Todd Pugatch

Bumpy Rides: School to Work Transitions in South Africa

Re-enrollment in school following a period of dropout is a common feature of the South African school to work transition that has been largely ignored in both the literature on South Africa and the wider literature on sequential schooling choice. In this paper, I quantify the importance of the option to re-enroll in the school to work transition of South African youth. I estimate a structural model of schooling choice in South Africa using a panel dataset that contains the entire schooling and labor market histories of sampled youth. Estimates of the models structural parameters confirm the hypothesis that enrollment choices reflect dynamic updating of the relative returns to schooling versus labor market participation. In a policy simulation under which re-enrollment prior to high school completion is completely restricted, the proportion completing at least 12 years of schooling rises 6 percentage points, as youth who would have dropped out under unrestricted re-enrollment reconsider the long-term consequences of doing so. The results suggest that the option to re-enroll is an important component of the incentives South African youth face when making schooling decisions.

U.S. Border Enforcement and Mexican Immigrant Location Choice

We provide the first evidence on the causal effect of border enforcement on the full spatial distribution of Mexican immigrants to the United States. We address the endogeneity of border enforcement with an instrumental variables strategy based on administrative delays in budgetary allocations for border security. We find that 1,000 additional Border Patrol officers assigned to prevent unauthorized migrants from entering a U.S. state decreases that state’s share of Mexican immigrants by 21.9 %. Our estimates imply that if border enforcement had not changed from 1994 to 2011, the shares of Mexican immigrants locating in California and Texas would each be 8 percentage points greater, with all other states’ shares lower or unchanged.

Safety valve or sinkhole? Vocational schooling in South Africa

As an alternative to traditional academic schooling, vocational schooling in South Africa may serve as a safety valve for students encountering difficulty in the transition from school to work. Yet if ineffective, vocational schooling could also be a sinkhole, offering little chance for success on the labor market. After defining the terms “safety valve” and “sinkhole” in a model of human capital investment with multiple schooling types, I test for evidence of these characteristics using a panel of urban youth in South Africa. I find support for the safety valve role of vocational schooling, with a 1 percentage point decrease in vocational enrollment in response to grade failure, compared to a decline of 40 percentage points for academic enrollment. In contrast, I fail to find evidence that vocational schooling is a sinkhole, with wage and employment returns at least as large as those for academic schooling. The results suggest that vocational schooling plays an important role in easing difficult school to work transitions for South African youth.JEL classificationI25; J24; J31; O12.

At the frontlines of development : reflections from the World Bank

At the Frontlines of Development former World Bank country directors recount their experiences, both as managers of the World Banks programs in global economic hotspots of the 1990s as well as throughout their careers in development economics. These essays detail, among many stories of development in the 1990s, how China and India lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, while Russia collapsed; how Bosnia and Herzegovina and Mozambique remade their war-ravaged economies; and how Thailand, Turkey, and Argentina fell into financial crisis. These remarkable stories, told in first-person by the country directors who were there to witness them, provide candid assessments of development in the 1990s-what succeeded, what failed, and what lessons emerged.

Teacher Pay and Student Performance: Evidence from the Gambian Hardship Allowance

ABSTRACT More than two dozen developing countries have implemented policies to increase teacher compensation in rural schools. We evaluate the impact of the Gambian hardship allowance, which provides a salary premium of 30–40% to primary school teachers in remote locations, on student performance. A geographic discontinuity in the policy’s implementation provides identifying variation. We find no effects of the hardship allowance on average test scores. However, we find suggestive evidence that student performance improved at the top of the test score distribution and fell at the bottom. Our findings indicate that the substantial, unconditional salary increases earned by Gambian teachers had little to no effect on average student performance, with gains limited to the best students.