Road to the future: Identifying impacts of roads on education in Colombia

Abstract

This study examines the impact of Colombia’s Public–Private Partnership (PPP) road concessions on educational outcomes using a staggered difference-in-differences approach with student-level data (2006–2021). I find that road project completion leads to statistically significant increases of 0.169 standard deviations in math and 0.11 standard deviations reading literacy scores. Furthermore, child labor decreases by 3%, while higher education pursuit increases by 4.8%. These robust results suggest PPP-driven road investments effectively promote human capital development, urging policymakers to consider these short- and long-term educational effects when evaluating infrastructure.