nep-edu New Economics Papers
on Education
Issue of 2020‒08‒24
thirteen papers chosen by
Nádia Simões
Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

  1. The Impact of the new Senior High School Program on the School Participation of 16 and 17-year old learners in the Philippines By Geoffrey Ducanes; Dina Joana Ocampo
  2. Does Early Tracking Affect Learning Inequalities? Revisiting Difference-in-difference Modeling Strategies with International Assessments. By Contini, Dalit; Cugnata, Federica
  3. Mentoring and Schooling Decisions: Causal Evidence By Armin Falk; Fabian Kosse; Pia Pinger
  4. Refugees and the Educational Attainment of Natives By Green, Colin P.; Vaag Iversen, Jon Marius
  5. Measuring and explaining management in schools: New approaches using public data By Leaver, Clare; Lemos, Renata; Scur, Daniela
  6. Compensating for Academic Loss: Online Learning and Student Performance during the COVID-19 Pandemic By Andrew E. Clark; Huifu Nong; Hongjia Zhu; Rong Zhu
  7. Effects of Peers and Rank on Cognition, Preferences, and Personality By Dasgupta, Utteeyo; Mani, Subha; Sharma, Smriti; Singhal, Saurabh
  8. “I’ll See You in School”: A Multiple Proxy Analysis of the Role of Parental Involvement in K-12 Education and Improved Student Outcomes By Chandini Sankaran; Olivia Sorrentino; Eva Hernandez
  9. Financial literacy, risk and time preferences - Results from a randomized educational intervention By Matthias Sutter; Michael Weyland; Anna Untertrifaller; Manuel Froitzheim
  10. Stuck at a crossroads? The duration of the Italian school-to-work transition By Pastore, Francesco; Quintano, Claudio; Rocca, Antonella
  11. Culture and Student Achievement: The Intertwined Roles of Patience and Risk-Taking By Eric A. Hanushek; Lavinia Kinne; Philipp Lergetporer; Ludger Woessmann
  12. Sustainable Supply Chain Management Framework in a Higher Education Laboratory using Intuitionistic Fuzzy Cognitive Map By Muhammad Ridwan Andi Purnomo; Adhe Rizky Anugerah; Bella Taradipa Dewipramesti
  13. Distance and choice of field. Evidence from a Norwegian college expansion reform By Tora K. Knutsen; Jørgen Modalsli; Marte Rønning

  1. By: Geoffrey Ducanes (Economics Department, Ateneo de Manila University); Dina Joana Ocampo (University of the Philippines College of Education and UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies)
    Abstract: The study measures the impact on the school participation of 16 to 17-year-old learners in the Philippines of the implementation of the Senior High School program (SHS), which came into full effect in school year 2017–2018. The SHS program, which extended secondary education in the country from four to six years, was the most ambitious education reform action in the country in recent memory. The study found that the SHS program resulted in an increase in overall school participation rate of at least 13 percentage points among 16 to 17-year-olds. Perhaps more importantly, the increase in school participation rate was found to be highly progressive with those 16 to 17-year-olds in the two bottom income quintiles experiencing the highest increase in school participation rates by a wide margin. The study also found that both male and female students benefited from the program, although the gains appear to be higher for female students. Most of the gains in school participation were also found to occur outside Metro Manila.
