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on Education |
| By: | Matthewes, Sonke; Borgna, Camilla |
| Abstract: | This paper estimates how marginal increases in the flexibility of between-school tracking affect student attainment by exploiting the addition of non-selective ‘comprehensive schools’ and hybrid ‘vocational high schools’ to Germany's tracked school system. These schools opened up alternative pathways to the university-entrance certificate, which traditionally could only be obtained at academic-track schools. We use administrative records to compile a county-level panel of school supply and attainment for 13 cohorts between 1995 and 2007. Cross-sectionally, the supplies of all three school types awarding the university-entrance certificate correlate positively with its attainment. However, for academic-track and comprehensive schools this association is not robust to the inclusion of regional controls, suggesting that it reflects regional differences in educational demand rather than supply-side effects. For vocational high schools, in contrast, we find robust evidence for positive attainment effects not only in cross-sectional and two-way fixed-effects panel regressions, but also in an event-study design that exploits the quasi-random timing of new school openings. Likely reasons for their success are that they lower the (perceived) costs of educational upgrading for late-bloomers, and their hybrid curriculum, which may retain students in general schooling who would otherwise enter vocational training. |
| Keywords: | ability tracking; difference-in-differences; educational expansion; event study; regional inequality; school supply |
| JEL: | I28 J24 |
| Date: | 2025–02–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:126595 |
| By: | Elacqua, Gregory; Rodrigues, Mateus; Rosa, Leonardo |
| Abstract: | Teacher turnover is a major challenge for human resource management in schools, adversely affecting student learning. We examine the impact of a monetary incentive program introduced in 2022 in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, which aims to reduce teacher turnover by allocating wage premiums ranging from 5% to 25% of base salary based on schools turnover levels. Our results show a significant reduction in turnover: an average decrease of 18% across all schools, with an even more pronounced 30% reduction in schools offering higher incentives. Notably, the program also attracted new teachers to these higher-incentive schools. An analysis of teacher preferences similarly reveals a shift towards schools offering greater wage premiums. Furthermore, we find that schools offering high incentives experienced significant improvements in student test scores, with gains of 0.3-0.6 standard deviations in standardized assessments. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of monetary incentives in mitigating teacher turnover and improving educational outcomes, providing evidence-based guidance for policymakers developing teacher retention strategies. |
| Keywords: | Teachers;financial incentives;teacher shortage;Teacher sorting;turnover rates;disadvantaged schools |
| JEL: | I21 J45 J63 M52 |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:idb:brikps:13950 |
| By: | Ethan Kaplan; Jorg L. Spenkuch; Cody Tuttle |
| Abstract: | In 1975, a federal court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Jefferson County, KY. In order to approximately equalize the share of minorities across schools, students were assigned to a busing schedule that depended on the first letter of their last name. We use the resulting quasi-random variation to estimate the long-run impact of attending an inner-city school on political participation and preferences among whites. Drawing on administrative voter registration records and an original survey, we find that being bused to an inner-city school significantly increases support for the Democratic Party and its candidates more than forty years later. Consistent with the idea that exposure to an inner-city environment causes a permanent change in ideological outlook, we also find evidence that bused individuals are much less likely to believe in a "just world" (i.e., that success is earned rather than attributable to luck) and, more tentatively, that they become more supportive of some forms of redistribution. Taken together, our findings point to a poverty-centered version of the contact hypothesis, whereby witnessing economic deprivation durably sensitizes individuals to issues of inequality and fairness. |
| JEL: | D72 H75 I21 I28 J15 N32 |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33365 |
| By: | Zachary Bleemer; Aashish Mehta |
| Abstract: | Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less-lucrative fields of study since the mid-1990s. A decomposition reveals that this widening gap is principally explained by rising stratification at public research universities, many of which increasingly enforce GPA restriction policies that prohibit students with poor introductory grades from declaring popular majors. We investigate these GPA restrictions by constructing a novel 50-year dataset covering four public research universities’ student transcripts and employing a staggered difference-in-difference design around the implementation of 29 restrictions. Restricted majors’ average URM enrollment share falls by 20 percent, which matches observational patterns and can be explained by URM students’ poorer average precollege academic preparation. Using first-term course enrollments to identify students who intend to earn restricted majors, we find that major restrictions disproportionately lead URM students from their intended major toward less-lucrative fields, driving within-institution ethnic stratification and likely exacerbating labor market disparities. |
| Keywords: | higher education, racial wage gap, college majors |
| JEL: | H75 I24 J31 Z13 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11601 |
| By: | Pierre-André Chiappori; Monica Costa Dias; Costas Meghir; Hanzhe Zhang |
| Abstract: | Positive assortative matching refers to the tendency of individuals with similar characteristics to form partnerships. Measuring the extent to which assortative matching differs between two economies is challenging when the marginal distributions of the characteristic along which sorting takes place (e.g., education) change for either or both sexes. We show how the use of different measures can generate different conclusions. We provide axiomatic characterization for measures such as the odds ratio, normalized trace, and likelihood ratio, and provide a structural economic interpretation of the odds ratio. We then use our approach to consider how marital sorting by education changed between the 1950s and the 1970s cohort, for which both educational attainment and returns in the labor market changed substantially. |
| JEL: | C78 D1 J1 |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33354 |