Education and land inequality: Evidence on Colombia land tenure and human capital formation

This article provides new evidence for the effects of land inequality on human capital formation using the case of Colombia in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper studies this causal effect by exploiting a new historical database and creating a measure of land tenure based on subnational taxable land. The analysis applies multiple empirical strategies to demonstrate that low levels of land inequality are related to growth in literacy rates and better performance in variables such as enrolment and expenditure on education. Additionally, we analyse the relevance of the mechanism behind this relationship by identifying the effects of educational supply and demand through the heterogeneous impact on gender, rurality, and industrial employment. The results show that the demand side is prominent. The findings are in line with growing evidence of the perverse effects of land inequality on the formation of human capital in inegalitarian, poor, and rural societies.