Analysis of School Enrollment in Ghana: A Sequential Approach

In this paper, we depart from the standard way of analyzing school enrollment by accounting explicitly for educational selectivity in order to examine the determinants of child school enrollment in Ghana. Using data from the Ghana Living Standard Survey round 6 (GLSS 6), we estimate a three‐step sequential logit model for the determinants of secondary school enrollment and its dependence on completing primary school. We find that family resources such as parental education, household income and the gender of the head of the household play a role in households' child schooling decisions. Educated parents are relatively more likely to enroll their children in primary school and keep them in school until they complete primary education. As well, we show that educated parents do not promote a gender‐biased investment in the schooling of children at the primary level. While household welfare does not influence children's entry into primary school importantly, their completion of primary school depends on household welfare. The study sheds more light on the pro‐male bias phenomenon regarding entry into primary school and primary school completion. Policies to promote the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4 in Ghana must be grade sensitive.     

No country for young men: International migration and left‐behind children in Tajikistan

This paper investigates the effects of international migration on the schooling and labour outcomes of left‐behind children in rural Tajikistan. Using three‐wave panel survey data, I rely on an instrumental variable strategy to address the non‐random selection into migration. I identify important and gender‐differenced schooling and labour supply responses. My findings suggest that boys living in migrant households are less likely to lag behind at school or work. At the intensive margin, they also report fewer hours of work per week. On the other hand, left‐behind teenage females undertake a higher number of domestic chores. They appear to marry earlier as well. The migration impact on boys appears to be driven by remittances and the improved financial situation of households. The absence of any positive influence on the education of left‐behind girls is likely to be explained by Tajikistan's cultural norms and institutions.     

How Much of the Gender Difference in Child School Enrolment Can Be Explained? Evidence from Rural India

There are significant gender differences in child schooling in the Indian states though very few studies explain this gender difference. Unlike most existing studies we take account of the implicit and explicit opportunity costs of schooling and use a bivariate probit model to jointly determine a child's participation in school and market jobs. Results obtained from the World Institute of Development Economics Research (WIDER) villages in West Bengal suggest that indicators of household resources, parental preferences, returns to and opportunity costs of domestic work significantly affect child school enrolment. While household resources have similar effects on enrolment of boys and girls, other arguments tend to explain a part of the observed gender difference. Even after taking account of all possible arguments, there remains a large variation in gender differences in child schooling that cannot be explained by differences in male and female characteristics in our sample.     

International migration,remittances, and schooling: evidence from El Salvador

We examine the effect of remittances from abroad on households' schooling decisions using data for El Salvador. Following the massive war-related emigration of the 1980s, remittances became a significant source of household income throughout the 1990s. We use the Cox proportional hazard model to examine the determinants of school attendance. Measuring income from a source that is uncorrelated with parental schooling—remittances—, we find that remittances have a large, significant effect on school retention. We estimate that while household income net of remittances has a small, though significant, impact on the hazard of leaving school in rural and urban areas, remittances have a much larger impact on the hazard of leaving school. In urban areas, the effect of remittances is, at its smallest, 10 times the size of the effect of other income. In rural areas, the effect of remittances is about 2.6 times that of other income. Our finding is of interest in that it suggests that subsidizing school attendance, particularly in poor areas, may have a large impact on school attendance and retention, even if parents have low levels of schooling.     

Dual Poverty Trap: Intra‐ and Intergenerational Linkages in Frictional Labor Markets

This paper constructs an overlapping generations model with a frictional labor market to explain persistent low education in developing countries. When parents are uneducated, their children often face difficulties in finishing school and therefore are likely to remain uneducated. Moreover, if children expect that other children of the same generation will not receive an education, they expect that firms will not create enough jobs for educated workers, and thus are further discouraged from schooling. These intergenerational and intragenerational mechanisms reinforce each other, creating a serious poverty trap. Escape from the trap requires the well‐organized and combined implementation of a subsidy for schooling, support for disadvantaged children, and public awareness programs.     

Gender and household education expenditure in Pakistan

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.     

The curse of low expectations

We examine how a remedial education programme for primary school‐age children affects parental expectations about their children's future. Using original survey data we collected in Serbia, we investigate whether expectations on labour market prospects and educational attainment change as a consequence of exposure to the Roma Teaching Assistant programme. Our results show that parents of pupils in treated schools expect higher returns to education for their children and are more likely to expect them to achieve a secondary level of education. We also investigate the possible mechanisms in place due to the characteristics of the programme: remedial education and role model.     

Can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks?

