Students today, teachers tomorrow: Identifying constraints on the provision of education

Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das and Asim Khwaja

Journal of Public Economics, 2013, vol. 100, issue C, 1-14

Abstract: With an estimated one hundred fifteen million children not attending primary school in the developing world, increasing access to education is critical. This paper highlights a supply-side factor – the availability of low-cost teachers – and the resulting ability of the market to offer affordable education. We first show that private schools are three times more likely to emerge in villages with government girls' secondary schools (GSSs). Identification is obtained by using official school construction guidelines as an instrument for the presence of GSSs. In contrast, private school presence shows little or no relationship with girls' primary or boys' primary and secondary government schools. In support of a supply-channel, we then show that, villages which received a GSS have over twice as many educated women, and private school teachers' wages are 27% lower in these villages. In an environment with low female education and mobility, GSSs substantially increase the local supply of skilled women lowering wages locally and allowing the market to offer affordable education. These findings highlight the prominent role of women as teachers in facilitating educational access and resonate with similar historical evidence from developed economies. The students of today are the teachers of tomorrow.

Keywords: Educational markets; Teacher labor supply; Intertemporal externalities' public investments; Crowd-in (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (37)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272712001387
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:pubeco:v:100:y:2013:i:c:p:1-14

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2012.12.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().