nep-edu New Economics Papers
on Education
Issue of 2017‒01‒15
twenty-one papers chosen by
João Carlos Correia Leitão
Universidade da Beira Interior

  1. The effects of accelerating the school curriculum on student outcomes By Korthals, Roxanne
  2. Leading by Example: What is the effect on educational outcomes of exposing girls, in addition to parents, to female role models? By Eline Bos
  3. Cool to be Smart or Smart to be Cool? Understanding Peer Pressure in Education By Leonardo Bursztyn; Georgy Egorov; Robert Jensen
  4. Credit Where Credit Is Due: An Approach to Education Returns Based on Shapley Values By Barakat, Bilal; Crespo Cuaresma, Jesus
  5. Faculty Deployment in Research Universities By Paul N. Courant; Sarah Turner
  6. Explaining Gender Differences in Confidence and Overconfidence in Math By Seo-Young Cho
  7. Measuring the Publishing Productivity of Economics Departments in Europe By Konstantinos Chatzimichael; Pantelis Kalaitzidakis; Vangelis Tzouvelekas
  8. CREATING THE CREATORS By Akanksha Srivastava
  9. Educational expansion and homogamy. An analysis of the consequences of educational upgrading for assortative mating in Switzerland By Rolf Becker; Ben Jann
  10. Job access and the labor market entry and spatial mobility trajectories of higher education graduates in the Netherlands By Marten Middeldorp
  11. University impact evaluation: Counterfactual methods By Balazs Kotosz
  12. Results of an Impact Evaluation Study on DepED's School-Based Feeding Program By Tabunda, Ana Maria L.; Albert, Jose Ramon G.; Angeles-Agdeppa, Imelda
  13. Junior Farmer Field Schools, Agricultural Knowledge and Spillover Effects: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Northern Uganda By Jacopo Bonan; Laura Pagani
  14. Trends in Out-of-School Children and Other Basic Education Statistics By Albert, Jose Ramon G.; Raymundo, Martin Joseph M.
  15. Are Higher Education Institutions Responsive to Changes in the Labor Market? By Orbeta, Aniceto Jr. C.; Gonzales, Kathrina G.; Cortes, Sol Francesca S.
  16. Review and Assessment of the Students Grants-in-Aid Program for Poverty Alleviation (SGP-PA) and Expanded SGP-PA By Silfverberg, Denise Valerie; Orbeta, Aniceto Jr. C.
  17. Household expenditure on higher education in India: What do we know & What do recent data have to say? By S Chandrasekhar; P. Geetha Rani; Soham Sahoo
  18. Gender Differences in Academic Performance: The Role of Negative Marking in Multiple-Choice Exams By Funk, Patricia; Perrone, Helena
  19. ATTITUDE OF TEACHER TRAINEES TOWARDS CONTINUOUS AND COMPREHENSIVE EVALUATION(CCE) By Rajni Kumari; Yogesh Punia
  20. Policy Reform and Gender Inequality in French Higher Education: A Two-Generation Comparative Study By Magali Jaoul-Grammare
  21. The Returns to Preschool Attendance By Fessler, Pirmin; Schneebaum, Alyssa

  1. By: Korthals, Roxanne (General Economics 2 (Macro))
    Abstract: The aim of this paper is to estimate the causal effects of an accelerated curriculum, in which students progress through the course material faster, on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. I employ two methods: First, I make use of the cohorts before and after the introduction of the possibility to accelerate and of classes which are and which are not considered for acceleration using a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) strategy. However, it seems reasonable that the best students benefit from this policy, while it is less clear that the less able students would benefit. Therefore I also employ a second method in which I only look at the effects for the marginal student. For this, I use school grades to employ a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design (fRDD). Using both methods, I find that after one year the students who accelerated scored significantly higher on certain sub scores of the mathematics tests. I find no definitive results on non-cognitive skills: Using the DiD, I find that this positive cognitive effect is countered by lower scores on the teacher rated scores on perseverance, concentration, and conversation skills. For the marginal student, I find almost no effects on non-cognitive skills.
