Narrow Paths Out of Poverty and Educational Demand: Evidence from Dominican Baseball
研究了职业棒球对多米尼加共和国青少年教育程度的影响，发现棒球并未显著降低入学率，与广泛报道的负面印象相反。
Do narrow, or improbable, paths out of poverty, such as those in sports and entertainment, reduce the demand for schooling? We study the effect of professional baseball on educational attainment in the Dominican Republic, where all Major League Baseball (MLB) teams recruit 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 baseball. Using difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs, we find that baseball has no measurable effect on school attendance, in contrast to highly publicized accounts.