Historical Origins of Schooling: The Role of Democracy and Political Decentralization

Francisco Gallego

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2010, vol. 92, issue 2, 228-243

Abstract: Why does schooling attainment vary widely across countries? Why are differences in schooling attainment highly persistent? I show that cross-country differences in schooling are related to political institutions, such as democracy and local democracy (political decentralization), which are affected by colonial factors. By using the number of native cultures before colonization as an instrument for political decentralization, I show that after controlling for the causal effect of income on schooling, the degree of democratization positively affects the development of primary education, whereas political decentralization has a positive and significant impact on more advanced levels of schooling. © 2010 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (87)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest.2010.11894 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Historical Origins of Schooling: The Role of Democracy and Political Decentralization (2008)
Working Paper: Historical Origins of Schooling: The Role of Democracy and Political Decentralization (2008)
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:tpr:restat:v:92:y:2010:i:2:p:228-243

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().