    Keywords: curriculum, instruction hours, student performance, non-cognitive skills
    JEL: I20 I21
    Date: 2017
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unm:umaror:2017001&r=edu
  2. By: Eline Bos
    Abstract: Beaman et al. (2011) show that female leadership influences the aspirations of girls and educational attainment, comparing villages that randomly reserved leadership positions for women in India. They suggest that female leaders mainly had this effect through providing a role model of a woman in a leadership position, thereby raising girls’ aspirations for themselves and parents’ aspirations for their daughters. In this paper I look at the effect of exposing girls to a female role model, in addition to parents. Within the same village council, I compare the effect of exposing both children and parents to a female role model to the effect of exposing only parents, because their children were too young to be actively exposed to a female role model. I find a significant effect of exposing girls in addition to parents on educational attainment for girls, comparing outcomes for children in the age range of 4-18 years. This suggests that policies to improve girls’ education should crucially include a focus on both parents and girls.
    Keywords: Education; India; Gender inequality; Behavioural Economics
    JEL: D13 D04 I24
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csa:wpaper:2016-37&r=edu
  3. By: Leonardo Bursztyn; Georgy Egorov; Robert Jensen
    Abstract: Concerns about social image may negatively affect schooling behavior. We identify two potentially important peer cultures: one that stigmatizes effort (thus, where it is “smart to be cool”) and one that rewards ability (where it is “cool to be smart”). We build a model showing that either may lower the takeup of educational activities when takeup and performance are potentially observable to peers. We design a field experiment allowing us to test whether students are influenced by these concerns at all, and then which they are more influenced by. We examine high schools in two settings: a low-income, high minority share area and a higher-income, lower minority share area. In both settings, peer pressure reduces takeup of an SAT prep package. We show that this is consistent with a greater concern for hiding effort in the lower-income school, and a greater concern with hiding low ability in the higher-income schools.
    JEL: C93 D83 I21 I24
    Date: 2017–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23020&r=edu
  4. By: Barakat, Bilal; Crespo Cuaresma, Jesus
    Abstract: We propose the use of methods based on the Shapley value to assess the fact that private returns to lower levels of educational attainment should incorporate prospective returns from higher attainment levels, since achieving primary education is a necessary condition to enter secondary and tertiary educational levels. We apply the proposed adjustment to a global dataset of private returns to different educational attainment levels and find that the corrected returns to education imply a large shift of returns from tertiary to primary schooling in countries at all income levels. (authors' abstract)
    Keywords: Returns to education; Shapley value
    Date: 2016–06
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wus005:5086&r=edu
  5. By: Paul N. Courant; Sarah Turner
    Abstract: Deploying faculty efficiently (or more efficiently) should surely part of any optimizing strategy on the part of a college or university. Basic microeconomics about the “theory of the firm” provide some insight as to how a university would achieve productive efficiency given differences in the price (salary rate) of faculty across disciplines and variation in compensation within departments. The prices of faculty activities demonstrate substantial variation across institutions, disciplines, within disciplines and over time. These observations about variation in input prices raise fundamental questions about whether and, if so, how differences in the cost of faculty affect resource allocation at research universities. We examine how teaching allocations and costs vary both between departments and within departments. This allocation is complicated because teaching and research are jointly produced by universities, while they are also substitutes at some margin in faculty time allocation. We examine the link between departmental compensation (payroll) and student course offerings at two major public research universities. Strikingly, we find that faculty compensation per student taught varies much less across departments than salary levels. In turn, changes over time in relative salaries by discipline are much larger than changes in faculty compensation per student as universities adjust to these cost pressures by increasing class size and increasing teaching inputs from other sources. We also find that within departments the highest-paid faculty teach fewer undergraduates and fewer undergraduate courses than their lower-paid colleagues. This finding confirms our hypothesis that salaries are determined principally by research output and associated reputation, and that universities respond rationally to relative prices in deploying faculty.
