Publication: Child Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso
Date
2010-07-01
ISSN
Published
2010-07-01
Author(s)
Abstract
Using data they collected in rural
Burkina Faso, the authors examine how children's
cognitive abilities influence resource constrained
households' decisions to invest in their education.
This paper uses a direct measure of child ability for all
primary school-aged children, regardless of current school
enrollment. The analysis explicitly incorporates direct
measures of the ability of each child s siblings (both
absolute and relative measures) to show how sibling rivalry
exerts an impact on the parents decision of whether and how
much to invest in their child s education. The findings
indicate that children with one standard deviation higher
own ability are 16 percent more likely to be currently
enrolled, while having a higher ability sibling lowers
current enrollment by 16 percent and having two higher
ability siblings lowers enrollment by 30 percent. The
results are robust to addressing the potential reverse
causality of schooling influencing child ability measures
and using alternative cognitive tests to measure ability.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Akresh, Richard; Bagby, Emilie; de Walque, Damien; Kazianga, Harounan. 2010. Child Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso. Policy Research working paper ; no. WPS 5370. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/3854 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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