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The talk will present findings and insights generated from a novel and in-depth multi-year data collection exercise to capture the educational universe and its evolution in Pakistan - The "LEAPS" (Learning and Achievement in Pakistan Schools) project. The project is a 4-year longitudinal study in 112 villages in the Punjab (Pakistan) that collects panel data on all (800+) public and private schools, over 1000 teachers, 2,000 households, and tests over 12,000 children, with the first set of findings forthcoming in a book (Oxford University press). The talk looks at a subset of these findings that focus on getting the “facts” straight by challenging commonly held (mis)conceptions about the Pakistan educational sector. These findings are then used to both gain new insights into the challenges faced by the educational sector in Pakistan and South Asia more broadly, and illustrate how scholarship can effectively engage with policy-making in both designing and evaluating effective interventions. Details of the leaps project (reports, and open access to the first year of data) are available on the project website at: www.leapsproject.org.

Asim Ijaz Khwaja is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His areas of interest include economic development, finance, education, political economy, institutions, and contract theory/mechanism design. His research combines extensive fieldwork, rigorous empirical analysis, and microeconomic theory to answer questions that are motivated by and engage with policy. He has been published in the leading economics journals, such as the American Economic Review, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has received coverage in numerous media outlets such as the Economist, NY Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Al-Jazeera, BBC, and CNN. His recent work ranges from understanding market failures in emerging financial markets to examining the private education market in low-income countries. He was selected as a Carnegie Scholar in 2009 to pursue research on how religious institutions impact individual beliefs. Khwaja received BS degrees in economics and in mathematics with computer science from MIT and a PhD in economics from Harvard.

Event information and directions: http://iicas.ucsd.edu/events/speakerseries/southasia.php

For event questions, please contact iicasintern@ucsd.edu or (858) 822-5297.  Anyone needing special

arrangements to accommodate a disability is encouraged to contact IICAS two weeks in advance of the event.

The IICAS South Asia Studies Speaker Series at UC San Diego

is sponsored by the Institute for International, Comparative,

and Area Studies (IICAS).  IICAS promotes interdisciplinary research, discussion and information exchange on international,

comparative, and cross regional topics.               iicas.ucsd.edu