    JEL: I23
    Date: 2017–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23025&r=edu
  6. By: Seo-Young Cho (University of Marburg)
    Abstract: This paper investigates empirically how and why men and women are different in their confidence levels. Using the data of the PISA test in math, confidence is decomposed into two dimensions: confidence in correct math knowledge and overconfidence in over-claiming false knowledge. The findings highlight that female students are not less confident than male students, but they are rather less overconfident. Furthermore, mathematical abilities have different effects on male and female students. While ability alone increases confidence and decreases overconfidence, the interaction effect of feminine gender and ability is negative. This means that the negative effect of ability on overconfidence is larger for female students than male ones, while the positive effect of ability on confidence is smaller for females. That being said, the negative gender gap in overconfidence against girls is greater for students in the higher quartiles of math scores than those in the lower quartiles. Also, the positive gender gap in confidence for girls is smaller for well-performing students than underperforming ones. The empirical evidence further reveals that such gender-asymmetric effects of ability can be explained by gender socialization that limits women’s roles and undermines their achievements.
    Keywords: gender differences in confidence and overconfidence; gender gaps in math; genderasymmetric effects of ability; gender equality; gender socialization effects
    JEL: C31 I21 I24 J16 J24
    Date: 2017
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mar:magkse:201701&r=edu
  7. By: Konstantinos Chatzimichael; Pantelis Kalaitzidakis (Department of Economics, University of Crete, Greece); Vangelis Tzouvelekas (Department of Economics, University of Crete, Greece)
    Abstract: Rankings of academic departments are widely used by universities throughout the world as benchmarks to allocate efficiently their research funds to different departments, and further, as signals of high-quality education to attract or retain the most skillful and promising students and faculty. They are also used by academic departments themselves to define performance targets and shape optimal marketing strategies and further by academics and students when making their decisions on career advancements and investments in education, respectively. At aggregate level, rankings serve as informative policy instruments for national governments, as well as for country unions, in defining research budgets levels and optimally allocate them to domestic universities and country members, respectively. For instance, the development of Lisbon Agenda (2000) and the associated commitment of European Council (2005) to increase R&D funding in EU, were mainly triggered by the observed gap in leading-edge research between EU member countries and the U.S., as robustly evidenced by worldwide institutional rankings. In economic profession, there is a long tradition in ranking departments. Existing work commonly uses various measures of research output to rank departments. Laband (1985) used counts of citations to assess economics departments performance, while Yotopoulos (1961), and Niemi (1975) focused on number of articles published in top journals. Along the same lines, Yeager (1978) and Bairam (1978) considered total number of pages published in high-ranked journals. Recognizing that the quality of publications matters, Graveset al., (1982), and Scott and Mittias (1996) used AER-equivalent pages to adjust for journal-quality differences. Along the same line of argument, Conroy et al. (1994), and Dusansky and Veron (1998) looked also at AER-equivalent page counts using Laband and Piettes's (1994) updating of Liebowitz and Palmer's (1984) journal rank to weight journals. Similarly, Kalaitzidakis et al. (2003) provided a worldwide ranking of economics departments correcting further for biases arising from lagged journal weights and self-citations inclusions. There have been also rankings based on Ph.D. placements (Amir and Knauff, 2008) and averages of ranks statistics (Coupe, 2003). Most of the studies highlighted above focus solely on research output measures to rank economics departments such as number of articles, article pages, citations or combinations of them. Needless to say, such measures lack important information on research inputs use and thus might be considered as inappropriate, especially when comparisons are to be made. For instance, published articles and subsequently citations are likely to be proportionally related to faculty size. Similarly, differences in research funds, research environment and other research inputs between departments are likely to explain observed differences in research output produced. Hence, adjusting at least for some sort of inputs variations between departments is a necessary prerequisite prior comparing actual departments performance in order to obtain meaningful rankings. The important dimension of research inputs has been considered only by a limited number of studies in the field. At micro level (department level), Conroy et al. (1995) and Scott and Mittias (1996) ranked economics departments in U.S. based on productivity performance as measured by output per faculty. Using NRC (1995) survey data, Thursby (2000) tested for differences in quality ratings between economics departments in U.S. accounting for faculty size, number of federal grants, and expenditures on library acquisitions. At macro level (country level), Kirman and Dahl (1994) and Kocher and Sutter (2001) provided aggregated country rankings adjusting for research inputs such as financial resources