Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/229213 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
WIDER Working Paper No. 2019/110
Publisher: 
The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Helsinki
Abstract: 
Inequalities in children's learning are widely recognized to arise from variations in both household- and school-related factors. While few studies have considered the role of sorting between schools and households, even fewer have quantified how much sorting contributes to educational inequalities in low- and middle-income countries. We fill this gap using data on over one million children from three countries in Eastern Africa. Applying a novel variance decomposition procedure, our results indicate that sorting of pupils across schools accounts for at least 8 per cent of the total test-score variance and that this contribution tends to be largest for children from families at either end of the socio-economic spectrum. Empirical simulations of steady-state educational inequalities reveal that policies to mitigate the consequences of sorting could substantially reduce inequalities in education.
Subjects: 
Africa
education
inequality of opportunity
sorting
variance decomposition
JEL: 
I24
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
ISBN: 
978-92-9256-746-0
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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