Behrman, Julia Andrea

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  • Publication
    The Effect of Increased Primary Schooling on Adult Women's HIV Status in Malawi and Uganda: Universal Primary Education as a Natural Experiment
    (2014-04-07) Behrman, Julia Andrea
    This paper explores the causal relationship between primary schooling and adult HIV status in two East African countries with some of the highest HIV infection rates in the world. Using data from the most recent Demographic Health Surveys in Malawi (2010) and Uganda (2011), the paper takes advantage of a natural experiment, the implementation of Universal Primary Education policies in the mid 1990s. An instrumented fuzzy regression discontinuity approach is used to model the relationship between increased primary schooling and adult HIV status. The results indicate that in Malawi a one year increase in schooling for a girl leads to a 6-7 percent reduction in probability of testing positive for HIV as an adult and in Uganda a one year increase in schooling leads to a 2-4 percent reduction in probability of testing positive for HIV as an adult. These results are robust to a variety of model specifications. In a series of supplementary analyses a number of potential pathways through which such effects may occur are explored. Findings indicate increased exposure to primary school affects overall schooling attainment and effects adolescent sexual behavior to some extent. However primary schooling has no effect on recent (adult) sexual behavior.
  • Publication
    Does Mother’s Schooling Matter Most in Rural Bangladesh? Re-contextualizing an Old Debate in a New Era of School Reform
    (2014-04-07) Behrman, Julia Andrea
    This paper explores the dynamic interplay between parental wealth, parental schooling, government schooling initiatives and child schooling outcomes in rural Bangladesh. In doing so, I engage with the vast literature that suggests mother’s schooling is the most important predictor of offspring schooling attainment and empirically investigate whether this continues to be the case in the context of recent waves of school reform. Methodologically, I improve upon past estimates by using a gender-disaggregated measure of wealth that is exogenous to decision-making in marriage: men’s and women’s assets at marriage. I run a series of Cox semi-proportional hazard models estimating factors that predict rates of school entry and duration between entry and exit, as well as OLS regression estimates of grade progression between entry and exit. Findings indicate that mother’s schooling, and to some extent father’s schooling, are important predictors of offspring attainment even after controlling for government schooling initiatives and improved measures of wealth. Substantively, I argue for a re-contextualization of the literature on household decision-making to better understand the nuanced interplay between household factors and external programs and incentives in the context of mass schooling reform in Bangladesh and around the globe.