Community effects and desired schooling of parents and children in Mexico

This paper investigates community effects in the determination of desired s chooling in a sample of more than 300 school children and their parents in three Mexican cities. Community residence is found to be a significant pred ictor of desired schooling of parents and children, even with comprehensive controls for child and family traits. Measurement error and omitted variab le bias are considered, but rejected, as principal causes of this result. A comparison of recent and long-term residents of a community reveals that t he predictive power of residence is much stronger for long-term residents. This result is interpreted as evidence of community effects, since the alte rnative hypothesis of Tiebout behavior predicts a stronger common effect fo r recent migrants. potential sources of the community effects are then inve stigated with neighborhood-level data from the 1990 Mexican Census. (C) 199 9 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.