University proximity at teenage years and educational attainment

This presentation investigates the impact of geographical proximity to universities on educational attainment in Nigeria. I relate individuals' level of schooling obtained from three rounds of the Nigeria Living Standard Measurement Survey (LSMS) to spatial distance too university measured by pairing residential and university campuses, GPS coordinates. To identify the effect of the distance to the university, I exploit the theory of residential sorting to instrument residential proximity to the university. Specifically, I instrument distance to the university drawing on variations in households’ proximity to state boundary posts and neighborhood population density. The instrumental variable estimates show a negative and significant effect of distance, revealing that geographical constraints during teenage years represent a barrier to the subsequent human capital acquisition. Additional results from a difference-in-difference estimation strategy indicate that a large-scale establishment of universities had beneficial trickle-down effects by decreasing the intention to drop out of secondary school, supporting evidence of the role of geographical constraints in the accumulation of human capital in Nigeria.