downturn), or if teachers were less motivated. Understanding the impact of crises on the quality of education, as opposed to enrollment levels, is an important priority for future research.<sup>15</sup> We now turn to evidence of the effects of shocks on schooling outcomes in countries outside Latin America, including Indonesia, Cote d’Ivoire and Malawi. The economic crisis of 1998 in Indonesia was a sudden reversal of fortune for a country that had enjoyed high growth rates for decades. In 1998 GDP per capita contracted by 14 percent, and by a further 1 percent in 1999. Since then growth has resumed, although at rates generally lower than those enjoyed by the country in the decade or so before the crisis.

Thomas et al. (2004) analyze the impact of the crisis on schooling outcomes. Table 3, based on their results, shows that there was a decrease in enrollment during the crisis, although the estimated changes are very small.<sup>16</sup> For no age group between 7 and 17 did school enrollment fall by more than 1 percent. Even among households in the lowest quartile of the distribution of per capita expenditures, changes in enrollment rates never exceed 2 percent; for most ages, changes were substantially smaller than this.

A different picture emerges from Jensen’s (2000) analysis of the effects of drought on school enrollment in Cote d’Ivoire. Jensen uses panel data for 1986-87 to compare children in villages that were affected by drought and others that were not.<sup>17</sup> Jensen shows that, between 1986 and 1987, school enrollment of boys grew by 5 percentage points in villages that were not affected by droughts, while the school enrollment of girls grew by 10 percentage points; in 15 One way to address this question would be to compare the performance of students on standardized tests in different years, but (to our knowledge) no such data are available from a developing country spanning the years before, during, and after a major economic recession. Another approach would be to see whether the wage premium paid to adults for each additional year of schooling is lower for those who received their education during the crisis years. We attempted to do this with the _Encuesta Nacional de Hogares_ (ENAHO) surveys for Peru. Specifically, using surveys for 2002 and 2007, we traced out the earnings profiles of adults with no schooling, primary school, and secondary school by calendar year of birth. These graphs have the expected shape—the earnings profiles for workers with more schooling lie above those for workers with less schooling, and the difference between the earnings schedules increases with age. If school quality dropped appreciably during the crisis, we might expect to see a “dent” in the earnings profile of workers with primary school education, relative to those with no education, for cohorts that received their education during the crisis years. Children of primary school age, age 6-11 during the 1988-92 crisis, would have been 16 to 25 years of age in 2002, and 21 to 30 years of age in 2007. We see no clear evidence of any crisis patterns, although the estimates tend to be quite noisy, in spite of the reasonably large number of observations in these surveys (56,371 observations in 2002, and 65,549 in 2007). We thank Luis Barrantes for making these data available to us.

> 16 Thomas et al. (2004) report percentage changes in school _non_ -enrollment rates. These appear to suggest quantitatively large, negative effects of the crisis. However, because enrollment rates before the crisis were high, a small increase in non-enrollment translates into a large percentage change. When reported as changes in enrollment, the effects appear quite small.

17 He defines villages as having suffered from a drought if rainfall was more than one standard deviation below the historical mean.

15