School competition and students’ entrepreneurial intentions: international evidence using historical Catholic roots of private schooling

Abstract

School choice research mostly focuses on academic outcomes. Policymakers increasingly view entrepreneurial traits as a non-cognitive outcome important for economic growth. We use international PISA-2006 student-level data to estimate the effect of private-school competition on students’ entrepreneurial intentions, measured by their occupational desire to manage a small enterprise. We exploit Catholic-Church resistance to state schooling in the 19th century as a natural experiment to obtain exogenous variation in current private-school shares. Our instrumental-variable results suggest that a 10%-point higher private-school share raises students’ entrepreneurial intentions by 0.3–0.5% points (11–18% of the international mean) even after controlling for current Catholic shares, students’ academic skills, and parents’ entrepreneurial occupation.