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on Education |
| By: | Demirel, Merve (Bilkent University); Okten, Cagla (Bilkent University) |
| Abstract: | We analyze the impact of an increase in compulsory schooling policy on the gender gap in intergenerational educational persistence using the Turkish Adult Education Survey (2012). Prior to the reform there is a gender gap in the association of parents' educational attainment with their offspring's. Daughters exhibit more intergenerational persistence than sons. We show that the education reform that increased compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years, exposed children born after 1986 to 3 more years of schooling and reduced the effect of parental education on the completion probability of new compulsory schooling (8 years) from 30% to 1% percentage points for sons and from 49% to 11% percentage points for daughters, while the effect of parental education on post-compulsory schooling outcomes of sons and daughters decreased by 12 and 13 percentage points, respectively. The gender gap in intergenerational education transmission has decreased by 8 percentage points in the completion of new compulsory schooling level but remains unchanged at the post-compulsory schooling level after the reform. |
| Keywords: | intergenerational education transmission, gender equality, compulsory schooling |
| JEL: | I20 I24 J16 J62 |
| Date: | 2020–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13362&r=all |
| By: | Shah, Chandra; Richardson, Paul; Watt, Helen |
| Abstract: | Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education is a critical part of a modern education system. Motivating students to learn STEM subjects is however a challenge. Teachers have a critical role in motivating students but to do this effectively they need to have appropriate subject matter knowledge. Data from PISA 2015 show a substantial proportion of teachers in Australian schools are teaching STEM subjects ‘out-of-field’, which is that they do not have the qualifications to teach these subjects. This paper examines the effects of individual teacher characteristics and school context on of out-of-field teaching in STEM subjects. In particular, it examines the role of school autonomy and staff shortage in this. The results show these two variables have a strong association with out-of-field teaching, however, other factors either mediate or confound their effects. A full understanding of the results requires knowing the role of school funding and school budgets in out-of-field teaching. While we do not have direct measures of these in the data, we can infer their likely roles through the effects of other factors, such as school sector and education level of parents of students in the school, in the model. |
| Keywords: | out-of-field teaching,teacher supply and demand,multi-level logit model |
| JEL: | C25 I22 I24 J23 J24 |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:511r&r=all |
| By: | Belzil, Christian (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris); Hansen, Jörgen (Concordia University) |
| Abstract: | We estimate a structural dynamic Roy model of education, labor supply and earnings on the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of males taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and evaluate to what extent changes in education and labor supply decisions across cohorts have been explained by changes in i) the college premium, ii) the utility of attending higher education, iii) grade progression standards, and iv) the value of non-market time. We quantify the evolution of the relative and absolute qualities of both college graduates and college attendants (associates). We find that it is impossible to rationalize changes in observed schooling decisions without appealing to a large increase in intrinsic taste for education, despite a doubling of the cost of college and its impact on debt-load. The population distribution of the college premium has shifted to the right, going from 50% to 58%, while the premium of actual college graduates has shifted to the left, going from 72% to 54%, thereby pointing toward a reduction of the relative quality of college graduates. The absolute quality (human capital) of college graduates has however remained stable. For college attendants (associates), both relative and absolute quality dropped. One implication of the relative flattening of age earnings profiles is the removal of the negative effect of late college graduation on early life-cycle wages. Our estimates indicate it moved from a 4% penalty per year of delay to an insignificant quantity by the early 2000's. |
| Keywords: | wage inequality, educational selectivity, wage distribution, college premium, dynamic discrete choice |
| JEL: | I2 J1 J3 |
| Date: | 2020–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13356&r=all |
| By: | Christian Belzil; Jörgen Hansen |
