Ramadan school holidays as a natural experiment : impacts of seasonality on school dropout in Bangladesh

In 2000, Ramadan school vacation coincided with the original annual exam period of December in Bangladesh. This forced schools to pre-pone their final exam schedules in November, which was the month before the harvest begins. 'Ramadan 2000' is a natural experiment that reduced the labor demand for children during the exam period. Using household level panel data of 2000 and 2003, and after controlling for various unobservable variations including individual fixed effects, aggregate year effects, and subdistrict-level year effects, this paper finds evidence of statistically significant impact of seasonal labor demand on school dropout in Bangladesh among the children from agricultural households.

Trade, economic growth and environment

The literature on trade openness, economic development, and the environment is largely inconclusive about the environmental consequences of trade. This study review previous studies focusing on treating trade and income as endogenous and estimating the overall impact of trade openness on environmental quality using the instrumental variables technique. The results show that whether or not trade has a beneficial effect on the environment varies depending on the pollutant and the country. Trade is found to benefit the environment in OECD countries. It has detrimental effects, however, on sulfur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in non-OECD countries, although it does lower biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) emissions in these countries. The results also find the impact is large in the long term, after the dynamic adjustment process, although it is small in the short term.