In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coffee became the main Colombian export, turning the country into one of the world’s leading coffee producers. This agrarian commodity provided resources for coffee-growing areas, favouring the rise of mass education. However, this paper suggests that coffee led to children ceasing to attend school to work in coffee production, thus affecting the demand for education adversely. We test this hypothesis by using different empirical strategies. We conduct panel regressions and instrumental variable cross-sectional estimates. The results show that increasing coffee production negatively affects the demand for the education of primary school-age children.

中文翻译：

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咖啡尝起来很苦：十九世纪末二十世纪初哥伦比亚的教育和咖啡经济

在 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初，咖啡成为哥伦比亚的主要出口产品，使该国成为世界领先的咖啡生产国之一。这种农产品为咖啡种植区提供了资源，有利于大众教育的兴起。然而，本文认为咖啡导致儿童辍学从事咖啡生产工作，从而对教育需求产生不利影响。我们通过使用不同的经验策略来检验这个假设。我们进行面板回归和工具变量横截面估计。结果表明，增加咖啡产量会对小学学龄儿童的教育需求产生负面影响。