Public Primary School Expansion, Gender-Based Crowding Out, and Intergenerational Educational Mobility

From 1965 to 1985, the number of schools doubled in developing countries, but little is knownabout their impacts on intergenerational educational mobility. This paper studies the effects of 61,000 publicprimary schools constructed in the 1970s in Indonesia on intergenerational educational mobility, using full-countcensus data and a difference-in-differences design. The educational mobility curve is concave in most cases, andschool expansion reduced the degree of concavity. Evidence on primary completion suggests contrasting effects across the distribution: relative mobility improved irrespective ofgender in the uneducated households, but it worsened in the highly educated households. For completed years ofschooling, there are striking gender differences, with strong effects on sons, but no significant effects on girls.This surprising finding reflects an unintended bottleneck at the secondary schooling level which created fiercecompetition among the Inpres primary graduates. The girls suffered an 8.5 percentage points decline in the probabilityof completing senior secondary schooling, while the boys reaped a 7.7 percentage points gain. The gender-basedcrowding out occurred across the board, suggesting mechanisms unrelated to family background such as low labormarket returns for girls and gender norms in a patrilineal society. Available evidence on returns to education of girlsrejects a labor market-based explanation. The authors test and find evidence consistent with gender norms as amechanism by exploiting data from the “Matrilineal island” West Sumatra. In West Sumatra, girls are not crowded out atthe secondary level; instead, boys face significant crowding out.