Political cycle in graduation rates

Christian Hubert Ebeke (cebeke@imf.org) and Sabine Mireille Ntsama

Oxford Economic Papers, 2016, vol. 68, issue 1, 89-107

Abstract: We show that exam success rates in Sub-Saharan Africa increase significantly in the months prior to national elections. Using a sample of more than 35 African countries, the study seeks to demonstrate that higher graduation rates prior to major national elections arise because of government manipulation. Evidence from a variety of robustness checks—controlling for observables, focussing on strictly exogenous elections, regression discontinuity estimates—confirms the central hypothesis: public officials deliberately relax graduation requirements to increase popular support for the incumbent in the months prior to national elections. We find that this result is stronger in a context of competitive elections. However, the results also show that good governance dampens the political cycle in graduation rates.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpv061 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:oxecpp:v:68:y:2016:i:1:p:89-107.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Economic Papers is currently edited by James Forder and Francis J. Teal

More articles in Oxford Economic Papers from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press (joanna.bergh@oup.com).