Community effects and desired schooling of parents and children in Mexico

This paper investigates community effects in the determination of desired schooling in a sample of more than 300 school children and their parents in three Mexican cities. Community residence is found to be a significant predictor of desired schooling of parents and children, even with comprehensive controls for child and family traits. Measurement error and omitted variable bias are considered, but rejected, as principal causes of this result. A comparison of recent and long-term residents of a community reveals that the predictive power of residence is much stronger for long-term residents. This result is interpreted as evidence of community effects, since the alternative hypothesis of Tiebout behavior predicts a stronger common effect for recent migrants. potential sources of the community effects are then investigated with neighborhood-level data from the 1990 Mexican Census. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.