Obstacles on the Road to School: The Impacts of Mobility Restrictions on Educational Performance

Many students face various obstacles when going to school, including poor physical infrastructure and exposure to conflict. We investigate the costs of conflict-induced substandard infrastructure in terms of educational performance. We focus on students in the West Bank over 2000–2006 during the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This conflict is characterized by a system of mobility restrictions enforced through physical barriers, such as checkpoints, which increase commuting costs and the likelihood of encounters with security forces. We find that the introduction of checkpoints near a school reduces the probability of passing the final high school exam by one percentage point and the overall score by 0.04 standard deviations. Direct encounters with checkpoints have strong negative effects on performance, suggesting that time loss due to delays or the psychological impact of encountering security personnel may be important mechanisms.