This week's speaker is Enrico Nano, PhD candidate in Development Economics, giving a talk entitled
The Impact of Service Sector Liberalization on Education: Evidence from India
Abstract: This paper studies the impact of service sector liberalization on education and the gender education gap at the district level in India. We focus on three key service sectors – banking, insurance and telecommunication – which were all state monopolies, have been heavily liberalized in our time-frame, are relatively female-friendly and require high education investments. Our hypothesis is that the national-level liberalization spurred higher investment in education, particularly by women, in districts with higher employment growth in these service sectors. We employ a first difference strategy to control for unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity, use an IV procedure to eliminate other potential sources of bias and control for the simultaneous tariff liberalization. Our results suggest that the district employment share in liberalized service sectors is a consistently significant determinant of both the average number of years of education (positively) and the gender education gap (negatively). The findings hold both in the medium (12 years lag) and in the longer term (18 years lag) and the effect seems to be at least as relevant as that of merchandise trade liberalization.
The Brown Bag Lunch is a weekly series where professors and doctoral students present their ongoing research. For more details please contact Xiaojing Zhou.