Publication

This paper examines what role social capital – or the ability of a community to engage in collective action or establish shared norms – and ethnic divisions play in determining the quality of schools in Africa. More specifically, the authors examine social capital through average levels of trust as measured by a survey and ethnic divisions using the index of ethnic fractionalization as proposed by Alesina et al. Overall, they find that while local levels of trust do have an impact on the ability of a community to increase school quality, ethnic divisions only have a marginal impact.