Ten-Year Impacts of Burkina Faso’s BRIGHT Program

APPENDIX B
MATHEMATICA POLICY RESEARCH
since the last survey, differential migration could result in the emergence of discontinuities in
household or child characteristics.
To provide evidence on the continued reasonability of the continuity assumptions, Table B.2
provides the estimated discontinuities for the socio-demographic characteristics from our current
survey using equation (A.1) without the socio-demographic controls. 55 All of the 16 child,
household, and household head-level characteristics are practically small and only 5 are
statistically significant at conventional levels. 56 These estimates suggest that the assignment rule
was, in fact, successful in creating exogenous variation in treatment assignment.
55
The estimates include department fixed effects.
56
A joint test of all of the discontinuities using seemingly unrelated regressions yields a Chi-square statistic of 23.07
with a p-value of 0.1120, meaning that the differences at discontinuities are not different from zero. However,
estimates of the bias due to these small differences suggest that these differences would have a net effect of 0.2
percentage points on the estimates treatment effect on enrollment and 0.013 standard deviations on test scores.
These are negligible given the magnitude of the observed effects.
B.5