Narrow paths out of poverty and educational demand: Evidence from Dominican baseball

Brian Marein () and Craig Palsson
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Brian Marein: Wake Forest University, Economics Department, Postal: 1834 Wake Forest Rd., PO Box 7505, Winston-Salem, NC, 27109, https://sites.google.com/site/bcmarein/

No 108, Working Papers from Wake Forest University, Economics Department

Abstract: Do narrow, or improbable, paths out of poverty, such as those in sports and entertainment, reduce the demand for schooling? We study the effect of professional baseball on educational attainment in the Dominican Republic, where all Major League Baseball (MLB) teams recruit teenage boys. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to MLB’s sudden entry into the Dominican Republic based on preexisting local baseball cultures and leverage the fact that girls are not recruited for baseball. Using difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs, we find that baseball has no measurable effect on school attendance, in contrast to highly publicized accounts.

Keywords: human capital; labor markets; school enrollment; economic development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 J24 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2024-03-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:wfuewp:0108

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