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Differential labor market returns to male and female education are one potential explanation for large gender gaps in education in Pakistan. We empirically test this explanation by estimating private returns to education separately for male and female wage earners. This article contributes to the literature by using a variety of methodologies (ordinary least squares, Heckman correction, two‐stage least squares, and household fixed effects) in order to estimate economic returns to education. The latest nationally representative data - the Pakistan Integrated Household Survey (2002) - are used. Earnings function estimates consistently reveal a sizable gender asymmetry in economic returns to education, with returns to women's education being substantially and statistically significantly higher than men's. The return to an additional year of schooling ranges between 7% and 11% for men and between 13% and 18% for women. There are also large, direct returns to women's education at low levels of schooling, and the education‐earnings profile is more convex for women than for men. However, a decomposition of the gender wage gap (into the component "explained" by differing male and female endowments and the residual component) suggests that there is highly differentiated treatment by employers. We conclude that the total labor market returns are much higher for men, despite returns to education being higher for women. This suggests that parents may have an investment motive in allocating more resources to boys than to girls within households.

This study is driven by some fundamental issues evolving in
Pakistan's educational set-up. In the past few decades, the country has
been experiencing what can only be termed a dramatic revolution in
education provision. There has been an explosion of private schooling
mostly at the primary but at higher levels as well and, somewhat
surprisingly, private schooling cannot be relegated the status of an
urban èlite phenomenon alone [Andrabi, et al. (2002)]. This has taken
the form of many poor households and those in rural areas opting to send
their children to fee-paying private schools rather than the non-fee
charging government schools. This transformation of the education sector
has generated many concerns among which the 'equity' issue has been
raised to the fore. The unprecedented growth of cheap private schooling
has also raised questions regarding the role of these institutions in
the delivery of education, the question of parental 'choice'1 as well as
the future of government educational policy.

This study investigates public–private sector wage differentials for male and female waged employees in Pakistan. This is done using latest nationally representative data from the Pakistan Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM) 2005. We adopt three methodologies to obtain robust estimates of the wage differential and the results reveal that public sector workers enjoy large wage premia. The gross pro-public wage differential is much larger for women than for men. Our findings also show that while private and public sector workers' differing characteristics 'explain' a larger proportion of the private–public wage gap for men, this is not the case for women.

Pakistan has very large gender gaps in educational outcomes. One explanation could be that girls receive lower educational expenditure allocations than boys within the household, but this has never convincingly been tested. This article investigates whether the intra-household allocation
of educational expenditure in Pakistan favours males over females. It also explores two different explanations for the failure of the extant 'Engel curve' studies to detect gender-differentiated treatment in education even where gender bias is strongly expected. Using individual level data
from the latest household survey from Pakistan, we posit two potential channels of gender bias: bias in the decision whether to enrol/ keep sons and daughters in school, and bias in the decision of education expenditure conditional on enrolling both sons and daughters in school. In middle and secondary school ages, evidence points to significant pro-male biases in both the enrolment decision as well as the decision of how much to spend conditional on enrolment. However, in the primary school age-group, only the former channel of bias applies. Results suggest that the observed strong gender difference in education expenditure is a within rather than an across household phenomenon.

Gender gaps in educational access, schooling quality and labour market outcomes are pervasive in Pakistan. This brief discusses the findings of three recent studies in Pakistan that highlight the role of education in improving individual productivity, increasing earnings, bringing people out of poverty and providing a pathway to gender equality in the labour market. The papers note the policy implications of the research both for education and labour market policy.

In this study we examine whether gender bias in education depends on the extent of female decision-making power. Household headship is used as a measure of female autonomy, with different types of households theorized to reflect varying degrees of female autonomy. Most female-headed-households in Pakistan are formed either because women are widowed or because husbands migrate. Women in male-headed-households are hypothesized to have least autonomy followed by married women heads whose migrant husbands may retain some decision-making power. Widow heads are hypothesized to have the greatest degree of autonomy among women in different households. The econometric findings suggest that married women heads gender-discriminate as much as male heads but that widow-heads have significantly lower bias against girls in enrolment decisions than male heads. The results also suggest that educated female heads gender differentiate less than both uneducated female heads and than male heads. The evidence suggests that households having better educated women with more independent status discriminate against the education of their daughters less than other households.

Differential labour market returns to male and female education are one potential explanation for large gender gaps in education in Pakistan. We empirically test this explanation by estimating private returns to education separately for male and female wage earners. This paper contributes to the literature by using a variety of methodologies (Ordinary Least Squares, Heckman correction, 2SLS and household fixed effects) in order to consistently estimate economic returns to education. Earnings function estimates reveal a sizeable gender asymmetry in economic returns to education, with returns to women's education being substantially and statistically significantly higher than men's. However, a decomposition of the gender wage gap suggests that there is highly differentiated treatment by employers. We conclude that the total labour market returns are much higher for men, despite returns to education being higher for women. This suggests that parents may have an investment motive in allocating more resources to boys than to girls within households.

Recent evidence from Pakistan points to significant pro-male bias within households in the allocation of education expenditures. This raises two important questions: Is less spent on enrolled girls than boys through differential school-type choice for the two sexes, for example
through a greater likelihood of sending boys to fee-charging private schools? And, if indeed this is the case, are girls thereby condemned to lower quality schooling, on average, than boys? By asking these questions, this paper makes three contributions to the literature. Firstly, this is one of a very few studies in Pakistan to explore the question of the relative effectiveness of public and private schools despite there being an unprecedented expansion of fee-charging private schools in the last two decades. Secondly, unlike existing papers which focus on primary schooling, this study looks at potential learning gaps by school-type for students in their last year of middle school (grade 8), very near their transition to secondary schooling. Thirdly, it exploits unique, purposively-collected data from government and private school students and thus, in estimating achievement production functions, is able to control for a number of variables typically 'unobserved' by researchers. The findings reveal that boys are indeed more likely to be sent to private schools than girls within the household, so that differential school-type choice is an important channel of differential treatment against girls. Private schools are also found to be of better quality – they are more effective than government schools in imparting mathematics and literacy skills. Girls lose out vis a vis boys in terms not only of lower within-household educational expenditures but also in terms of the quality of schooling accessed.

Improving weak teaching may be one of the most effective means of raising pupil achievement. However, teachers' classroom practices and the teaching 'process' may matter more to student learning than teachers' observed résumé characteristics (such as certification and experience).
There may also be important differences in teacher characteristics across government and private schools which may help explain the large documented public-private achievement differences often found in studies. This paper delves into the black-box representing 'teaching' to uncover the teacher characteristics and teaching practices that matter most to pupil achievement. This is done using unique school-based data, collected in 2002-2003 from government and private schools from one district in Punjab province in Pakistan. The data allow exploitation of an identification strategy that permits the matching of students' test scores in language and mathematics to the characteristics of teachers that teach those subjects. Within pupil (across subject rather than across time) variation is used to examine whether the characteristics of different subject teachers are related to a students' mark across subjects. The data are also unique in asking all subject teachers questions pertaining to their teaching practices
and these, often unobserved, 'process' variables are included in achievement function estimates. Our pupil fixed-effects findings reveal that the standard résumé characteristics of teachers do not significantly matter to pupil achievement. Perversely, however, teachers are found to be rewarded for possessing these characteristics highlighting the highly inefficient nature of teacher pay schedules. Our findings also show that teaching 'process' variables matter significantly to student achievement. There are important differences across school-types.