The Effect of Primary School Construction on Later Outcomes
Hakan Ercan,
Ahmet Ozturk (ahmetozturk@sesric.org) and
Semih Tumen
Additional contact information
Ahmet Ozturk: Statistical, Economic, and Social Research and Training Centre for Islamic Countries (SESRIC)
No 1522, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum
Abstract:
Improving the later outcomes of children through increasing their school attainment is a key policy priority in developing countries; yet, whether increasing government spending can improve school attainment is still an issue of debate. In this paper, we investigate the effect of a massive primary school construction program—which was launched as part of the 1997 schooling reform—on high school completion and labor force participation rates in Turkey. With this program, Turkey increased the number of primary education classrooms approximately by 31 percent from 1998 to 2002. Using the 2011 Population and Housing Census, we employ an identification strategy based on provincial differences in the intensity of construction program and the variation in exposure across birth cohorts induced by the timing of the program. The estimates suggest that the construction program increased high school completion rates by 2.1-2.4 percentage points for men and by 2.3-2.5 percentage points for women. While the program had no significant effect on male labor force participation, it led to a 2.2-2.6 percentage-point rise in female labor force participation. These findings suggest that the program has been effective in reducing the gender gaps in later outcomes. The results suggest that increasing primary school availability helps reducing gender gaps in later outcomes in a developing country context.
Pages: 40
Date: 2021-12-20, Revised 2021-12-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-dev and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)
Downloads: (external link)
https://erf.org.eg/publications/the-effect-of-prim ... on-later-outcomes-2/ (application/pdf)
https://bit.ly/3H9jNpE (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erg:wpaper:1522
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel (nnabil@erf.org.eg).