The correlation between religion and socioeconomic status is observed throughout the world. In the Middle East, local non-Muslims are, on average, better off than the Muslim majority. I trace the origins of the phenomenon in Egypt to a historical process of self-selection across religions, which...

This paper examines the effect of increased local supply of schooling on intergenerational mobility in education in Jordan. We use a unique data set that links individual data on own schooling and parents’ schooling for adults, from a household survey, with the annual supply of schools in the...

Public mass modern education was a major pillar of state-led development in the post-Colonial developing world. I examine the impact of Egypt’s transformation in 1953 of traditional elementary schools (kuttabs), which served the masses, into public modern primary schools on the...