Reproducibility package for The Impact Of School Grants On Disadvantaged Students: Experimental Evidence From Romania

In this report, we analyze the impact of the ROSE project, a program designed to improve student retention, graduation rates and pass rates on a national end-of-high-school exam for low-achievement high schools in Romania. The program was implemented in three waves, September 2017, September 2018, and September 2020, respectively, with eligible high schools randomly assigned to each. We exploit this staggered implementation of ROSE to causally measure its impacts on students. Our estimates indicate that the ROSE program had no significant impact on (i) student preferences for attending a ROSE high school, ii) student retention rates, (iii) high school graduation rates, (iv) enrollment in the post-high school baccalaureate (bac) exam, (v) bac pass rates, or
(vi) bac scores. While there is a small increase in girls’ bac passing rates (3 pp), we find little heterogeneity in these null effects by grant size, urban-rural status, student achievement levels, town income levels, and type of curriculum taught.