age transitions from 12 to 14 and 15 to 17 years of age, where increases in the independent variable are associated with declining shares of female Osow youth. The effect however, fades away as cohorts become older.

Lastly, we introduce the fertility rate observed at the year of birth, which in the same spirit of Newhouse and Wolff (2013) intends to capture the potential effects of “higher competition” from larger cohort sizes for accessing educational services at younger ages, and accruing to job opportunities after school age. The data is taken from the United Nations Population Statistics. Apart from our interest in the relationship with changes in the size of the Osow youth group, the inclusion of this variable allows controlling for the mortality and migration effects that might be inherent in the cohort trajectories constructed from our household survey data.

According to our estimates, there is in fact a positive and significant association between cohort size (as approximated by the fertility rate at the year of birth), and the share of females belonging to the Osow youth group. However, even though the coefficient remains positive, it loses significance after cohorts reach 18 years of age, which could be an indication that greater cohort sizes are more relevant for educational access than for their effects on labor market competition.

An interesting result to observe from these sets of estimations is that the R-squared of the model is relatively high, and increasing with the age group considered. The statistic reaches a value of 0.60 for the transition from ages 21-23 to 24-26, which suggests higher explanatory power for the stages of the life cycle where Osow youth shares remain relatively stable (as can be seen in Figure 8).

Table 2 presents the results for cohorts of males. As in the case of females, we find the expected positive association between changes in the share of Osow youth and changes in the share of rural populations across the life cycle until cohorts reach 20 years of age. However, the effect for males continues to be significant in later ages, which is not the case for females. The relation between changes in the share of malnourished children and the size of the Osow youth group is also of the expected positive sign, but as compared to the case of females, the association is statistically significant during the early stages of the life cycle, indicating that males tend to be more vulnerable to becoming Osow due to household poverty.

As for the returns to education, we find similar results of a non-statistically significant relation between the size of the Osow youth groups and the economic rewards of acquiring Upper Secondary or Higher Education. However, for males we do identify a significant effect of increases in the returns to higher education related to significant declines in the share of Osow youth between ages 21-23 and 24-16, which could be interpreted as a consequence of increased incentives for remaining in the school system at these ages.

Perhaps the most important result is the one observed for the relationship with male and female employment rates. For the share of males in the labor market, we find the expected strong and significant negative sign indicating that greater job opportunities lead to reductions in the share of 27