    Keywords: education inequality, education reform, senior high school, gender in education
    JEL: I21 I24 I28
    Date: 2020–08
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:agy:dpaper:202012&r=all
  2. By: Contini, Dalit; Cugnata, Federica (University of Turin)
    Abstract: The development of international surveys on children’s learning like PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS – delivering comparable achievement measures across educational systems – has revealed large crosscountry variability in average performance and in the degree of inequality across social groups. A key question is whether and how institutional differences affect the level and distribution of educational outcomes. In this contribution, we discuss the difference-in-difference strategies employed in the existing literature to evaluate the effect of early tracking on learning inequalities exploiting international assessments administered at different age/grades. In their seminal paper, Hanushek and Woessmann (2006) analyze with two-step estimation the effect of early tracking on overall inequalities, measured by test scores’ variability indexes. Later work of other scholars in the economics and sociology of education focuses instead on inequalities among children of different family background, using individual-level models on pooled data from different countries and assessments. In this contribution, we show that individual pooled difference in difference models are quite restrictive and that in essence they estimate the effect of tracking by double differentiating the estimated cross-sectional family background regression coefficients between tracking regimes and learning assessments. Starting from a simple learning growth model, we show that if test scores at different surveys are not measured on the same scale, as occurs for international learning assessments, pooled individual models may deliver severely biased results. Instead, the scaling problem does not affect the two-step approach. For this reason, we suggest using two-step estimation also to analyze family-background achievement inequalities. Against this background, using PIRLS-2006 and PISA- 2012 we conduct two-step difference-in-difference analyses, finding new evidence that early tracking fosters both overall inequalities and family background differentials in reading literacy.
    Date: 2020–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uto:dipeco:202018&r=all
  3. By: Armin Falk; Fabian Kosse; Pia Pinger
    Abstract: Inequality of opportunity strikes when two children with the same academic performance are sent to different quality schools because their parents differ in socio-economic status. Based on a novel dataset for Germany, we demonstrate that children are significantly less likely to enter the academic track if they come from low socio-economic status (SES) families, even after conditioning on prior measures of school performance. We then provide causal evidence that a low-intensity mentoring program can improve long-run education outcomes of low SES children and reduce inequality of opportunity. Low SES children, who were randomly assigned to a mentor for one year are 20 percent more likely to enter a high track program. The mentoring relationship affects both parents and children and has positive long-term implications for children’s educational trajectories.
    Keywords: mentoring, childhood intervention programs, education, human capital investments, inequality of opportunity, socio-economic status
    JEL: C90 I24 J24 J62
    Date: 2020
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8382&r=all
  4. By: Green, Colin P. (Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)); Vaag Iversen, Jon Marius (Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU))
    Abstract: There has been a recent rapid increase in immigration into Europe, specifically in the form of refugees and asylum seekers. This raises a range of social challenges and a particular focus is education and school systems. A growing body of research investigates the impact of immigrants on native test score performance. In practice this reports very mixed results and a difficulty is that immigrant groups are often pooled together due to data restrictions. We return to this issue using Norwegian register data that allows us to distinguish refugees from other immigrants. Using narrow within-school, within-family comparisons combined with the Norwegian refugee settlement system we demonstrate marked negative effects of refugee children on the test score performance of their native school children classmates. These effects are simply not present for other immigrants, and stem primarily from refugee children who themselves are most at risk of low performance. These negative effects are concentrated on students at most risk of underperformance, boys and children from lower educated backgrounds, and may reflect a lack of compensatory inputs at schools.
    Keywords: refugees, educational attainment
    JEL: J15 I21
    Date: 2020–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13433&r=all
  5. By: Leaver, Clare; Lemos, Renata; Scur, Daniela
    Abstract: Why do some students learn more in some schools than others? One consideration receiving growing attention is school management. To study this, researchers need to be able to measure school management accurately and cheaply at scale, and also explain any observed relationship between school management and student learning. This paper introduces a new approach to measurement using existing public data, and applies it to build a management index covering 15,000 schools across 65 countries, and another index covering nearly all public schools in Brazil. Both indices show a strong, positive relationship between school management and student learning. The paper then develops a simple model that formalizes the intuition that strong management practices might be driving learning gains via incentive and selection effects among teachers, students and parents. The paper shows that the predictions of this model hold in public data for Latin America, and draws out implications for policy.