and population. Finallly, Kocher et al. (2006) adopted a DEA approach to compile a productivity-based ranking of OECD countries using country's R&D expenditures, number of economics departments, and population as research inputs. Three important observations can be drawn from the existing literature as reviewed earlier. First, most of the work in the field neglects to adjust for differences in research inputs among departments, producing therefore less informative rankings, inappropriate for comparison purposes. On the other hand, the few exceptional studies that do consider for research inputs variations focus exclusively on U.S. Second, the majority of studies are based on journals rankings constructed over a certain period of time that, more often than not, does not coincide with the corresponding period of departments rankings. This implies that journal weights used to adjust for quality differences in publications are likely to misestimate the true quality of the journals at the time of investigation and subsequently the true performance of departments. Third, most of the existing work provides either university- or country-level rankings but does not combine them. It would be quite informative though to assess performance at both micro- and macro-level combining at the same time information from department and country rankings produced using the same methodology. In this paper, we assess the relative performance of economics departments in Europe using publication data in a core set of thirty-five top research journals in economics during the period 2007-11. Rather than focusing exclusively on output research measures, we assess performance on the basis of a publishing productivity index which allows to account for differences in research inputs among departments. The measurement of publishing productivity is based on counts of AER-equivalent articles per faculty using Kalaitzidakis' et al. (2011) updated journal weights computed over the same period with our study, overcoming thus any concerns associated with lagged-weights bias. Data on faculty size were obtained from an online search on departments websites at the time of investigation. Based on publishing productivity performance, comprehensive rankings are constructed at department level, as well as, at country level by aggregating research output and inputs of economics departments in each country. The distance of Greek economics departments from the top european departments is finally assessed.
    Keywords: economics departments, universities rankings, publishing productivity, Europe
    JEL: A11 A14 D24 I23
    Date: 2016–09–20
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crt:wpaper:1601&r=edu
  8. By: Akanksha Srivastava
    Abstract: The teacher who provides a learning environment where a child can learn by himself/herself and doesn’t imposes his /her own theories, philosophies or ideas on the child is a real teacher. Our present educational system is focusing on teaching rather than creating. The focus needs to be shifted from teaching to learning, from teacher to child, from reproducing to creating. We are preparing a work force which can react, to some measure, to the external situations but is totally unaware of its inner self, its potential, the miracle it carries in itself. We have to shift our focus from the standardized model of education where certain values and concepts are taken for granted and we blindly keep on following and transferring them through generations. We the teachers, as a part of this standardized system, give very little opportunities to our students to imagine. Education has to be more Personal. We cannot follow the age old system because they were the best but we have to change and let our students choose what is the best and what will be the best for them. The present paper focuses on the loop holes of present system of education that blocks and systematically destroys the creative capacity of children and an attempt has also been made in the paper to present some ideas which can be implied to help foster creativity. Key words:Learning Environment, Standardized System, Creative Capacity Policy
    Date: 2016–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vor:issues:2016-12-03&r=edu
  9. By: Rolf Becker; Ben Jann
    Abstract: We analyze the changing relationship between education and assortative mating over the course of educational expansion in Switzerland between 1970 and 2000. The main question is whether educational expansion has resulted in increased openness of partnership opportunities or whether the educational system became increasingly important for assortative mating. Census data is used to describe this social change employing a cohort design. Over time and across cohorts, the proportion of people who live without a partner has increased, but the educational classes became more similar with respect to partnerlessness. At the same time, overall educational homogamy of partnerships has remained rather stable, although there were different trends for each of the educational levels. Educational expansion has contributed to increasing heterogamy for less educated and untrained persons while homogamy has increased for persons achieving intermediate and higher levels of education. However, after taking opportunity structure into account, the inclination for educational homogamy is actually more pronounced in the lower educational groups than in the higher and, in particular, the intermediate educational groups. In this respect, one can speak of a polarization of assortative mating with social closure at the lower end of the educational scale and relative openness for intermediate educational classes. This polarization, however, declined somewhat in the course of educational expansion.
