Tuition Fees and the Intra-Household Allocation of Schooling : Evidence from Uganda's Universal Primary Education Reform

The impact of policies that increase access to schooling to children in low income countries is mediated by household responses that distribute educational investments across children; however, these household responses are often difficult to cleanly identify. In this paper, I study a UPE reform that abolished elementary school fees for up to four children per household in Uganda, with families paying fees on each additional child. Depending on the composition of children and their age at the onset of the reform, the policy generates costs for primary school that vary both within and across households. Children that are eligible for the tuition waiver but live in households with ineligible siblings complete fewer years of schooling. I estimate that the presence of ineligiblesiblings wiped out one half of the overall impact of the UPE reform on educational attainment, with the effects concentrated among the poorest households