Unintended bottleneck and essential nonlinearity: Understanding the effects of public primary school expansion on intergenerational educational mobility

We study the effects of 61,000 public primary schools on intergenerational educational mobility in Indonesia using full-count census data, a credible identification strategy, and theory-based nonlinearity in the mobility equation. We find that the mobility curve is concave in most of the cases, and school expansion reduced the degree of concavity. Evidence from a DiD strategy (Duflo (2001)) on primary completion suggests substantial improvements in relative mobility of the children of low educated fathers irrespective of gender. But relative mobility in the college educated households worsened, strengthening the advantages of the better educated households across generations. This highlights the pitfalls of a linear model which incorrectly suggests a weakening of the advantages of the children of educated fathers. For completed years of schooling, there are striking gender differences: the strong effects on sons remain largely unchanged, but there are no significant effects on girls. The surprising absence of an effect on girls is due to an unintended bottleneck at the secondary schooling level creating fierce competition among the Inpres primary graduates. The girls lost ground, experiencing an 8.5 percentage points decline in the probability of completing senior secondary schooling, while the boys reaped a 7.7 percentage points gain. The girls suffered crowding out irrespective of the family background, suggesting that social norms rather than parental economic conditions are the mechanisms at work.