_Some recent findings on the relationship between distance to school and enrollment_ The literature on the relationship between access to school and enrollment is difficult to summarize. Often the distance to school is included in an analysis as a control variable but is not the focus of attention and therefore its importance (or statistical significance) is not discussed.<sup>1</sup> Perhaps more pernicious, it is easy to imagine that studies that set out to analyze the relationship between distance to school and enrollment and find no effect do not get wide distribution (or are not written at all if preliminary data analysis finds no association). Moreover, even among studies that have focused on the question and have been published, methodological differences make it difficult to draw strict comparisons. Some relatively recent results do stand out, however. In particular, four studies explicitly attempt to account for the potential endogeneity of school availability and school enrollment:<sup>2</sup>

- A panel data study of over 4,000 households in rural India between 1971 and 1982 found that the new construction of a school in a village significantly increased the probability that a child aged 5 to 14 was enrolled (Foster and Rosenzweig 1996). The point estimates imply that building a school in a village can more than double the enrollment rate— although only about 6 percent of villages did not have a school at the start of the study period.

- A retrospective study of a large-scale school construction program in Indonesia between 1973 and 1980 found that additional schools led to higher average education attainment. The program, which resulted in increasing the number of schools by more than 1 per 500 children resulted in on the order of .2 to .4 additional years of schooling for those children (Duflo 2001). The impact of the program was larger in poor regions.

- Using a different methodology, a panel study between 1976 and 1986 showed that the change in the density of schools significantly affected school attendance of children ages 10 to 14 and somewhat less significantly those ages 15 to 18 (Pitt, Rosenzweig, and Gibbons, 1993).

- A repeated cross-section study of a large-scale program that emphasized school construction in India between 1993 and 1999 found that the enrollment of children ages 6 to 10 only increased by about 1 percentage point, and that of children 11 to 13 actually decreased (Jalan and Glinskaya 2003).

Other studies use cross-sectional analysis to address the issue—but cannot deal with potential endogeneity:

- In rural Ghana, a bigger distance to all types of schools—primary, middle, and secondary—reduced the probability that a child aged 5 to 12 had ever been to school, and reduced the number of years a child would spend in school (Lavy 1993).

- In rural communities in Northwest Tanzania, distance to secondary school mattered for girls’ enrollment in primary school—but not boys’—ages 10 to 15 while the presence of more primary schools in a village affected neither (Beegle and Burke 2003).

> 1 For example Alderman, Behrman, Lavy and Menon (2001) focus on the impact of health on enrollment, but their model includes distance to school which is a statistically insignificant correlate of the decision to enroll in school. 2 See the discussion below for more on this issue.

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