ages. Figure 6 plots the proportion of individuals ages 7-18 who were enrolled in the schooling system circa 2013. The main feature of the figure is that between ages 7 and 11, relatively small differences of around 10 percentage points are observed across the six Central American countries, with Nicaragua at the lower end of the spectrum, and Costa Rica and Panama at the upper end.<sup>10</sup> However, at age 12, when secondary entry is generally expected to occur, considerable and expanding disparities arise, to the extent that by age 17 the difference between the highest enrollment rates observed in Costa Rica and Panama (75 percent) are practically 30 percentage points higher than that observed in Honduras (46 percent). In between is El Salvador with an enrollment rate of 65 percent of 17 year olds, followed by Nicaragua with 60 percent, and Guatemala with 51 percent.

As already mentioned, one advantage of household surveys for the present analysis is that they allow identifying within-country differences. Figure 7 plots the average differences in enrollment rates for 12-17 year olds between females and males, indigenous and non-indigenous groups, rural and urban areas, and individuals belonging to households in the poorest and richest quintiles of the household income distribution.<sup>11</sup> These underlying factors, as presented in the conceptual framework, affect the marginal costs and benefits of staying in school, and therefore are expected to be correlated with dropout.

The largest differences in enrollment rates in Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, and Guatemala are observed between youth belonging to households in the richest and poorest quintiles. In Honduras and Nicaragua, more pronounced differences are observed when the population is classified by its urban/rural location, which in addition to relating to income, is likely related to the supply of secondary school services. Disparities across indigenous and non-indigenous groups are sizable in Panama, Guatemala, and Honduras. An important result is that gender differences are relatively small, with females generally showing slightly higher enrollment rates than males across the secondary age group, with the exceptions of El Salvador and Guatemala where males show slightly higher rates.

In most Central American countries, schooling enrollment disparities across the household income distribution are relatively small in primary and start to expand in LS. As Figure 8 shows, at the primary level (first panel in the left) more than 90 percent of children in the relevant age group are actually enrolled in primary across the income distribution in most countries. The exceptions are Guatemala and Nicaragua, where enrollment rates for the poorest four deciles are between 80 and 90 percent. Enrollment rates reach over 95 percent in all countries as household income levels rise. In contrast, LS enrollment rates among individuals in the poorest decile of households are about 30 percentage points lower than those in the richest decile, with extreme cases like Honduras registering a distance of more than 50 points. By US, differentials between the poorest and richest decile reach 40 percentage points in most countries, with Panama showing the largest gap of 55

> 10 Some recent studies for Nicaragua (see for instance Ministerio de Educación de Nicaragua (2014)) and Guatemala (Ministerio de Educación de Guatemala (2014)  have argued that education coverage rates at the primary level after 2010 have declined, although there is controversy about the data sources from which this conclusion emerges. In particular, the calculations are based on school attendance rates from the administrative records of the Education Ministry while data on the number of individuals in the relevant age group (the denominator in the equation) is from extrapolations based on Census data. We do not find the same pattern in our household survey data.

> 11 Country-specific plots are in Appendix Figures A.1 to A.4.

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