In Ouagadougou (the capital of Burkina Faso), at least 33% of the 2.5
million inhabitants live in informal settlements, while the remainder lives
in the formal settlements. The sub-population in the informal settlements
lacks social infrastructure and has extremely low education attainments.
Motivated by this specific context, we develop a method that can be used
to investigate differences in family behaviour towards schooling in the two
settlement types and, in particular, the trade- off between child quantity
and quality. Our method uses a two-stage control function approach that
allows for settlement-specific residual variances as well as for the
endogeneity of both the number of children and the settlement choice.
After controlling for a set of observable covariates, we find evidence of a
significant non-linear quantity-quality trade-off in the informal
settlements. We also find evidence that significant differences in quantityquality
behaviour exist between the two settlements, but that the
differences depend on both the education outcome considered as well as
the gender of the child.

School Attainment Family Size Regional Disparities Quantity-Quality trade-off Burkina Faso