Income shocks on poor households are known to induce parents to take their children out of school and send them to work when other risk-coping instruments are insufficient. State dependence in school attendance further implies that these responses to short-run shocks have long-term consequences on children's human capital development. Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, where the condition is on school attendance, have been shown to be effective in increasing educational achievements and reducing child work. We ask the question here of whether or not children who benefit from conditional transfers are protected from the impacts of shocks on school enrollment and work. We develop a model of a household's decision regarding child school and work under conditions of a school re-entry cost, conditional transfers, and exposure to shocks. We take model predictions to the data using a panel from Mexico's Progresa experience with randomized treatment. Results show that there is strong state dependence in school enrollment. We find that the conditional transfers helped protect enrollment, but did not refrain parents from increasing child work in response to shocks. These results reveal that CCT programs can provide an additional benefit to recipients in acting as safety nets for the schooling of the poor.     

Schooling and the Intergenerational Transmission of Values

We present a model of the evolution of identity via dynamic interaction between the choice of education and the transmission of values in a community from parents to children, when parents care about the preservation of their traditional community values, different from the values of the host society. We compare the educational and socioeconomic outcomes in different scenarios (melting pot versus multiculturalism). If schooling shifts children's identity away from their parents' values, parents may choose lower levels of education for their children, at the cost of reducing their future earnings. We show how this effect can be attenuated and reversed when the school or, indeed, the host society are willing to accommodate the values of the community and/or to adjust to these values; otherwise the community gradually becomes alienated. This approach may be applied to the analysis of temporal changes in values and attitudes in a community of immigrants, as well as ethnic, religious, or other minority groups.     

Is emigration of workers contributing to better schooling outcomes in Nepal?

This paper presents evidence on how emigration for work affects schooling outcomes for primary and secondary school‐age children in Nepal. Using an instrumental variable strategy exploiting past migration network, we show that the identified effects critically depend on how schooling outcomes are measured. While conventional measures of school attendance indicate no impact, our new set of schooling status and schooling gap measures reveals significant impacts. Schooling status measures reveal favorable impacts for girls, and for emigration to India. Schooling gap measures reveal favorable effects of all emigration on schooling outcomes for girls and of emigration to other countries for boys.     

The effects of external migration on enrolments,accumulated schooling and dropouts in Punjab

External migration in developing countries can relax household income constraints because of external remittances. This paper looks at whether the external migration of individuals in a household has a positive effect on schooling outcomes of children as measured by school enrolments, accumulated level of schooling, number of days spent in school and dropouts in Punjab. Historic migration rates were used to instrument for migration in an analysis of school outcomes for children of different ages to see which group has been most affected by external migration. The results show a significantly positive impact of external migration on the enrolments of younger children, whereas, the accumulated level of schooling for older children increases significantly if there is an external migrant in the household.     

New Evidence on Intra‐Household Allocation of Resources in Japanese Households

This paper examines intra‐household allocation of resources to gain insight into family relationships and gender bias in Japanese households. We take the Engel curve approach to examine how adult consumption is affected by the presence of a child, either a boy or a girl, in the family. Empowered by diary‐based high quality spending data from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, our empirical results show that adult consumption is significantly reduced in households with children; furthermore, gender bias is not observed in total adult expenditures, while responses of adult clothing expenses to the presence of a child are significantly different between a boy and a girl: spending on a father's clothing is reduced when the child is a school‐aged daughter, while spending on a mother's clothing decreases when a school‐aged son is in the home. Our analysis also shows that after the early 2000s girls receive a larger share of spending for children's clothing as well as for high school education than boys.     

The impact of foreign and domestic remittance types and senders on education outcomes

Migration and remittances are very important for Nepal, yet the country continues to be plagued by low financial development. Increases in human capital investments, such as enrollment of school‐aged children, are a possible gain from the country's labor movements, which can be leveraged further through an understanding of the microeconomic processes involved. This study examines how remittances from both household and nonhousehold members affect school enrollment rates for children in Nepalese families. We analyze the positive and negative impacts of migration and remittances separately and consider both the type and location of the remittance sender using the Nepal Living Standards Survey (NLSS‐III) of 9,335 school‐aged children. We find enrollment more associated with an exogenous process and use this to estimate marginal effects in which remittances significantly increase children's school enrollment by about 2% points in most cases. These results suggest policymakers should encourage domestic migration (which allows proximity between senders and recipients of remittances as well as less family disruption).     