| Abstract: | We estimate a structural dynamic Roy model of education, labor supply and earnings on the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of males taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and evaluate to what extent changes in education and labor supply decisions across cohorts have been explained by changes in i) the college premium, ii) the utility of attending higher education, iii) grade progression standards, and iv) the value of non-market time. We quantify the evolution of the relative and absolute qualities of both college graduates and college attendants (associates). We find that it is impossible to rationalize changes in observed schooling decisions without appealing to a large increase in intrinsic taste for education, despite a doubling of the cost of college and its impact on debt-load. The population distribution of the college premium has shifted to the right, going from 50% to 58%, while the premium of actual college graduates has shifted to the left, going from 72% to 54%, thereby pointing toward a reduction of the relative quality of college graduates. The absolute quality (human capital) of college graduates has however remained stable. For college attendants (associates), both relative and absolute quality dropped. One implication of the relative attening of age earnings profiles is the removal of the negative effect of late college graduation on early life-cycle wages. Our estimates indicate it moved from a 4% penalty per year of delay to an insignificant quantity by the early 2000’s. |
| Keywords: | Wage Inequality,Educational Selectivity,Wage Distribution,College Premium,Dynamic Discrete Choice, |
| JEL: | I2 J1 J3 |
| Date: | 2020–06–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cir:cirwor:2020s-36&r=all |
| By: | Westphal, Matthias; Kamhöfer, Daniel A.; Schmitz, Hendrik |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we identify female long-term wage returns to college education using the educational expansion between 1960-1990 inWest Germany as exogenous variation for college enrollment. We estimate marginal treatment effects to learn about the underlying behavioral structure of women who decide for or against going to college (e.g., whether there is selection into gains). We propose a simple partial identification technique using an adjusted version of the Lee bounds to account for women who select into employment due to having a college education, which we call college-induced selection into employment (CISE). We find that women are, on average, more than 17 percentage points more likely to be employed due to having a college education than without. Taking this CISE into account, we find wage returns of 6-12 percent per year of education completed (average treatment effects on the treated). |
| Keywords: | Marginal treatment effect,Partial identification,Returns to higher education,Female labor force participation |
| JEL: | C31 I26 J24 |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:dicedp:341&r=all |
| By: | Scott E. Carrell; Michal Kurlaender |
| Abstract: | Despite a growing body of literature that instructors “matter” in higher education, there is virtually no evidence about how their actions influence student outcomes. We provide experimental evidence on the impact of specific faculty behaviors aimed at increasing student success. We test the effect of professor feedback on student success in higher education classrooms though a "light-touch" randomized intervention. We present results from a small pilot in an introductory-level microeconomics course at a comprehensive research university, and the scale-up conducted in over 43 classrooms and nearly 4,000 students at a large broad-access university. The intervention consisted of several strategically-timed E-mails to students from the professor indicating keys to success in the class, the students’ current standing in the course, and a reminder of when the professor is available. Results from the pilot show that students in the treatment group scored higher on exams, homework assignments, and final course grade. Results from the scaled-up experiment are more mixed—we find significant positive effects on student perceptions of the professor and course for all students. However, we only find positive achievement effects for our target population, first year students from underrepresented minority groups. Finally, we replicated the pilot to test the robustness of these results and again find positive effects on student achievement. We conclude that in certain settings and with some students, targeted feedback from professors can lead to meaningful gains in achievement. |
| JEL: | I20 |
| Date: | 2020–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27312&r=all |
| By: | Marin Drlje |
| Abstract: | A large literature estimates various school admission and graduation effects by employing variation in student admission scores around schools’ admission cutoffs, assuming (quasi-) random school assignment close to the cutoffs. In this paper, I present evidence suggesting that the samples corresponding to typical applications of the regression discontinuity design (RDD) fail to satisfy these assumptions. I distinguish ex-post randomization (as in admission lotteries applicable to those at the margin of admission) from ex-ante randomization, reflecting uncertainty about the market structure of applicants, which can be naturally quantified by resampling from the applicant population. Using data from the Croatian centralized collegeadmission system, I show that these ex-ante admission probabilities differ dramatically between treated and non-treated students within typical RDD bandwidths. Such unbalanced admission probability distributions suggest that bandwidths (and sample sizes) should be drastically reduced to avoid selection bias. I also show that a sizeable fraction of quasirandomized assignments occur outside of the typical RDD bandwidths, suggesting that these are also inefficient. As an alternative, I propose a new estimator, the Propensity Score Discontinuity Design (PSDD), based on all observations with random assignments, which compares outcomes of applicants matched on ex-ante admission probabilities, conditional on admission scores. |
