should be the case as long as the intervention was implemented to some extent according to the randomized plan). Finally, there is one complication that arises with IV estimation; the findings of Cameron, Gelbach and Miller (2008) regarding the wild bootstrap have not been checked for IV estimation, so as yet there are no recommendations on what method to use for IV estimation to correct for poor performance of clustered covariance matrices when the number of clusters is less than

21 V. Estimates of Program Impact This section presents estimates of the impact of the Gansu Vision Intervention Project on the test scores of students in grades 4-6 in the spring of Thus these results measure the impact of the project after one year. As explained above, all test scores have been normalized separately for each subject and grade. The first subsection presents estimates of the impact of being offered eyeglasses, and the second presents IV estimates of the impact of receiving eyeglasses. A. Estimates of the Impact of Being Offered Eyeglasses. Before examining the impact of the Gansu Vision Intervention Project, the data must be examined to see whether the offer of eyeglasses was in fact randomly allocated across townships. This was done by estimating equations (1) and (1 ) using test scores from the spring of 2004, before the project was implemented. These results are shown in Table 3. As explained in the previous section, all estimates use either school random effects or school fixed effects. The estimates of equation (1) in the top panel of Table 3 show no statistically significant difference in spring 2004 test scores across program and control schools, as indicated by the coefficients on the treatment township variable. More specifically, the difference in mean the score of the Chinese test across these two sets of schools is very small (less than 0.05 standard deviations of the distribution of test scores). Also, the differences in the mean mathematics and science scores are close to zero, and 0.01, respectively. None of these differences is statistically significant. Averaging across all three subjects gives an insignificant difference of of the standard deviation of the 20

22 (average) test score. Thus estimates of equation (1) support the claim that the randomization of the 25 townships was correctly implemented. Estimates of equation (2) are shown in the second and third panels of Table 3; the second panel uses school random effects and the third uses school fixed effects. 10 Recall that estimates of equation (2) include both students without vision problems and students with vision problems and so should be more precise, and indeed it is the case that the standard errors of the estimates of β are lower. Consider first the estimates of the specification with school random effects. Comparing students without vision problems (i.e. examining the coefficient on treatment township ), there is little difference in mean test scores for students without vision problems, and all differences are completely insignificant; the difference of the averaged scores is only 0.04 standard deviations and is far from significant. Focusing on the (more precise) estimates of differences across students with poor vision (i.e. the coefficient on poor vision treatment township), there are no significant differences in the impact on Chinese, math or science scores, and when all scores are averaged the impact is small (- 0.05) and statistically insignificant. The last set of estimates in Table 3 adds school fixed effects to equation (2). As with the other two sets of estimates in that table, the estimated program impacts are completely insignificant. Indeed, they are very similar to the estimates of equation (2) using school random effects. This should not be surprising, for two reasons. First, since the offer of glasses was randomly assigned, both fixed and random effects estimates are 10 Estimates of equation (1) classify students whose worst eye has a visual acuity score of 4.9 as having good vision. Recall, however, that such children were offered glasses, and that 17 out of 249 accepted them. Those 17 children are excluded from the regression. Note also that dropping all 249 of these children from the regressions does not change the results. 21

23 consistent and so there is no reason for any systematic difference. Second, as explained in Wooldridge (2010, pp ), fixed effects and random effects estimates are tend to give similar results when the number of observations per group (in this case the school) is large, which is the case here since there are 18,598 students divided into 165 schools. Overall, the results in Table 3 are consistent with the hypothesis that the randomization was properly implemented. They also suggest that excluding the corrupted township pairs does not lead to any obvious bias in the characteristics of treatment versus control students. Next, turn to estimates of the impact of being offered eyeglasses on test scores after a full academic year. Table 4 presents estimates of equations (1) and (2), that is estimates with the (normalized) 2005 spring semester test score as the dependent variable. The first two rows of Table 4 present results for equation (1), and so uses data only for children with poor vision. The results show positive impacts, ranging from 0.09 to 0.19 standard deviations, for all three subjects, but only the estimated impact for Chinese is statistically significant, and even this result has a p-value of 0.19 when the wild bootstrap method is used to account for the small number of townships. Averaging over all three scores yields an impact of 0.16, but it is not quite significant at the 10% level, and the p-value for the wild bootstrap is quite large (0.28). To obtain more precise estimates of the impact of offering eyeglasses, turn to the estimates of equation (2) in the rest of Table 4, which compare the difference in test scores of children with good vision across program and control schools with the same difference for children with bad vision. The random effects specification shows that the offer of eyeglasses increased students test scores by 0.04 to 0.10 standard deviations of a 22

