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on Education |
| By: | Semrad, Alexandra |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the relationship between social class, educational attainment, and social mobility. While educational expansion has been shown to increase educational attainment and social mobility in contemporary countries, the 19th century has received little attention. The German state of Bavaria experienced an enormous expansion of secondary education in the course of the 19th century, also due to the introduction of modern secondary education (Gewerbeschule). In this context, it is asked whether educational expansion (1) led to changes in the association between social class and educational attainment, and especially so after the introduction of the Gewerbeschule; (2) weakened the link between social class of origin (father’s occupation) and class of destination (son’s occupation) and thereby increased social mobility? Employing a unique dataset based on annual school reports of 21 Bavarian cities covering the 19th century, the analysis of occupational background information on students by the use of HISCO/HISCLASS reveals that introduction of the Gewerbeschule increased self-selection of the upper class into traditional and the middle class into modern education. Even though educational expansion did not increase participation of lower social classes, the prospect of social mobility for underprivileged classes was high especially in the Gymnasium. |
| JEL: | N33 I24 |
| Date: | 2015–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lmu:muenec:25261&r=all |
| By: | Philip DeCicca; Harry Krashinsky |
| Abstract: | While less-educated women are more likely to give birth as teenagers, there is scant evidence the relationship is causal. We investigate this possibility using variation in compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) to identify the impact of formal education on teen fertility for a large sample of women drawn from multiple waves of the Canadian Census. We find that greater CSL-induced schooling reduces the probability of giving birth as a teenager by roughly two to three percentage points. We find evidence that education affects the timing of births in a way that strongly implies an “incarceration” effect of education. In particular, we find large negative impacts of education on births to young women aged seventeen and eighteen, but little evidence of an effect after these ages, consistent with the idea that being enrolled in school deters fertility in a contemporaneous manner. Our findings are robust to the inclusion of several province-level characteristics including multiple dimensions of school quality, expenditures on public programs and region-specific time trends. |
| JEL: | I1 I18 I24 J13 |
| Date: | 2015–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21594&r=all |
| By: | Avitabile,Ciro; De Hoyos Navarro,Rafael E. |
| Abstract: | A randomized control trial was conducted to study whether providing 10th grade students with information about the returns to upper secondary and tertiary education, and a source of financial aid for tertiary education, can contribute to improve student performance. The study finds that the intervention had no effects on the probability of taking a 12th grade national standardized exam three years after, a proxy for on-time high school completion, but a positive and significant impact on learning outcomes and self-reported measures of effort. The effects are larger for girls and students from households with a relatively high income. These findings are consistent with a simple model where time discount determines the increase in effort and only students with adequate initial conditions are able to translate increased effort into better outcomes. |
| Keywords: | Education For All,Secondary Education,Gender and Education,Tertiary Education,Primary Education |
| Date: | 2015–09–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:7422&r=all |
| By: | SELLAMI, Sana; VERHAEST, Dieter; NONNEMAN, Walter; VAN TRIER, Walter |
| Abstract: | We investigate the role of four motives to participate in higher education – investment, educational consumption, student life consumption and social pressure – on field of study choices and academic performance and on three labour market outcomes – over-education, wages and job satisfaction. We use data on three cohorts of about 3000 Flemish individuals documenting the transition from education to work. Principal components are used to identify the four study motives. Effects of study motives on field of study choices and academic performance are estimated using logit respectively Poisson regression. Effects on over-education are measured by two-bit regression and on wages and job satisfaction using standard and IV panel estimates. Key findings are that individuals motivated by education consumption are less likely to be overeducated but face a stronger job satisfaction penalty to over-education than other workers. Our results also suggest that individuals who continue in education because of student life consumption have a higher likelihood of over-education. |
| Keywords: | Educational motives, Higher education, Graduates, Wages, Job satisfaction, Underemployment, Over-qualification |
| Date: | 2015–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ant:wpaper:2015014&r=all |
| By: | Lorenzo Cappellari (Università Cattolica Milano); Antonio Di Paolo (AQR-IREA, University of Barcelona) |
