Volume 35, Number 1 (Winter) 2000
Bommier, Antoine, and Sylvie Lambert. 2000. "Education Demand and Age at School Enrollment in Tanzania." Journal of Human Resources 35(1):177-203.
In Tanzania, actual school enrollment takes place 2 or 3 years later on average than legal enrollment age. In this paper, we develop a micro-economic model that allows us to disentangle various explanations for such delays. We simultaneously estimate enrollment age and schooling duration by maximum likelihood techniques using data from the Human Resource Development Survey carried out in Tanzania in 1992-93. A particularly interesting result of our econometric analysis is that boys and girls follow fundamentally different patterns of schooling. Our model suggests that this could be due to different returns from pre-school training in the family's economic activities or it could be related to the wish to have girls ready to be married as early as possible.
Antoine Bommier is research fellow at the Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques, associate professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, and associate researcher at the Laboratoire d'Economie Appliquée (LEA-INRA). Sylvie Lambert is a research fellow at the Laboratoire d'Economie Appliquée of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique. We would like to thank Patrice Bertail,François Bourguignon, Thierry Magnac, David Sahn, Michael Visser, and two anonymous referees for very useful comments. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning June 2000 through June 2003 from Sylvie Lambert, LEA-INRA, 48 bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris, France, Sylvie.Lambert@ens.fr.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X