Description:

Laia Navarro-Sola (Northwestern University): "Secondary school expansion through televised lessons: The labor market returns of the Mexican telesecundaria"

Abstract:
This study investigates the long-run effects of the telesecundaria, a Mexican junior secondary school program that provides all lessons through television broadcastings in a classroom setting, and that served 19.2% of all junior secondary students in 2014. I exploit geographical and timing variation in telesecundaria's introduction to estimate the program effects using an instrumented differences-in-differences (IV-DiD) empirical approach. The main results indicate that a telesecundaria construction raises by 0.2-0.5 the average years of education and significantly increases the labor market participation of cohorts with the opportunity to attend them. I estimate a 10-13.5% hourly wage return from an additional year of education for the subgroup affected by the telesecundaria construction. In work in progress, I investigate the returns' sensitivity to the educational opportunities available: I first examine how they vary depending on the presence of brick-and-mortar secondary schools, outlining a method to separately identify the effects on individuals that would have otherwise worked versus those who would have attended a brick-and-mortar school. I then provide suggestive evidence that the estimated returns could be a combination of the returns of attending a telesecundaria (direct effect) and the returns of attending education levels available after completing telesecundaria (continuation effect), and discuss potential ways to separate both effects.