This paper documents wage differentials between private and public school graduates
in Bangladesh and Pakistan. While evidence in support of a wage advantage of
private school graduates in Bangladesh is lacking, Pakistani private school graduates
are found to earn more than their public school counterparts. This finding has
important implications for the current debate over the effectiveness of private schools
in South Asia. To the extent the wage premium arises owing to education in private
schools, our result suggests relative superiority of private schools in Pakistan and are
consistent with extant studies that have assessed private school quality using testscores
of students. The difference in the performance of private schools in the two
countries, however, remains a puzzle. This difference, we conjecture, may be partly
explained by the between-country differences in public policy towards private schools
and, therefore, the regulatory regime facing these schools.