Impact of teacher content knowledge on student achievement in a low-income country

This paper estimates the causal impact of teacher content knowledge on student achievement in Mozambique, a low-income country where a large share of fourth-graders fail to meet the minimum requirements of literacy and numeracy. I use nationally representative data from the Service Delivery Indicator survey, and exploit within-student across-subject variation in a sample of students taught by the same teacher in maths and Portuguese, thus circumventing bias caused by unobserved student and teacher heterogeneity. I find that, on average, teacher content knowledge does not have an impact on student achievement. However, the impact varies significantly by student’s first language, urban or rural location of the school, and the match of students and teachers in their knowledge.