Centralized governance, household preferences and publicly provided education: Evidence from Vietnam

How does fiscal and administrative centralization affect the provision of public services? We address this question using a 2009 Vietnamese reform which dissolved elected district councils in some provinces and transferred authority to provincial bodies. Exploiting spatial and temporal variation in program implementation, we find that centralization reduced household education subsidies, a key public expenditure in Vietnam. Households responded by increasing out-of-pocket education spending, lowering non-recurrent consumption to offset the decline in public support and maintain enrolment levels. The replication package for this study, including the data, code, and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the reported results, is available here . The authors are responsible for the completeness and accuracy of the replication materials.