| Abstract: | We exploit the 1983 language-in-education reform that introduced Catalan alongside Spanish as medium of instruction in Catalan schools to estimate the labour market value of bilingual education. Identification is achieved in a difference-in-differences framework exploiting variation in exposure to the reform across years of schooling and years of birth. We find positive wage returns to bilingual education and no effects on employment, hours of work or occupation. Results are robust to education-cohort specific trends or selection into schooling and are mainly stemming from exposure at compulsory education. We show that the effect worked through increased Catalan proficiency for Spanish speakers and that there were also positive effects for Catalan speakers from families with low education. These findings are consistent with human capital effects rather than with more efficient job search or reduced discrimination. Exploiting the heterogeneous effects of the reform as an instrument for proficiency we find sizeable earnings effects of skills in Catalan. |
| Keywords: | Bilingual education, returns to schooling, language-in-education reform, Catalonia |
| JEL: | J24 J31 I28 |
| Date: | 2015–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:xrp:wpaper:xreap2015-03&r=all |
| By: | Britta Boyd (Department of Border Region Studies, University of Southern Denmark); Simon Fietze (Department of Border Region Studies, University of Southern Denmark); Kristian Philipsen (Department of Entrepreneurship and Relationship Management, University of Southern Denmark) |
| Abstract: | The research field of entrepreneurship gets more and more important in Denmark. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and recently the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS) were carried out to gain more insights about entrepreneurial intentions and activities in Denmark. The origins of GUESSS go back to 2003 when researchers at the Swiss Research Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Gallen (KMU-HSG) started the survey. The study is conducted every two years to explore the entrepreneurial intent and activity of students as well as the entrepreneurship training and education provided by universities in 34 countries around the world. In the sixth data collection wave Demark participated for the first time in 2013. The results for the Danish sample are presented in this report. The main findings are that Danish students have a rather low entrepreneurial intention. Their career intentions seem to follow the international pattern of first being an employee and then later becoming a founder. The report suggest to improve entrepreneurial intention among Danish students by stimulating entrepreneurial education at universities considering specific offers and activities for the different groups of entrepreneurial students as well as for students who not have considered becoming a founder yet. |
| Keywords: | entrepreneurial intention, succession intention, GUESSS, Denmark |
| JEL: | I21 I23 I28 L26 |
| Date: | 2015–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sdn:wpaper:9&r=all |
| By: | Lisa Dragoset; Susanne James-Burdumy; Kristin Hallgren; Irma Perez-Johnson; Mariesa Herrmann; Christina Tuttle; Megan Hague Angus; Rebecca Herman; Matthew Murray; Corutney Tanenbaum; Cheryl Graczewski |
| Abstract: | This brief summarizes findings from a new report from Mathematica’s multi-year evaluation of School Improvement Grants (SIG) for the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. It describes the practices schools reported using in spring 2012. |
| Keywords: | Race to the top, school improvement grant |
| JEL: | I |
| Date: | 2015–09–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mpr:mprres:b94534c5c57f446b867e9b3943737ad5&r=all |
| By: | Semih Tumen |
| Abstract: | Informal jobs offer skill acquisition opportunities that may facilitate a future switch to formal employment for young workers. In this sense, informal training on the job may be a viable alternative to formal schooling in an economy with a large and diverse informal sector. In this paper, I investigate if these considerations are relevant for the schooling decisions of young individuals using panel data for 17 Latin American countries and micro-level data for Turkey. Specifically, I ask if the prevalence of informal jobs distorts schooling attainment. I concentrate on three measures of schooling outcomes : (1) secondary education enrollment rate, (2) out-of-school rate for lower secondary school, and (3) tertiary education graduation rate. I find that the secondary education enrollment rate is negatively correlated with the size of the informal economy, while the out-of-school rate is positively correlated. Moreover, the tertiary education graduation rates tend to fall as the informal employment opportunities increase. This means that informal training on the job may be crowding out school education in developing countries. Policies that can potentially affect the size of the informal sector should take into consideration these second-round effects on aggregate schooling outcomes. |
| Keywords: | Informal economy, Skill acquisition, Schooling outcomes, Latin America, Turkey |
| JEL: | E26 I21 J24 O17 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tcb:wpaper:1514&r=all |
| By: | Rodriguez Lesmes,Paul Andres; Trujillo,Jose Daniel; Valderrama Gonzalez,Daniel |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the relation between public, education-related infrastructure and the quality of education in schools. The analysis uses a case study of the establishment of two large, high-quality public libraries in low-income areas in Bogotá, Colombia. It assesses the impact of these libraries on the quality of education by comparing national test scores (SABER 11) for schools close to and far from the libraries before (2000?02) and after (2003?08) the libraries were opened. The paper introduces a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition on di?erence-in-di?erences estimates to assess whether variation of traditional determinants of mathematics, verbal, and science test scores explains the estimates. The analysis ?nds differences that are not statistically di?erent from zero that could be attributed to the establishment of the libraries. These results are robust to alternative speci?cations, a synthetic control approach, and an alternative measure of distance. |
| Keywords: | Education For All,Secondary Education,Tertiary Education,Effective Schools and Teachers,Primary Education |
