Endogenous Skill Acquisition and Export Manufacturing in Mexico

This paper presents empirical evidence that the growth of export manufacturing in Mexico during a period of major trade reforms (the years 1986 to 2000) altered the distribution of education. I use variation in the timing of factory openings across commuting zones to show that school drop-out increased with local expansions in export-manufacturing industries. The magnitudes I find suggest that for every 25 jobs created, one student dropped out of school at grade 9 rather than continuing through to grade 12. These effects are driven by less-skilled export-manufacturing jobs which raised the opportunity cost of schooling for students at the margin. (JEL F14, F16, J24, L60, O14, O19)