Education demand and age at school enrollment in Tanzania

In Tanzania, actual school enrollment takes place 2 or 3 years later on average than the legal enrollment age. In this paper we develop a microeconomic model that allows us to disentangle various explanations for such delays. We simultaneously estimate enrollment age and schooling duration by maximum likelihood techniques using data from the Human Resource Development Survey carried out in Tanzania in 1992-93, A particularly interesting result of our econometric analysis is that boys and gills follow fundamentally different patterns of schooling. Our model suggests that this could be due to different return from pre-school training in the family's economic activities or it could be related to the wish to halle git ls ready to be married as early as possible.