Gender, Intrafamily Allocation of Resources and Child Schooling in South India

Abstract

The gender differences in the determinants of child schooling are examined using household level data from rural and urban areas of south India.Two measures of child schooling, namely, school enrollment status and grade attainment, are analyzed.The empirical results suggest that the education of father and mother are the significant determinants of the schooling of their sons and daughters.Both parent's education have a bigger effect on daughter's than on son's schooling in rural areas.Distance to primary and secondary schools reduces both the enrollment rate and grade attainment.The fixed effects estimates suggest that the unobserved community specific heterogeneity in the school availability and school quality is important and failure to control for such factors leads to bias in the cross section parameter estimates of grade attainment equations.