    Keywords: Cross-country; Management; teacher incentives; teacher selection
    JEL: I2 J3 M5
    Date: 2019–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14069&r=all
  6. By: Andrew E. Clark (PSE - Paris School of Economics, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement); Huifu Nong (SunYat-sen University); Hongjia Zhu (Jinan University [Guangzhou]); Rong Zhu (Flinders University [Adelaide, Australia])
    Abstract: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread school shutdowns, and many schools have opted for education using online learning platforms. Using administrative data from three middle schools in China, this paper estimates the causal effects of online learning on student performance. Using the difference-in-differences approach, we show that online education improves students' academic achievement by 0.22 of a standard deviation, relative to those who stopped receiving learning support from their school during the COVID-19 lockdown. All else equal, students from a school having access to recorded online lessons delivered by external higher-quality teachers have achieved more progress in academic outcomes than those accessing lessons recorded by teachers in their own school. We find no evidence that the educational benefits of distance learning differ for rural and urban students. However, there is more progress in the academic achievement of students using a computer for online education than that of those using a smartphone. Last, low achievers benefit the most from online learning while there is no significant impact for top students. Our findings have important policy implications for educational practices when lockdown measures are implemented during a pandemic.
    Keywords: academic achievement,COVID-19 pandemic,online learning
    Date: 2020–07
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-02901505&r=all
  7. By: Dasgupta, Utteeyo; Mani, Subha; Sharma, Smriti; Singhal, Saurabh
    Abstract: We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that enrolling in a selective college improves university exam scores of the marginally admitted females, and makes them less overconfident and less risk averse, while males in selective colleges experience a decline in extraversion and conscientiousness. We find differences in peer quality and rank concerns to be driving our findings.
    Keywords: College Quality,Peer Effects,Rank Concerns,Regression Discontinuity,India
    JEL: I23 C9 C14 J24 O15
    Date: 2020
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:591&r=all
  8. By: Chandini Sankaran (Boston College); Olivia Sorrentino (Boston College); Eva Hernandez (Boston College)
    Abstract: We analyze the role of parental involvement on a child’s academic performance by employing multiple proxies for direct and indirect parental involvement in his/her child’s schooling using a large dataset of 11,913 observations from the 2016 National Household Education Survey (NHES (2016)). Our estimations of ordered logit grade models show that children of parents who volunteer in the school or classroom, serve on a school committee, or attend PTO meetings are significantly more likely to receive higher grades; these children are 2.4% to 11% more likely to be making grades of mostly As compared to children of parents who do not engage in these activities. Elementary aged children who are told by their parents to read are also significantly more likely to receive higher grades in school. However, we find that homework help is a noisy proxy for parental involvement. Finally, our analysis uncovers some stark racial and gender disparities in K-12 student performance as well as racial differences in the parental involvement measures.
    Keywords: K-12, school, parental involvement, academic performance
    JEL: I20 I29
    Date: 2020–08–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boc:bocoec:1016&r=all
  9. By: Matthias Sutter; Michael Weyland; Anna Untertrifaller; Manuel Froitzheim
    Abstract: We present the results of a randomized intervention in schools to study how teaching financial literacy affects risk and time preferences of adolescents. Following ore than 600 adolescents, aged 16 years on average, over about half a year, we provide causal evidence that teaching financial literacy has significant short-term and longer-term effects on risk and time preferences. Compared to two different control treatments, we find that teaching financial literacy makes subjects more patient, less present-biased, and slightly more risk-averse. Our finding that the intervention changes economic preferences contributes to a better understanding of why financial literacy has been shown to correlate systematically with financial behavior in previous studies. We argue that the link between financial literacy and field behavior works through economic preferences. In our study, the latter are also related in a meaningful way to students' field behavior.
