Compulsory schooling for whom? The role of gender, poverty, and religiosity

Abstract

We exploit an extension of compulsory schooling in Turkey to identify which population segments that otherwise would not have attended high school complied with the law and which type of schools they chose to attend. By adopting a regression discontinuity design, we find that the reform increased high school attendance for both boys and girls. The main compliers with the reform among boys were those who would have participated in paid employment prior to the change in law. Conversely, female compliers would have likely not been in education, employment, or training (NEET), or they could have been employed in unpaid work. Although regional poverty rates do not affect the compliance rates for boys or girls, we find that the reform had a positive impact on girls’ high school attendance only in more religiously conservative regions, and that the NEET status of girls in these regions declined. Finally, we find that the marginal students chose to attend vocational high schools, as opposed to academic high schools. We provide some suggestive evidence showing that the increase in vocational school attendance was not driven by an increase in the supply of these schools.