| Keywords: | RDD; PSDD; school admission effects; lottery; |
| JEL: | C01 C51 |
| Date: | 2020–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cer:papers:wp658&r=all |
| By: | Dayioglu-Tayfur, Meltem (Middle East Technical University); Kirdar, Murat G. (Bogazici University) |
| Abstract: | We examine the effects of a compulsory schooling reform on child labor in Turkey, which extended the duration of schooling from 5 to 8 years while substantially improving the schooling infrastructure. We employ four rounds of Child Labor Surveys with a very rich set of outcomes. The reform reduces child labor by 4.8 percentage points (28 percent) for 12- to 17-year-olds and by 1.7 percentage points (81-percent) for 7- to 11-year-olds. For girls, the probability of spending long hours on household chores also reduces. We find that school enrollment and child labor are highly substitutable in rural areas, but not as much in urban areas. The policy effect at first increases but then sharply declines in parental income, which is consistent with the luxury axiom. Favorable effects of the reform on a large range of child labor outcomes suggest that incapacitation effects of a compulsory schooling policy (combined with investment in schooling infrastructure) can be more successful than child labor laws in combatting child labor—as monitoring school enrollment is much easier. |
| Keywords: | child labor, compulsory schooling, costs of schooling, program effect, education policy, Turkey |
| JEL: | H52 I21 J21 J22 |
| Date: | 2020–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13276&r=all |
| By: | Peter Bergman; Eric W. Chan; Adam Kapor |
| Abstract: | We randomized school quality information onto the listings of a nationwide housing website for low-income families. We use this variation and data on families' search and location choices to estimate a model of housing search and neighborhood choice that incorporates imperfect information and potentially biased beliefs. We find that imperfect information and biased beliefs cause families to live in neighborhoods with lower-performing, more segregated schools. Families underestimate school quality conditional on neighborhood characteristics. If we had ignored this information problem, we would have estimated that families value school quality relative to their commute downtown by half that of the truth. |
| JEL: | I0 I21 I24 I3 R0 R21 R31 |
| Date: | 2020–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27209&r=all |
| By: | Natalie Bau; Martin Rotemberg; Manisha Shah; Bryce Steinberg |
| Abstract: | Policies that improve early life human capital are a promising tool to alter disadvantaged children's lifelong trajectories. Yet, in many low-income countries, children and their parents face tradeoffs between schooling and productive work. If there are positive returns to human capital in child labor, then children who receive greater early life investments may attend less school. Exploiting early life rainfall shocks in India as a source of exogenous variation in early life investment, we show that increased early life investment reduces schooling in districts with high child labor, especially for girls and lower castes. These effects persist and are intergenerational, affecting fertility, per capita household consumption, and other measures of household poverty, and lead to a divergence in the next generations' educational outcomes. Our results are robust to the inclusion of rich controls for district-level characteristics and an IV strategy. We provide evidence that reductions in educational investment in response to positive early life shocks are inefficient. |
| JEL: | I2 J1 O12 |
| Date: | 2020–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27241&r=all |
| By: | Christophe Jalil Nordman (IRD, UMR LEDa, DIAL, PSL, Université Paris Dauphine, IFP (Pondicherry, India)); Smriti Sharma (Newcastle University Business School, Newcastle Upon Tyne); Naveen Sunder (Bentley University, Waltham, MA (USA)) |