24 test score, and these impacts are statistically significant at the 5% level for Chinese (although the wild bootstrap gives a p-value of 0.07). The estimated impact on average test scores is 0.08, but it is not statistically significant. Finally, the school fixed effects estimates are very similar to the random effects estimates, as expected. Overall, the results in Table 4 suggest that offering eyeglasses to children with poor vision increased their test scores (after about eight months) by about 0.08 standard deviations, but the results are not precisely estimated. This leads to estimates that condition on initial test scores, which are shown in Table 5. The first two rows of Table 5 present estimates of equation (1) that are identical to those in Table 4 except that they condition on all three baseline test scores from the Spring of These increases the point estimates somewhat, but more importantly it reduces the standard errors of the estimates. The results show positive impacts, ranging from 0.09 to 0.18 standard deviations, for all three subjects, and the estimated impact for science is statistically significant at the 1% level, with a wild bootstrap p-value of Averaging over all three scores yields an impact of 0.16 that is significant at the 5% level, with a wild bootstrap p-value of The remaining estimates in Table 5 include both students with good vision and students with poor vision. As in Table 4, including the students with good vision always increases the precision of the results, but it also reduces the significant of the estimates somewhat. Turning to the random effects specification, the subject-specific impacts range from 0.07 to 0.12 standard deviations, and the estimate for Chinese is significant at the 5% level (with a wild bootstrap p-value of 0.096). Averaging over all three scores, estimated impact is 0.11 standard deviations, which is significant at the 5% level, 23

25 although the wild bootstrap has a slightly higher p-value (0.056). The fixed effects estimates in the third panel of the table are again very similar to those in the second panel. The results in Table 5 are our preferred estimates for the impact of offering eyeglasses to the students in our sample. B. IV Estimates of the Impact of Wearing Eyeglasses. This subsection presents estimates of the impact of wearing eyeglasses for one year on student test scores. (A few of the students have worn eyeglasses for more than one year; of the 1,245 children with glasses, 199 had purchased them on their own, and of these 94 had purchased them about one year ago, 85 had purchased them two years ago, 18 had purchased them 3 years ago, and 2 had purchased them about 4 years ago, so only 105 out of the 1,245 children had them for more than one year.) 11 As explained above, random selection into the treatment school, conditional on having bad eyesight, is the instrumental variable. This IV has strong explanatory power; in the regressions that include only children with poor vision the R 2 of the first stage regression is 0.48 and the F-statistic is [Paul will check if this has changed slightly]. Recall that conditioning on 2004 test scores increases precision of the estimates, so Table 6 reports only results that do so. (See Appendix Table A.1 for results that do not condition on 2004 test scores; which are similar but less precisely estimated.) Turning to the estimates based only on students with poor vision, the estimated impact of having eyeglasses among those students is positive for all three subjects, ranging from 0.12 to 11 Recall that only 59 children in the sample with bad vision had glasses, which implies that 140 of the 199 children who report having purchased eyeglasses on their own did not have bad vision as measured in the data. This could reflect a misdiagnosis that led their parents to purchase glasses for them, or measurement error either in the visual acuity variables or the variable that indicates wearing eyeglasses. Measurement error in reporting of wearing eyeglasses does not imply inconsistency since that variable is being instrumented. 24

26 0.26, and the estimate of 0.26 for science is statistically significant at the 1% level (although the pairs cluster bootstrap p-value is higher, at 0.073). Averaging over all subjects, the estimated impact is 0.22 standard deviations, which is significant at the 5% level (although again the pairs cluster bootstrap p-value is somewhat higher, at 0.108). The remaining estimates in Table 6 add students with good vision. The random effects specification yields impacts ranging from 0.10 for math (not significant) to 0.11 for science (significant at the 10% level, but with a large pairs cluster bootstrap p-value of 0.35) to 0.16 for Chinese (significant at the 5% level, with a pairs cluster bootstrap p- value of 0.07). Averaging over all subjects yields an impact of having eyeglasses of 0.15 standard deviations, which is significant at the 5% level (with a wild bootstrap p-value of 0.084). As above, the school fixed effects estimates are quite similar. To summarize this subsection, these estimates indicate that wearing eyeglasses for 8-9 months raises grade 4-6 students test scores by 0.15 to 0.22 standard deviations of the distribution of test scores, which is an unusually large impact after such a short time. VI. Robustness Checks The estimates in the previous section are based on assumptions that could be challenged. In particular, the estimates that compare children with poor vision to children with good vision assume that providing eyeglasses to the former has no effect on the test scores of the latter. In addition, all the estimates in Section V assumed that, after dropping the township pairs in which the randomization was compromised, the township pairs that remained did not suffer from any type of selection bias. This section checks whether these assumptions are valid. 25