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The term Koranic school is often used to describe schools that are not part of the formal education system and typically place a strong emphasis on memorising the Koran in Arabic, as well as on knowledge of Islamic religious education and practice. Using data from Niger as a case study, this paper provides data on trends in the share of individuals that have a Koranic education, a formal education, or no education at all, as well as a basic profile (univariate and multivariate) of children with Koranic education, formal education, or no education at all. In addition, the potential impacts of Koranic education in comparison to formal education or no education at all on outcomes such as literacy and numeracy, labour market earnings, household consumption, assets and perceptions of well-being, and infant mortality is analyzed.

In a dynamic panel data model, the number of moment conditions increases rapidly with the time dimension, resulting in a large dimensional covariance matrix of the instruments. As a consequence, the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator exhibits a large bias in small samples, especially when the autoregressive parameter is close to unity. To address this issue, we propose a regularized version of the one-step GMM estimator using three regularization schemes based on three different ways of inverting the covariance matrix of the instruments. Under double asymptotics, we show that our regularized estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal. These regularization schemes involve a tuning or regularization parameter which needs to be chosen. We derive a data-driven selection of this regularization parameter based on an approximation of the higher-order mean square error and show its optimality. As an empirical application, we estimate a model of income dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particularly in low- and lower middle-income countries, petty corruption remains prevalent in service delivery, whether in schools, health centers, administrative services, or other institutions. In reference to Pope Francis' call to say no to corruption in his recent trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, this article measures the extent of corruption in schools in Africa using data collected by the Afrobarometer. More than one in four respondents have encountered problems to obtain the education services they need for their children and nearly one in five have had to pay bribes or do other favors for education providers. This proportion does not appear to have declined significantly over the past decade. Regression analysis suggests that different household characteristics are associated with the likelihood of having difficulty obtaining the services they need and the likelihood of being a victim of corruption. Interestingly for this special issue, while faith affiliation does not seem to affect the likelihood of providing favors to obtain services, religiosity does appear to matter—and therefore so may faith leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]