Educational Investment Responses to Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Indian Road Construction

Abstract

The rural poor in developing countries, once economically isolated, are increasingly being connected to outside markets. Whether these new connections crowd out or encourage educational investment is a central question. We examine the effects on educational choices of 115,000 new roads built under India’s flagship road construction program. We find that children stay in school longer and perform better on standardized exams. Heterogeneity in treatment effects supports a standard human capital investment model: enrollment increases most when nearby labor markets offer high returns to education and least when they imply high opportunity costs of schooling. (JEL I25, I26, J24, O15, O18, R42)

Roads Development Optimization for All-Season Service Accessibility Improvement in Rural Nepal using a Novel Cost-Time Model and Evolutionary Algorithm

“…Given this contextual uncertainty, evidence exists that the most consistent living standards improvements from rural roads are not economic in nature but instead linked to improved access to services such as health (Van de Walle and Cratty, 2002), finance (Binswanger et al, 1993), education (Adukia et al, 2020;Kristjanson et al, 2005), or administration. Comparing Asian Development Bank projects in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, Hettige (2006) finds that rural roads most consistently benefit the poor through improved access to services, whereas poverty reduction is conditional on the contextual factors listed above or complementary investments.…”

Public attention and policy responses to COVID-19 pandemic⋆

“…4. We exclude early weeks as in Adukia et al (2020) and Aksoy et al (2020) and leave out the week just prior to policy adoption since there may have been discussion on NPIs already in the days before it.…”

The Effects of Elite Public Colleges on Primary and Secondary Schooling Markets in India

“…PMGSY was launched in 2000 while RGGVY was launched in 2005. Both programs were targeted to villages above a certain population cut-off, 1000 for PMGSY (Adukia et al, 2017) and 300 for RGGVY (Burlig and Preonas, 2016). We examine if villages nearest to elite public colleges were more likely to meet the village level population cut off required to be eligible for these programs (Figure A.33).…”

“…SeeNeumark and Simpson (2014) for a review on the literature examining the economic effects of place-based policies.9 A possible interpretation of our results could be that a suite of focal infrastructure investments may have larger development impacts than certain last mile programs that target specific infrastructure services. For instance,Burlig and Preonas (2016) find that a rural electrification program in India had no effects on educational attainment, whileAdukia, Asher and Novosad (2017) find that a rural road construction program in India increased middle school completion by 7%. In comparison, we find that elite public colleges increased middle school completion by 14%.10 Specifically, elite public colleges include Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Petroleum Technology, Indian Institute of Management, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Indian Institute of Technology, School of Planning and Architecture, School of Planning and Architecture, Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research National Institute of Technology, and All India Institute of Medical Sciences.…”