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on Education |
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Issue of 2010‒12‒04
eleven papers chosen by Joao Carlos Correia Leitao University of Beira Interior and Technical University of Lisbon |
| By: | Michele Raitano (University of Rome, department of public economics); Francesco Vona (Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques) |
| Abstract: | The empirical literature using large international students’ assessments tends to neglect the role of school composition variables in order not to incur in a misidentification of peer effects. However, this leads to an error of higher logical type since the learning environment crucially depends on peers’ family background and on peer heterogeneity. In this paper, using PISA 2006, we show how peer heterogeneity is a key determinant of student attainment and of opportunity equalization. Interestingly, the effect of school compositional variables differs depending on the country tracking policy: peer heterogeneity reduces efficiency in comprehensive systems whereas it has a non-linear impact in early-tracking ones. In turn, linear peer effects are larger in early-tracking systems. Besides, higher heterogeneity tends to equalize student differences related to family background. Results do not change in school- and student-level regressions suggesting that the impact of heterogeneity is correctly identified. Results are also robust when we add school-level dummies and several controls correlated with the school choice to alleviate the selectivity bias of linear peer effects. |
| Keywords: | peer heterogeneity, peer effects, schooling tracking, educational production function, equality of opportunities. |
| JEL: | I21 I28 J24 |
| Date: | 2010–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fce:doctra:1023&r=edu |
| By: | Pierre Lefebvre; Philip Merrigan |
| Abstract: | The purpose of this research is to estimate the impact of education, with a particular focus on education levels lower than a university diploma, on the labour market and social outcomes of the 24- to 26-year-old Canadians found in the fourth wave of the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS), conducted by Statistics Canada in 2006. We focus on differences between individuals who did not pursue college or university level degrees. We find that dropouts perform very poorly for most of the outcomes we analyse. Our most important result is that males who finish their high-school degree very late (after 19 years of age), perform, ceteris paribus, at many levels like dropouts. This suggests that policy makers should be taking a very close look at “second chance” or “adult education” programs across Canada. |
| Keywords: | Education levels, high school and postsecondary dropouts, graduate and continuers, earnings, wage rates, employment, employment insurance and social assistance, volunteer activities, youth skills |
| JEL: | I21 I28 |
| Date: | 2010 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lvl:lacicr:1045&r=edu |
| By: | Raquel Rangel de Meireles Guimarães (Cedeplar-UFMG); Gilvan Ramalho Guedes (Brown University); Eduardo Luiz Gonçalves Rios-Neto (Cedeplar-UFMG) |
| Abstract: | In this article we test the hypothesis in which the democratization policies for higher education adopted in Brazil had reduced the strength of the association between socioeconomic background and the entry chances in this educational level. For this, we used microdata from Monthly Employment Survey (IBGE), and we followed the educational trajectory of the individuals aged 16 to 30 for a year in the following periods: 2002/2003 and 2008/2009. The results show that this hypothesis holds for residents in the metropolitan areas. Results suggest that educational expansion policies may be decisive in reducing the inequality of opportunities. |
| Keywords: | Entry to Tertiary Education; School Transitions Model; Grade of Membership |
| JEL: | Y80 |
| Date: | 2010–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td414&r=edu |
| By: | Lucila Berniell; Dolores de la Mata; Nieves Valdés |
| Abstract: | To prevent modern diseases such as obesity, cancer, cardiovascular conditions and diabetes, which have reached epidemic-like proportions in the last decades, many health experts have called for students to receive Health Education (HED) at school. Although this type of education aims mainly to improve children's health profiles, it might affect other family members as well. This paper exploits state HED reforms as quasi-natural experiments to estimate the causal impact of HED received by children on their parents' physical activity. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) for the period 1999-2005 merged with data on state HED reforms from the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) Health Policy Database, and the 2000 and 2006 School Health Policies and Programs Study (SHPPS). To identify the spillover effects of HED requirements on parents' behavior we use a "differences-in-differences-in-differences" (DDD) methodology in which we allow for different types of treatments. We find a positive effect of HED reforms at elementary school on parents' probability of doing light physical activity. The implementation of HED for the first time increases fathers' probability of engaging in physical activity in 14 percentage points, although it does not seem to affect mothers' probability of being physically active. We find evidence of two channels that may drive these spillovers. We conclude that information sharing between children and parents as well as the specialization of parents in doing typically-male or female activities with their children may play a role in generating these indirect effects and in turn in shaping healthy lifestyles within the household. |
| Keywords: | Physical activity, Healthy lifestyles, Indirect treatment effects, Health education, Triple differences |
| JEL: | I12 I18 I28 C21 |
| Date: | 2010–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:werepe:we1031&r=edu |
| By: | Canonva, Luciano; Vaglio, Alessandro |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the role performed by mothers in affecting their childrens performance at school. The article develops firstly a theoretical modelin which household (parent - child pair) is treated as an individual, whose utility depends both on the performance at school of the student and on consumption. The model focuses on the different possibilities through which help of mothers may affect pupils' performance both in terms of time devoted to supervision and spillover effects. Empirical evidence then, using PISA 2006 and focusing on Italian case, shows that education of mothers is an issue when interacted with her occupational status. Highly educated mothers have a positive impact on students' score only when they are highly qualifi ed in the job market. |
| Keywords: | PISA 2006; parental help; education |
| JEL: | H0 N34 R2 |
| Date: | 2010 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:27019&r=edu |
| By: | Åslund, Olof (Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU), Uppsala University, IZA, and Uppsala Center for Labor Studies (UCLS).); Edin, Per-Anders (Uppsala University, IFAU, and UCLS.); Fredriksson, Peter (Stockholm University, IZA, and UCLS.); Grönqvist, Hans (Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) Stockholm University.) |
