Seasonality, Academic Calendar and School Drop-outs in Developing Countries

Rural families face tradeoffs when deciding whether to keep children in school or have them work in the ï¬ eld. School calendars can magnify this tradeoff by not accommodating agricultural harvesting cycles within the schedule. We show this misalignment has a signiï¬ cant and sizable effect on school continuation. In Bangladesh, a rise in seasonal labor demand due to the Aman paddy harvesting typically coincides with the yearly ï¬ nal examination of schools. Employing the lunar calendar variation of Ramadan school holidays as a natural experiment framework — that forced schools to re-schedule ï¬ nal examinations to a pre-harvest season in 1999 — and comparing it with a typical year of 2002, we ï¬ nd that annual exams overlapping with major local harvesting period inflate the school dropout by 6.5 to 8.4 percentage points between the agricultural and non-agricultural households. Age-speciï¬ c cohort analysis using a nationally representative household survey also supports this evidence. Exploiting state-level academic calendar variation, we executed a similar analysis for India and found supporting evidence to validate our ï¬ ndings. Our paper suggests the careful design of school calendars in developing countries by adequately addressing local seasonality.