Remittances and the human capital of children: New evidence from Kyrgyzstan during revolution and financial crisis, 2005–2009

We analyze the effect of the receipt of remittances on the education and health of children in Kyrgyzstan during a volatile period of their recent history, 2005–2009. The country experienced revolution in 2005 and the global financial crisis beginning in 2008. Both events impact human capital investment, and the changes vary by region of the country. We use fixed effects estimation and fixed effects, instrumental variables estimation to isolate the effects of remittances and other events on human capital. We find that boys aged 14–18 in remittances’ receiving households are less likely to be enrolled in school than other children. We also find that girls in remittances’ receiving households are more likely to be malnourished (thin). Both effects are relatively small. Remittances do not improve the human capital of children left behind. However, we do find an overall positive improvement in school enrollment among young children between 2005 and 2009 but a negative trend in enrollment among older boys and girls. Nutrition improves over time. Regional differences are apparent in these trends in nutrition and education.     

PRELIMINARY EVIDENCE ON INTERNAL MIGRATION,REMITTANCES, AND TEEN SCHOOLING IN INDIA

We examine correlations between the receipt of remittances from internal migrants and human capital investment in rural areas of India. We employ a propensity score matching approach to account for the selectivity of households into receiving remittances. We find a positive correlation between remittances received from internal migrants and the schooling attendance of teens. The magnitude of the correlation is greater when focusing on low‐caste households, and male schooling attendance in particular becomes more positive and statistically significant. Our findings provide a basis for establishing future research in the areas of migration and social protection in India. (JEL O15, J24, R23)     

School Attainment, Completion, and Economic Development: A Cross-Country Analysis

The primary aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between school attainment, school completion, and economic development. In doing so it also examines the effect of other macroeconomic variables on school attainment and completion. Estimation is conducted using a panel dataset of 138 countries. Our results show that income levels, government expenditure on education, and political instability all have significant effects on school completion and attainment. In addition these variables have different effects on male and female schooling. Our results have important policy implications and in particular allow policymakers to identify different instruments to target the problem of non‐completion of schooling.     

Child Schooling and Work Decisions in India: The Role of Household and Regional Gender Equity

Abstract

This paper tests three hypotheses about how mothers' autonomy in India affects their children's participation in school and the labor market. To do so it extends the concept of mothers' autonomy beyond the household to include the constraints imposed by the extent of gender equity in the regions in which these women live. This study began with the expectation that increased autonomy for Indian mothers living in heterosexual households would increase child schooling and decrease child work. However, the results are mixed, indicating that mother's autonomy can be reinforced or constrained by the environment. The paper concludes that mothers and fathers in India make different decisions for girls vis-à-vis boys and that the variables reflecting mothers' autonomy vary in their impact, so that mothers' level of education relative to fathers' is not often statistically significant, while mothers' increased contributions to household expenditure decrease the probability of schooling and girls' work.     

Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Hong Kong: Are Immigrants More Mobile than Natives?

We characterize intergenerational educational mobility by the percentage of children who have more schooling than their parents, and the change in the relative probability of the children attending university across their parents’ schooling levels. In Hong Kong, immigrant children are very upward mobile; their percentage of upward mobility has caught up with that of the children of the Hong Kong‐born parents. Hong Kong‐born children of immigrant parents are also more mobile than the children of Hong Kong born parents. Even though parental educational background remains important for university attendance, immigrant children experience higher mobility than Hong Kong‐born children in terms of access to university education.     

Accounting for the Changing Role of Family Income in Determining College Entry

In this paper, I analyze the determinants of college enrolment and the changes in these determinants over time. I propose a quantitative life‐cycle model with college enrolment. Altruistic parents provide financial support to their children. Using counterfactual experiments, I find that 24 percent of all households are financially constrained in their college decision. Constraints become more severe over time. I show that my model is consistent with a narrow college enrolment gap between students from rich and poor families, as previously reported in the empirical literature. The estimation of enrolment gaps is a popular reduced‐form approach for measuring the fraction of constrained households. My results suggest that these reduced‐form estimates are misleading, and that a structural model of parental transfers is needed to correctly identify constrained households. Further, I show that parental transfers are an important driver behind the changing role of family income as a determinant of college entry, a fact that is well documented for the US economy.     

THE ESTIMATED EFFECT OF CATHOLIC SCHOOLING ON EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES USING PROPENSITY SCORE MATCHING

This paper examines the effect of attending a Catholic high school on educational outcomes. The statistical analysis is based on data obtained from the US National Educational Longitudinal Study. Using propensity score matching methods to control for selection bias, we find that Catholic schooling improves maths test scores, with stronger effects for males than for females, but appears to have little effect (if any) on reading scores. Catholic schooling also raises high school graduation rates and substantially increases the likelihood of enrolment in a 4‐year college. Use of the difference‐in‐difference method suggests that the effect of Catholic schooling on changes in maths scores is more muted, though still statistically significant.