| Date: | 2015–09–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:7429&r=all |
| By: | David L. Sjoquist (Georgia State University); John V. Winters (Oklahoma State University) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the effects of state merit-based student aid programs on college attendance and degree completion. Our primary analysis uses micro data from the 2000 Census and 2001 2010 American Community Survey to estimate the effects of exposure to merit programs on educational outcomes for 25 states that adopted such programs by 2004. We also utilize administrative data for the University System of Georgia to look more in depth at the effects of exposure to the HOPE Scholarship on degree completion. We find strong consistent evidence that exposure to state merit aid programs has no meaningfully positive effect on college completion. |
| Keywords: | merit aid, HOPE, college attainment, degree completion, higher education |
| JEL: | H75 I23 J24 R28 |
| Date: | 2014–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:okl:wpaper:1408&r=all |
| By: | Rafael Carranza; Daniel Hojman |
| Abstract: | This paper studies inequality of opportunity in health in Chile. Following Roemer’s approach to equality of opportunity, we separate the effect of circumstances and efforts -healthy behaviors- on self-assessed health. In addition to parental and family background, our set of circumstances includes a proxy of numeracy skills. We find that circumstances explain nearly 40 percent of the variance of health outcomes, four times the contribution of efforts. More than one third of the contribution of circumstances is due to numeracy skills, similar to the contribution of parental education. Parents’ longevity is also important but its contribution is smaller. The overall influence of circumstances on inequality is substantial, ranging from 62 to more than 90 percent depending on the inequality index used. Overall, we find that health inequality is higher in Chile than in European countries and the contribution of unequal opportunities to inequality is at least as large. Our results also highlight the importance of cognitive ability on health inequality. |
| Date: | 2015–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:udc:wpaper:wp410&r=all |
| By: | Rui Castro (University of Western Ontario); Daniele Coen-Pirani (University of Pittsburgh) |
| Abstract: | We study the evolution of educational attainment of the 1932–1972 cohorts using a human capital investment model with heterogeneous learning ability. Inter-cohort variation in schooling is driven by changes in skill prices, tuition, and education quality over time, and average learning ability across cohorts. Under static expectations the model accounts for the main empirical patterns. Rising skill prices for college explain the rapid increase in college graduation till the 1948 cohort. The decline in average learning ability, calibrated to match the evolution of test scores, explains half of the stagnation in college graduation between the 1948 and 1972 cohorts. |
| Keywords: | Educational Attainment; Human Capital; Skill Prices; Inequality; Cohorts |
| JEL: | I24 J24 J31 O11 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uwo:hcuwoc:20155&r=all |
| By: | Zhuoqiong (Charlie) (London School of Economics); David Ong (Economic Science Institute & Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University); Roman Sheremeta (Case Western Reserve University) |
| Abstract: | We study how salient group identity, created through competition between students from different universities, as well as differences in the value of winning impact competitive behavior. Our experiment employs a simple all-pay auction within and between two university subject pools. We find that when competing against their peers, students within the lower tier university bid more aggressively than students within the top-tier university. Also, students from the lower tier university, in particular women, bid more aggressively when competing against students from the top-tier university. These findings, interpreted through a theoretical model incorporating both group identity and differential value of winning, suggest that students at the lower tier university have a stronger group identity as well as higher desire to win. |
| Keywords: | experiments, all-pay auction, competitiveness, group identity |
| JEL: | C91 D03 J7 Z13 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chu:wpaper:15-16&r=all |
| By: | Marchand, Joseph (University of Alberta, Department of Economics); Weber, Jeremy (University of Pittsburgh) |
| Abstract: | Resource booms can affect student achievement through greater labor demand, where rising wages pull students or teachers out of schools, and through an expanded tax base, where increased school spending alters teacher quality or student productivity. Using shale depth variation across Texas school districts with annual oil and gas price variation, this study finds that resource development slightly decreased student achievement despite providing schools with more money. Vocational and economically disadvantaged students were pulled into the labor market, while teacher turnover and inexperience increased. Schools responded to the tax base expansion by spending more on capital projects but not on teachers. |
| Keywords: | local labor markets; local school finance; resource booms; teacher quality |
| JEL: | H70 I22 J24 J40 Q33 R23 |
| Date: | 2015–09–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:albaec:2015_015&r=all |
| By: | Urvi Neelakantan (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond); Felicia Ionescu (Federal Reserve Board); Kartik Athreya (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond) |