    Keywords: educational expansion, educational homogamy, census, cohort analysis, social stratification, partnerlessness
    JEL: I24 J12
    Date: 2016–12–23
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bss:wpaper:25&r=edu
  10. By: Marten Middeldorp
    Abstract: The successfulness of the transition from education into working life is closely related to further career success. Graduates with good access to jobs earn higher wages and have lower chances of being unemployed. Access to jobs at the start of the career is therefore an important determinant of early career success and of importance for the whole career. In this paper, we study the effect of job access on the school-to-work transitions of recent higher education graduates. We use a GIS to calculate a job accessibility index based on driving time and use sequence analysis to calculate ideal-typical labor market entry trajectories and spatial mo-bility histories for 13,679 recent graduates of higher education. We subsequently relate job access, labor market entry trajectories and spatial mobility histories to analyze whether a suboptimal starting location in terms of job access leads to dif-fering career paths and spatial mobility trajectories. Finally, we analyze how they interact to influence early career success.
    Keywords: Job access; Spatial mobility; Labor market entry; Sequence analysis
    Date: 2016–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa16p741&r=edu
  11. By: Balazs Kotosz
    Abstract: Nowadays the realization that certain economic units, universities or other objects have impact on the economy of their region comes more and more into prominence. The economic impact study has become a standard tool to persuade state legislatures of the importance of expenditures on higher education. The most general definition is as ?the difference between existing economic activity in a region given the presence of the institution and the level that would have been present if the institution did not exist.? In the practice we face a series of problems: separation of net and gross impact, identification of universities? missions, territorial level choice, statistical model choice, estimation of induced and catalytic impacts, etc. Different methods used in literature make results hardly comparable, thereby our focus is to recommend a method to investigate universities in different countries: in the lack of regional input-output matrices a multiplier based approach for first and second missions (education and research), while an application of a set of indicators for third mission (knowledge transfer related) activities. After a methodological review, we demonstrate our experiences based on example of the University of Lorraine (France), University of Szeged (Hungary), and 2 other small colleges in Hungary.
    Keywords: impact study; university; economic impact
    Date: 2016–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa16p735&r=edu
  12. By: Tabunda, Ana Maria L.; Albert, Jose Ramon G.; Angeles-Agdeppa, Imelda
    Abstract: The link between malnutrition and poor health among elementary school children and absenteeism, early dropout and poor classroom performance as well as the effectiveness of school-based nutrition and health interventions in improving school performance are well-established in the literature. Thus, the Department of Education has been conducting conditional food transfer programs since 1997. Its current program, the School-Based Feeding Program, as implemented in school year (SY) 2013-2014, fed 40,361 severely wasted pupils enrolled in Kindergarten to Grade Six in 814 public elementary schools in the country. This paper presents the findings from the impact evaluation of the SY 2013-2014 implementation of the program. This is a follow-up on the process evaluation conducted by the PIDS. The study employed mixed methods research, undertaking qualitative surveys while undertaking focus group discussions. The findings indicate that, except for inaccurate measurement of nutrition status variables and improper documentation of the program in all its three phases (prefeeding, feeding, and postfeeding), the program was generally implemented well by the beneficiary schools, and welcomed not only by program beneficiaries and their parents but also by many of the school heads and teachers of the beneficiary pupils.
    Keywords: Philippines, impact evaluation, health and nutrition, school children, school-based feeding program, food for education program
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:phd:dpaper:dp_2016-05&r=edu
  13. By: Jacopo Bonan (Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM)); Laura Pagani (University of Milano-Bicocca)
    Abstract: We analyse the impact of a junior farmer field school project in Northern Uganda on students’ agricultural knowledge and practices. We also test for the presence of intergenerational learning spillover within households. We use differences-in-differences estimators with ex-ante matching. We find that the program had positive effects on students’ agricultural knowledge and adoption of good practices and that it produced some spillover effects in terms of improvements of household agricultural knowledge and food security. Overall, our results point to the importance of adapting the basic principles of farmer field schools to children.
