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Girls' education and HIV risk: evidence from Uganda
Marcella M Alsan1, David M Cutler
1Department of Economics, Harvard University, 1805 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 01238, USA.
Abstract:
Uganda is widely viewed as a public health success for curtailing its HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s. The period of rapid HIV decline coincided with a dramatic rise in girls' secondary school enrollment. We instrument for this enrollment with distance to school, conditional on a rich set of demographic and locational controls, including distance to market center. We find that girls' enrollment in secondary education significantly increased the likelihood of abstaining from sex. Using a triple-difference estimator, we find that some of the schooling increase among young women was in response to a 1990 affirmative action policy giving women an advantage over men on University applications.
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