Facilitating innovative growth of low cost private schools: experimental evidence from Pakistan 2016-2019

The data contain information on 837 low-cost for-profit private schools (LCPS) from three districts in Punjab, Pakistan: Faisalabad, Gujranwala, and Sialkot. The past few decades have seen an exponential increase in the growth of these LCPS globally, and in countries like Pakistan and India, the private sector now commands a large and quickly increasing share of the market. Over forty percent of primary school enrolment in Pakistan is now in LCPS, and students in private schools in Pakistan far out-perform those in public schools. Yet, firm innovation and expansion is constrained for private schools, likely due to a range of supply-side and market level failures. The main research questions this study and the uploaded dataset seek to answer are: (1) To what extent are schools constrained by finance, and does the type of financing vehicle (loan vs equity) matter? (2) Is LCPS quality improvement constrained by a lack of access to appropriate quality-enhancing products and services, i.e. educational support services (ESS)? (3) Is there a positive interaction between access to finance and the provision of appropriate innovative investment opportunities? The dataset includes topics such as school administration, facilities, fees, enrolment, student population, finances, and financial expectations and literacy. Schools are uniquely identified using the variables mauza (administrative district) code and school code. While most of the variables are school-level, there are a few individual-level data pieces that were collected from the school owner. For each school we interviewed only one owner, therefore both schools and school owners are identified using the same mauza code and school code ID.