Determinants of Schooling Outcomes among Children from Rural Ethiopia

Subha Mani, Fordham University
John Hoddinott, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

This paper outlines the socioeconomic determinants of schooling outcomes - enrollment status and relative grade attainment among primary school age children from Ethiopia. We find using repeated cross-sectional data from 15 rural villages in Ethiopia that household income is strongly associated with improvements in schooling enrollments and grade progression. The static results do not capture the impact of past schooling decisions, all of which cumulatively affect schooling outcomes today. To capture the impact of schooling investment decisions made in the past, we also estimate a dynamic schooling demand function. The dynamic specification is estimated using panel data on children between the age of 7 and 14 years from 1994 who are followed through the 1999 and 2004 waves of the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey. We find that the dynamic specification exhibits strong positive association between past schooling outcomes and current schooling outcomes.