| Abstract: | Households invest substantially in human capital, especially early in life, through partic- ipation in formal higher education. Later in life, they primarily invest in financial assets. Formal educational investments are lumpy and illiquid, financial investments are not. Both are risky. We show that in the presence of short-sale constraints on risky financial assets alone, the characteristics of formal education, including the cost of debt-finance, have strong effects on financial portfolios throughout life. Conversely, we show that changes in the rate of return on financial wealth can exert substantial influence on human capital investment decisions. |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:red:sed015:804&r=all |
| By: | Avitabile,Ciro; Bobba,Matteo; Pariguana,Marco |
| Abstract: | Parents and students from different socioeconomic backgrounds value differently school characteristics, but the reasons behind this preference heterogeneity are not well understood. In the context of the centralized school assignment system in Mexico City, this study analyzes how a large household income shock affects choices over high school tracks exploiting the discontinuity in the assignment of the welfare program Oportunidades. The income shock significantly increases the probability of choosing the vocational track vis-a-vis the other more academic-oriented tracks. The findings suggest that the transfer relaxes the financial constraints that prevent relatively low-ability students from choosing the schooling option with higher labor market returns. |
| Keywords: | Education For All,Secondary Education,Tertiary Education,Effective Schools and Teachers,Primary Education |
| Date: | 2015–09–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:7427&r=all |
| By: | Margaret Brehm; Scott A. Imberman; Michael F. Lovenheim |
| Abstract: | This paper estimates the effect of the individual incentives teachers face in a teacher-based value-added merit pay tournament on student achievement. We first build an illustrative model in which teachers use proximity to an award threshold to update their information about their own ability, which informs their expected marginal return to effort. The model predicts that those who are closer to an award cutoff in a given year will increase effort and thus will have higher achievement gains in the subsequent year. However, if value-added scores are too noisy, teachers will not respond. Using administrative teacher-student linked data, we test this prediction employing a method akin to the bunching estimator of Saez (2010). Specifically, we examine whether teachers who are proximal to a cutoff in one year exhibit excess gains in test score growth in the next year. Our results show consistent evidence that teachers do not respond to the incentives they face under this program. In line with our model, we argue that a likely reason for the lack of responsiveness is that the value-added measures used to determine awards were too noisy to provide informative feedback about one's ability. This highlights the importance of value-added precision in the design of incentive pay systems. |
| JEL: | H75 I21 J33 J38 |
| Date: | 2015–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21598&r=all |
| By: | Acosta,Pablo Ariel; Muller,Noel; Sarzosa,Miguel Alonso |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the relationship between individuals? skills and labor market outcomes for the working-age population of Colombia?s urban areas. Using a 2012 unique household survey, the paper finds that cognitive skills (aptitudes to perform mental tasks such as comprehension or reasoning) and socio-emotional skills (personality traits and behaviors) matter for favorable labor market outcomes in the Colombian context, although they have distinct roles. Cognitive skills are greatly associated with higher earnings and holding a formal job or a high-qualified occupation. By contrast, socio-emotional skills appear to have little direct influence on these outcomes, but play a stronger role in labor market participation. Both types of skills, especially cognitive skills, are largely associated with pursuing tertiary education. The analysis applies standard econometric techniques as a benchmark and structural estimations to correct for the measurement error of skill constructs. |
| Keywords: | Labor Markets,Education For All,Educational Sciences,Effective Schools and Teachers,Primary Education |
| Date: | 2015–09–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:7430&r=all |
| By: | Shira Fano (Department of Economics, Bocconi University, Milan); Paolo Pellizzari (Department of Economics, University of Venice Ca’ Foscari.) |
| Abstract: | In this paper we investigate the effects of using a Facebook page exclusively devoted to a first year Mathematics course in a large Italian public university. Posts and discussions supported traditional face-to-face lectures and students could freely post queries and get help from professors and peers. We use a newly constructed dataset to measure how this influences the grade they achieved and the probability of getting a passing grade. Firstly, we find that active students, who read and post more often, perform slightly better than non active ones, who mainly read the content, but the effect is not significant. However, other measures of activity, such as the frequency of visualization of the page significantly increase the probability of earning a passing grade, after controlling for students’ characteristics and robust ex-post measures of ability. Secondly, we exploit a quasi-natural experiment to compare the performance of students having access to Facebook with that of a large sample of similar students who were not offered the support page in another branch of the uni- versity. Difference-in-difference estimates show that students who could access online discussions gain on average 1 additional point out of 30. The effect is, hence, significant but rather small and of possibly limited practical relevance. |
| Keywords: | Facebook, virtual discussions, academic performance, quasi-natural experiment, difference-in-difference |
| JEL: | I23 C54 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ven:wpaper:2015:28&r=all |