    Keywords: Financial literacy, randomized intervention, risk preferences, time preferences, field experiment
    JEL: C93 D14 I21
    Date: 2020
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:inn:wpaper:2020-27&r=all
  10. By: Pastore, Francesco; Quintano, Claudio; Rocca, Antonella
    Abstract: Purpose – There is a long period from completing studies to finding a permanent or temporary (but at least satisfactory) job in all European countries, especially in Mediterranean countries, including Italy. This paper aims to study the determinants of this duration and measure them, for the first time in a systematic way, in the case of Italy. Design/methodology/approach – This paper provides several measures of duration, including education level and other criteria. Furthermore, it attempts to identify the main determinants of the long Italian transition, both at a macroeconomic and an individual level. It tests for omitted heterogeneity of those who are stuck at this important crossroads in their life within the context of parametric survival models. Findings – The average duration of the school-to-work transition for young people aged 18–34 years was 2.88 years (or 34.56 months) in 2017. A shorter duration was found for the highly educated; they found a job on average 46 months earlier than those with compulsory education. At a macroeconomic level, the duration over the years 2004–2017 was inversely related to spending in the labour market policy and in education, GDP growth, and the degree of trade-union density; however, it was directly related to the proportion of temporary contracts. At the individual level, being a woman, a migrant, or living in a densely populated area in the South are the risk factors for remaining stuck in the transition. After correcting for omitted heterogeneity, there is clear evidence of positive duration dependence. Practical implications – Positive duration dependence suggests that focusing on education and labour policy, rather than labour flexibility, is the best way to smooth the transition. Originality – This study develops our understanding of the Italian STWT regime by providing new and detailed evidence of its duration and by studying its determinants.
    Keywords: School-to-work transition,Passive and active labour policy,Survival models,Positive duration dependence,Italy
    JEL: H52 I2 I24 J13 J24
    Date: 2020
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:595&r=all
  11. By: Eric A. Hanushek; Lavinia Kinne; Philipp Lergetporer; Ludger Woessmann
    Abstract: Patience and risk-taking – two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making – are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds of the cross-country variation in student achievement. In an identification strategy addressing unobserved residence-country features, we find similar results when assigning migrant students their country-of-origin cultural traits in models with residence-country fixed effects. Associations of culture with family and school inputs suggest that both may act as channels.
    Keywords: culture, patience, risk-taking, preferences, intertemporal decision-making, international student achievement, PISA
    JEL: I21 Z10
    Date: 2020
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8407&r=all
  12. By: Muhammad Ridwan Andi Purnomo; Adhe Rizky Anugerah (UPR Forêts et Sociétés - Forêts et Sociétés - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement, Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement, INTROP - Institute of Tropical Forestry & Forest Products - Universiti Putra Malaysia, Universiti Putra Malaysia); Bella Taradipa Dewipramesti
    Abstract: Purpose: This research aims to develop framework in the sustainable supply chain management (SCM) and to provide causal model of service industry specifically in higher education laboratory. Design/methodology/approach: The concepts of sustainable SCM in higher education laboratory were obtained by in-depth interviews and organized using Delphi method. While to identify the relationship between concepts, intuitionistic fuzzy cognitive map was utilized. Findings: As many as 15 concepts were identified to assess sustainability in the higher education laboratory SCM. These 15 concepts were classified into four categories according to its importance level, and there are two most important concepts: legal requirement and social responsibility. It is recommended for higher education laboratories to constantly obey national and regional government regulations and to satisfy current and prospective employers by providing work-ready graduates. This suggestion is expected to make higher education achieving its sustainability goals. Originality/value: this research has identified factors that can help university laboratories achieve their sustainability by using combined methods. Greater and more accurate insight in determining the most important factor in the sustainable education can be identified.
    Keywords: causal model,intuitionistic fuzzy cognitive map,laboratory,service supply chain,sustainable
    Date: 2020–07–27
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:cirad-02907401&r=all
  13. By: Tora K. Knutsen; Jørgen Modalsli; Marte Rønning (Statistics Norway)
    Abstract: How can geographical proximity to college explain field of study choices? We empirically address this question using the major expansion of university colleges in Norway in the second half of the twentieth century, when 33 new education institutions were established in areas that did not previously have any institutions for higher education. Our findings indicate that take-up of the relevant educations (nursing, engineering and business administration) increased substantially with the establishment of new colleges. However, we do not find evidence of an increase in education on earnings capacity overall, suggesting that the new colleges shifted individuals on the intensive rather than extensive margin, between education tracks of similar length. We discuss challenges related to the estimation of education choices in a population that often started higher education late, well into their twenties, and also document substantial gender differences in the take-up of different higher education opportunities.
    Keywords: University access; Gender differences; Field of study; Geospatial variation
    JEL: D31 I23 J62
    Date: 2020–06
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ssb:dispap:932&r=all

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