    Keywords: Junior Farmer Field Schools, Agricultural Extension, Intergenerational Learning Spillover, Uganda
    JEL: O13 O22 O55 C93
    Date: 2016–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fem:femwpa:2016.72&r=edu
  14. By: Albert, Jose Ramon G.; Raymundo, Martin Joseph M.
    Abstract: The Philippines has put a lot of importance to the basic education sector. The immediate past government provided more resources to the sector, in support of the Philippine Development Plan as well as to attain commitments to global goals, including the Millennium Development Goals and its successor, the Sustainable Development Goals (which include SDG4 to achieve quality education for all). In this paper, various education indicators sourced from administrative reporting systems of the Department of Education, as well as sample surveys conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority, are examined for monitoring and evaluation of the basic education sector. Further, these data sources on education statistics are scrutinized for describing persisting disparities among various groups (e.g., boys versus girls, poor and nonpoor, urban and rural population), and for probing into why some children continue to be out of school. Measurement issues and policy implications are also discussed.
    Keywords: Philippines, out-of-school children (OOSC), education indicators, monitoring and evaluation, Department of Education, Millennium Development Goals, Sustainable Development Goals, basic education sector
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:phd:dpaper:dp_2016-39&r=edu
  15. By: Orbeta, Aniceto Jr. C.; Gonzales, Kathrina G.; Cortes, Sol Francesca S.
    Abstract: Higher education is a key driver of the economic growth of countries. Any country hopes that its universities, including state colleges and universities (SUCs) and private higher education institutions (PHEIs), produce the manpower needed to propel the country into high, sustained, and equitable development. This can be achieved if its universities respond well to changes in the labor market. This study seeks to review and assess how well the SUCs and PHEIs respond to regional market demands through wage premium analysis and their experience in introducing new program offerings, changing curriculums, and closing programs. To achieve this, it analyzes the developments in labor market outcomes such as wage premiums at the discipline level derived using data from the Labor Force Survey. It also uses focus group discussions with both SUCs and PHEIs to document and understand the relative ease of introducing changes into their academic programs in response to labor market changes.
    Keywords: Philippines, higher education, curriculum, programs, labor market, wage differentials
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:phd:dpaper:dp_2016-08&r=edu
  16. By: Silfverberg, Denise Valerie; Orbeta, Aniceto Jr. C.
    Abstract: Making higher education more accessible for the poor serves the equity objective. Until today, the main policy tool to achieve this objective is funding public higher institutions. This has been shown to have no significant correlation on the enrollment of the poor by earlier studies. This paper assesses a new initiative of the Philippine government called the Students Grants-in-Aid Program for Poverty Alleviation (SGP-PA) implemented starting 2012. While there are other grants-in-aid programs, SGP-PA has two important unique features, namely, (a) it is well-targeted to identified Pantawid Pamilya households and (b) it provides a grant amount that is sufficient to cover all normal education expenses including living allowance. The assessment is done by comparing the academic performance of grantees to that of their peers. The results show that their poorer socioeconomic background appears to be reflected only in their poorer grades in the first year. By their second year, they are already performing at par in Math and even better than their peers in Science and English. The study also highlights the importance of entrance exam scores in the academic performance of both grantees and their peers. Finally, the study also documents the challenges that the program is facing and provides recommendations on how to address these challenges.
