Assessing the Returns to Education in The Gambia

Using three nationally representative surveys from the country, we estimate the private rates of returns to education in The Gambia. To obtain consistent estimates, we exploit exogenous variation in school availability in the country at the district level at the time current wage earners were born. Our results show that the private rates of returns to education are quite high, although heterogeneous across regions of the country. The high rates of returns are robust to alternate formulations.