[Seminaire CREM] Présentation de Paola VILLAR, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne (CES)

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Abstract: Spatial inequality in access to schooling is large and persistent across much of the developing world, and is often traced to the colonial placement of Christian missions. We show that in the Democratic Republic of the Congo this inequality does not fade but is actively reproduced by religious competition. Combining a geolocated census of all secondary schools with newly assembled data on colonial missions, we document that schools increasingly cluster around former mission sites, leaving a quarter of the population without any local school. Exploiting the timing of openings within locations, we find that religious providers avoid opening where their own group has just opened, but respond to a rival group by opening more, a pattern that appears only after the 1990s, with the rise of new Christian churches. A simple model of competition for believers explains these patterns. Co-écrit avec Pablo Álvarez-Aragón et Catherine Guirkinger