| Abstract: | In predominantly agrarian economies with limited irrigation, rainfall plays a critical role in shaping households’ incomes and subsequently their spending decisions. This study uses household-level panel data from a nationally representative survey in India to estimate the effect of agricultural productivity shocks – as proxied by exogenous annual rainfall deviations from long-term average – on education expenditures and children’s work status in rural Indian households. Our results show that a transitory increase in rainfall significantly reduces education expenditures and increases the likelihood of child labor across a range of work activities. Additionally, we show that productivity-enhancing inputs such as land ownership and credit access do not mitigate these countercyclical effects of rainfall variations, indicating the importance of market imperfections (in labor and land markets). We also find that the effects of productivity shocks are reinforced for historically marginalized castes, and moderated for more educated households. These highlight that the average effects mask considerable heterogeneity based on household and regional characteristics. |
| Keywords: | Rainfall shocks, education expenditures, child work, market imperfections, India |
| JEL: | D13 I21 J16 O12 |
| Date: | 2020–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dia:wpaper:dt202005&r=all |
| By: | Belzil, Christian (Ecole Polytechnique, Paris); Hansen, Jörgen (Concordia University) |
| Abstract: | We estimate a dynamic model of schooling on two cohorts of the NLSY and find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the effects of real (as opposed to relative) family income on education have practically vanished between the early 1980's and the early 2000's. After conditioning on a cognitive ability measure (AFQT), family background variables and unobserved heterogeneity (allowed to be correlated with observed characteristics), income effects vary substantially with age and have lost between 30% and 80% of their importance on age-specific grade progression probabilities. After conditioning on observed and unobserved characteristics, a $300,000 differential in family income generated more than 2 years of education in the early 1980's, but only one year in the early 2000's. Put differently, a $70,000 differential raised college participation by 10 percentage points in the early 1980's. In the early 2000's, a $330,000 income differential had the same impact. The effects of AFQT scores have lost about 50% of their magnitude but did not vanish. Over the same period, the relative importance of unobserved heterogeneity has expanded significantly, thereby pointing toward the emergence of a new form of educational selectivity reserving an increasing role to noncognitive abilities and/or preferences and a lesser role to cognitive ability and family income. |
| Keywords: | inequality, education, family income |
| JEL: | I2 J1 J3 |
| Date: | 2020–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13279&r=all |
| By: | Seah, Kelvin (National University of Singapore); Pan, Jessica (National University of Singapore); Tan, Poh Lin (National University of Singapore) |
| Abstract: | We explore whether the choice of broad versus specialized university curricula affects subsequent labor market outcomes, as measured by earnings, full-time permanent employment, and unemployment six months after university graduation. We exploit a unique episode in the history of the National University of Singapore, in which a university-wide revision in graduation requirements in 2007 prompted students in one of the largest faculties to read a narrower, more specialized, curriculum. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we compare changes in the labor market outcomes of graduate cohorts from the affected faculty, before-and-after the curriculum revision, to changes in the labor market outcomes of graduate cohorts from the other faculties. We do not find evidence that curriculum breadth matters for these labor market outcomes. Similar conclusions are obtained using regression-control strategies and rich administrative data on student characteristics and academic ability for the broader population of undergraduates at NUS. |
| Keywords: | university curriculum, curriculum breadth, difference-in-differences, earnings, employment |
| JEL: | I21 J31 |
| Date: | 2020–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13364&r=all |
| By: | Bautista, M. A.; González, F.; Martínez, L. R.; Muñoz, P.; Prem, M. |
| Abstract: | Hostile policies towards higher education are a prominent feature of authoritarian regimes. We study the capture of higher education by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile following the 1973 coup. We find three main results: (i) cohorts that reached college age shortly after the coup experienced a large drop in college enrollment as a result of the systematic reduction in the number of openings for incoming students decreed by the regime; (ii) these cohorts had worse economic outcomes throughout the life cycle and struggled to climb up the socioeconomic ladder, especially women; (iii) children with parents in the affected cohorts also have a substantially lower probability of college enrollment. These results demonstrate that the political capture of higher education in non-democracies hinders social mobility and leads to a persistent reduction in human capital accumulation, even after democratization |
| Keywords: | Dictatorship, higher education, social mobility, intergenerational transmission |
| JEL: | I23 I24 I25 P51 |
| Date: | 2020–05–13 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000092:018163&r=all |