| Abstract: | We examine to what extent immigrant school performance is affected by the characteristics of the neighborhoods that they grow up in. We address this issue using a refugee placement policy which provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden. The main result is that school performance is increasing in the number of highly educated adults sharing the subject’s ethnicity. A standard deviation increase in the fraction of high-educated in the assigned neighborhood raises compulsory school GPA by 0.9 percentile ranks. Particularly for disadvantaged groups, there are also long-run effects on educational attainment. |
| Keywords: | Peer effects; Ethnic enclaves; Immigration; School performance |
| JEL: | I20 J15 Z13 |
| Date: | 2010–11–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:sunrpe:2010_0024&r=edu |
| By: | Vladimír Benáček (Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) |
| Abstract: | n this paper we study three crucial questions of economic decision-making: a) How are the people motivated in the choice of profession (career) and schools? This is also a decision that deals with the criteria for building the human capital of various specialisations. b) Can enterprises rely on the supply of new workers that should be qualified by skills for filling the future specialised demands of enterprises? c) Do the admissions into secondary schools, as intermediaries between the previous two, adjust to labour inputs with specific skills as required by firms? We have found by analysing the data for the agglomeration of Prague that the specialisation structure the supply of new cohort of workers (i.e. the school leavers) was highly consistent with the structure of expected demand of empoyers (i.e. enterprises). Our analysis working with 28 professional types of secondary schools in Prague reveals that the choice of school and profession depends primarily on the industrial structure of both employment opportunities and unemployment threats. As a secondary observation, the structure of new admissions to schools is related to the level of wages, profits, unemployment rates and R&D expenditures in industries. At the same time we could see that the existing official statistics about educational specialisation are insufficiently structured for serving as an efficient instrument for underpinning the labour market-dependent decision making in both families and schools. |
| Keywords: | education; human capital; supply and demand for working skills; employment in industries |
| JEL: | I21 G21 |
| Date: | 2010–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fau:wpaper:wp2010_28&r=edu |
| By: | Thiago de Azevedo Morais (Cedeplar-UFMG); Raquel Rangel de Meireles Guimarães (Cedeplar-UFMG); Eduardo Luiz Gonçalves Rios-Neto (Cedeplar-UFMG) |
| Abstract: | The aim of this paper was to investigate differentials on inequalities of educational opportunities between nuclear families and single parents families. The motivation to work is to verify if the result of literature which predicts a negative effect of belonging to a single parent family on educational outcome is true for Brazil. We used logistic school transition models and test the hypotheses of Mare (1979, 1980, 1981), which are: decline throughout the series of the effects of social origins in a given period; decline of the social origins effect in a given grade between two periods when there is an educational expansion. Our results show that the behavior of inequality of educational opportunities is generally similar among intact and not intact families. However, we found that women single parents were more benefited from the educational policies with a substantial reduction in inequality of educational opportunities in the early school transitions. For the other variables found no significant differences between nuclear families and single parenthood. |
| Keywords: | Inequality of Educational Opportunities; Family structures; Grade Progression Probability |
| JEL: | Y80 |
| Date: | 2010–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdp:texdis:td409&r=edu |
| By: | Eckhardt Bode |
| Abstract: | This paper estimates annual data on educational attainment for 3,076 mainland U.S. counties 1991 -- 2005. Being estimated without resorting to ancillary information, this data is suited particular well for panel regression analyses. Several plausibility checks indicate that the data is fairly reliable and yields plausible parameter estimates in a panel regression |
| Keywords: | Educational attainment, U.S. counties, Panel regression |
| JEL: | C33 C61 R12 |
| Date: | 2010–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kie:kieliw:1665&r=edu |
| By: | Persson, Mattias (Department of Business, Economics, Statistics and Informatics); Svensson, Mikael (Department of Business, Economics, Statistics and Informatics) |
| Abstract: | Being a victim of school bullying is related to several severe direct and indirect negative social and health consequences. There are an increasing number of antibullying programs used in schools in order to prevent and reduce school bullying, but often with a lack of understanding both regarding the effectiveness and monetary benefits of these programs. This paper uses a discrete choice experiment conducted in Sweden in the spring of 2010 to elicit respondents’ willingness to pay to reduce school bullying. Using both non-parametric and parametric approaches the results indicate a (societal) willingness to pay for each reduced statistical victim of bullying of 33 298 to 39,585 Swedish kronor (approx. €3 640 to €4 330). WTP was higher among individuals who reported to have themselves been bullied while in school. The results is a necessary input in order to conduct economic evaluations of antibullying programs and provides policymakers with useful information on taxpayers’ preferred allocations to antibullying programs. |
| Keywords: | Willingness to Pay; Choice Experiment; Bullying; School; Adolescents |
| JEL: | D61 I12 I21 |
| Date: | 2010–11–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:oruesi:2010_016&r=edu |
| By: | Walter, Sascha G.; Schmidt, Arne; Walter, Achim |
| Abstract: | This study explores why academic entrepreneurs patent their inventions before and after creating a firm. Drawing on start-up data combined with patent data, we specifically examine the impact of five, relatively under-researched factors (scientific field, pace of technological development, technological uncertainty, entrepreneurial orientation, and patent effectiveness. The study shows that some scientific fields, technological uncertainty, and patent effectiveness are positively related to patent propensity, both before and after founding. The effects of pace of technological development and entrepreneurial orientation were timespecific. Our study suggests that patenting by academic entrepreneurs is driven by special rationales and that prior research on full-time scientists and established firms does not necessarily generalize to them. We discuss the implications of our findings both in terms of contribution to the current literature and technology transfer policies. -- |
| Keywords: | academic patenting |
| Date: | 2010–08–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:37083&r=edu |