Narrow paths out of poverty and educational demand: Evidence from Dominican baseball

Do paths out of poverty with low probabilities of success (eg, sports and entertainment) reduce the demand for schooling? We study the effect of recruitment for professional baseball on educational attainment in the Dominican Republic, where all Major League Baseball (MLB) teams operate training academies for teenage boys. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to MLB’s sudden entry into the Dominican Republic based on preexisting local baseball cultures and leverage the fact that girls are not recruited for professional baseball. Using difference-in-differences and triple difference designs, we find that baseball has no measurable effect on school attendance, in contrast to highly publicized accounts in the popular press and legal journals. Although youths may underestimate the returns to education and overestimate their chances of success in sports and entertainment, their educational decisions are largely shaped by other factors.

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