Educational Investment Responses to Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Indian Road Construction

By Anjali Adukia, Sam Asher, P. Novosad. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2017

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The rural poor in developing countries, once economically isolated, are increasingly being connected to outside markets. Whether these new connections crowd out or encourage educational investment is a central question. We examine the effects on educational choices of 115,000 new roads built under India’s flagship road construction program. We find that children stay in school longer and perform better on standardized exams. Heterogeneity in treatment effects supports a standard human capital investment model: enrollment increases most when nearby labor markets offer high returns to education and least when they imply high opportunity costs of schooling. (JEL I25, I26, J24, O15, O18, R42)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/148bc5f75df094e70c7e76d79b70ab5fe8caca6d

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Citations in the corpus

Economic and Social Development along the Urban-Rural Continuum: New Opportunities to Inform Policy (2021, background): “This happened, for example, after the introduction of manufacturing jobs in Mexico (Atkin, 2016) or an employment guarantee program in India (Adukia, 2020).”
Rural Roads and Local Economic Development (2018, background): “Concurrent research on the PMGSY demonstrates that districts that built more roads experienced improved economic outcomes (Aggarwal, 2017), and that PMGSY roads lead to gains in educational enrollment and test scores (Mukherjee, 2012; Adukia et al., 2017).”
Do rural roads create pathways out of poverty? Evidence from India (2018, background): “Shamdasani (2016) studies the impact of PMGSY on agricultural decision-making, and finds a switch from subsistence to marketoriented farming.”
Who Needs a Fracking Education? The Educational Response to Low-Skill-Biased Technological Change (2020, unknown): “…choices in other settings, from trade shocks in Mexico and around the world (Atkin 2016; Blanchard and Olney 2017), to the housing price bubble in the United States (Charles et al. 2018), to infrastructure and workfare programs in India (Shah and Steinberg 2019; Adukia, Asher, and Novosad 2020).”