Are New Universities Helping the Poor Get More Education?

Pablo Garriga , Brown University

This paper uses the expansion of Argentina's Public University System to test its effects on educational attainment. I use the establishment of new universities between 1991 and 2000 in districts that previously had no college to measure its effect on educational attainment and see whether having a college nearby may have led individuals to pursue more education than they would have if there were no universities in their district. To identify this effect I exploit location and age variation across individuals. I use a fixed-effects methodology to compare individuals that were exposed to the treatment to those that were not, while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across districts and cohorts.

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 Presented in Session 2. Children & Youth