    Keywords: Philippines, higher education, grants-in-aid (GIAs), affirmative action
    Date: 2016
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:phd:dpaper:dp_2016-19&r=edu
  17. By: S Chandrasekhar (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research); P. Geetha Rani (Department of Economics, Central University of Tamil Nadu); Soham Sahoo (University of Goettingen)
    Abstract: We analyse data from two recent NSSO surveys to provide estimates of expenditure on higher education and loans availed for higher education. The average share of expenditure on higher education out of total household expenditure is 15.3 per cent and 18.4 per cent for rural and urban households who participate in higher education. This average is higher in the southern states since individuals from these states are more likely to be enrolled in private unaided institutions where fees are higher and are more likely to be pursuing technical education. For reasons similar to mentioned above, individuals from southern states are more likely to have outstanding borrowings for education. At the all India level, poorer households are less likely to borrow possibly because they are risk averse and uncertain about future returns. We do however find that individuals from lower quintiles of the distribution of consumption expenditure are more likely to get fee subsidies or scholarships, indicating that such schemes reach their intended beneficiaries. One metric that should be tracked at the policy level is the reliance on non-institutional source of finance and in particular money lender. In conclusion, we also highlight the need for additional research on the relative importance of credit constraints vis a vis employability in the decision to pursue higher education.
    Keywords: Higher Education, Expenditure, Borrowing, India
    JEL: I2 I23
    Date: 2016–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ind:igiwpp:2016-030&r=edu
  18. By: Funk, Patricia; Perrone, Helena
    Abstract: We investigate whether penalizing wrong answers on multiple-choice tests ("negative marking") makes females relatively worse off compared to males (the comparison being no penalties for wrong answers). With a cohort of more than 500 undergraduate students at a major Spanish university, we conducted a field experiment in the Microeconomics course. We created a final exam, which was composed of two parts: one with penalties for wrong answers and one without. Students were randomly allocated to different exam permutations, which differed in the questions that carried penalties for wrong answers. We find that the penalties did not harm female students. Females performed better than males on both parts of the exam and did so to a greater extent on the part with penalties. Whereas risk aversion did not affect overall scores (despite affecting answering behavior), ability did. High-ability students performed relatively better with negative marking, and these were more likely to be women.
    Date: 2016–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11716&r=edu
  19. By: Rajni Kumari; Yogesh Punia
    Abstract: There is need for a functional and reliable system of school-based evaluation i.e. continuous and comprehensive evaluation.” National Curriculum Framework (2005). Teacher are the most important link for the successful realization of any education policy and therefore building their capacity in understanding the concept and purpose of CCE is essential to the successful implementation of the program. Keeping in view, the investigator has conducted an independent study to measure the attitude of teacher trainees towards continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE). Survey method was used in the present investigation. A self-developed scale for Attitude of Teacher Trainees towards CCE was used and Mean, SD and t-test were used for analysis and interpretation of data in present study. Results of the study reveals that still we have a place for improvement in teacher training in relation to CCE. Until the space is not filled up it is not possible to make impartial and successful implementation of CCE in education system, a reality. Key words: School-based Evaluation, NCF (2005), Education Policy
    Date: 2016–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vor:issues:2016-09-01&r=edu
  20. By: Magali Jaoul-Grammare (BETA, University of Strasbourg Strasbourg, France)
    Date: 2017
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:afc:wpaper:02-17&r=edu
  21. By: Fessler, Pirmin; Schneebaum, Alyssa
    Abstract: Preschool attendance is widely recognized as a key ingredient for later socioeconomic success, mothers' labor market participation, and leveling the playing field for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is still relatively scarce, particularly in Europe. Using data from the 2011 Austrian European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), we contribute to this literature in all mentioned dimensions. In particular, we investigate the effect of preschool attendance on an individual's later educational attainment, the probability that they work full time and their hourly wages, the likelihood of the mother working when the child is 14 years old, and on the overall distribution of wages. We find strong and positive effects of preschool attendance on educational attainment, the probability of working full time, hourly wages, and the probability that the mother is in the labor market. Full time workers at the bottom and the top of the distribution tend to benefit less than those in the middle. Women in particular benefit more in terms of years of schooling and the probability of working full time. Other disadvantaged groups (second migration migrants; people with less educated parents) also often benefit more in terms of education and work. (authors' abstract)
    Keywords: returns to preschool; kindergarten; early childhood education; education; inequality
    Date: 2016–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wus005:5176&r=edu

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