| By: | Grey Gordon (Indiana University); Aaron Hedlund (University of Missouri) |
| Abstract: | We develop a quantitative model of higher education to test explanations for the steep rise in college tuition between 1987 and 2010. The framework extends the quality- maximizing college paradigm of Epple, Romano, Sarpca, and Sieg (2013) and embeds it in an incomplete markets, life-cycle environment. We measure how much changes in underlying costs, reforms to the Federal Student Loan Program (FSLP), and changes in the college earnings premium have caused tuition to increase. All these changes combined generate a 106% rise in net tuition between 1987 and 2010, which more than accounts for the 78% increase seen in the data. Changes in the FSLP alone generate a 102% tuition increase, and changes in the college premium generate a 24% increase. Our findings cast doubt on Baumol's cost disease as a driver of higher tuition. |
| Keywords: | Higher Education, College Costs, Tuition, Student Loans |
| Date: | 2015–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:inu:caeprp:2015015&r=all |
| By: | Susanne James-Burdumy |
| Abstract: | This executive summary describes key findings from a two-volume report from Mathematica’s multi-year evaluation of Race to the Top (RTT) and School Improvement Grants (SIG) programs for the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. |
| Keywords: | School Improvement Grants, Race to the Top, school reform, school turnaround |
| JEL: | I |
| Date: | 2015–09–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mpr:mprres:e818093f51524d268ffde30abe8d0de4&r=all |
| By: | Brown, Jeffrey R.; Fang, Chichun; Gomes, Francisco |
| Abstract: | We model education as an investment in human capital that, like other investments, is appropriately evaluated in a framework that accounts for risk as well as return. In contrast to dominant wage-premia approach to calculating the returns to education, but which implicitly ignores risk, we evaluate the returns by treating the value of human capital as the price of a non-tradable risky asset. We do so using a lifecycle framework that incorporates risk preferences and earnings risk, as well as a progressive income tax and social insurance system. Our baseline estimate is that a college degree provides a $440K dollar increase in annual certainty-equivalent consumption. Although significantly smaller than traditional estimates of the value of education, these returns are still large enough to offset both the direct and indirect cost of college education for a large range of plausible preference parameters. Importantly, however, we find that accounting for risk reverses the finding from the education wage-premia literature regarding the trends in the returns to education. In particular, we find that the risk-adjusted gains from college completion actually decreased rather than increased in the recent period. Overall, our results show the importance of earnings risks in assessing the value of education. |
| JEL: | G12 H52 I21 J24 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cfswop:512&r=all |
| By: | Maria Luisa Maitino; Letizia Ravagli (Istituto Regionale per la Programmazione Economica della Toscana) |
| Abstract: | The Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers (DCPM) No. 159/2013 has significantly changed the modalities for the computation of the Equivalent Economic Situation Indicator (ISEE). The effects of reform on the access and participation to social security benefits will depend on how the bodies in charge of distributing services modify the entry thresholds and the sharing modalities. This paper describes the results of the simulations performed to evaluate the impact of reform on access to scholarships granted through the Right to University Education. Some simulations considered the rules unchanged, while others assumed adjustments in both the entry threshold and the sum awarded. Most students applying for a scholarship should be unconcerned by reform, while a small portion advance their position, and the remaining share experience a worsening as compared to the pre-reform system. Among these, the most part is kept out because of an increase in the ISPEP, while a minority group is either excluded because of ISEEP (Equivalent Economic Situation Indicator for local benefits) or qualified for a smaller scholarship. Some simulations are also made assuming different kinds of revisions in the economic requirements, with results that partly augment the number of students ruled out because of ISEEP or receiving smaller grants. |
| Keywords: | Equivalent Economic Situation Indicator (ISEE), right to education, university |
| JEL: | I23 D31 D6 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:irp:report:565&r=all |
| By: | Chu, Angus C.; Furukawa, Yuichi; Zhu, Dongming |
| Abstract: | In this note, we explore the implications of cultural preference for education in an innovation-driven growth model that features an interaction between endogenous human capital accumulation and technological progress. Parents invest in children's education partly due to the preference for their children to be educated. We consider a preference parameter that measures the degree of this parental or cultural preference for education. We find that a higher degree of parental preference for education increases human capital, which is conducive to innovation, but the increase in education investment also crowds out resources for R&D investment. As a result, a stronger cultural preference for education has an inverted-U effect on the steady-state equilibrium growth rate. We also analytically derive the complete transitional path of the equilibrium growth rate and find that an increase in the degree of education preference has an initial negative effect on economic growth. |
| Keywords: | economic growth, human capital, education, culture |
| JEL: | E24 O31 O41 |
| Date: | 2015–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:66883&r=all |