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on Education |
| By: | Attar, Itay (Ben Gurion University); Cohen-Zada, Danny (Ben Gurion University) |
| Abstract: | Using Israeli data, we establish that the interaction between school entrance age (SEA) policy and youth employment laws increases high school dropout rates among students who start school older—particularly males. This is because these students become eligible for employment at an earlier grade, increasing their likelihood and duration of work, which amplifies dropout rates. Intriguingly, this effect is primarily driven by students who achieved above-average test scores in elementary school. Among males, a higher SEA also reduces participation in and scores on a college entry exam, as well as college enrollment. Unlike most previous estimates, our estimates of the effect of SEA on college entry-exam scores are free from age-at-test effects. In the longer run, a higher SEA reduces educational attainment for both males and females and has a sizable negative, though statistically nonsignificant, effect on their earnings. Our findings suggest that replacing the minimum working age in youth employment laws with a minimum-grade-completion requirement could mitigate the unintended consequence of higher dropout rates among older school entrants. |
| Keywords: | returns to education, compulsory schooling, high school dropout, youth employment, school entrance age, date of birth, test scores |
| JEL: | I20 I28 J22 J24 |
| Date: | 2025–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17790 |
| By: | Frederik Almar; Benjamin Friedrich; Ana Reynoso; Bastian Schulz; Rune M. Vejlin |
| Abstract: | This paper revisits the link between education-based marriage market sorting and income inequality. Leveraging Danish administrative data, we develop a novel categorization of “ambition types” that is based on starting wages and wage growth trajectories associated with detailed educational programs. We find a substantial increase in assortative matching by educational ambition over time, and the marriage market explains more than 40% of increasing inequality since 1980. In contrast, sorting trends are flat with the commonly-used educational level categorization. We conclude that the mapping from education to types matters crucially for conclusions about how education-based marriage market sorting contributes to rising income inequality. |
| JEL: | D1 J12 |
| Date: | 2025–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33683 |
| By: | Fort, Margherita (University of Bologna); Loviglio, Annalisa (University of Bologna); Tinti, Susanna (University of Bologna) |
| Abstract: | We study the impact of a program designed to enhance data literacy on graduate students’ skills and academic outcomes in a large Italian university. The program (i.e. a minor) targets students who are expected to have weak quantitative competences and offers 120-hours training focused on improving the ability to interpret and process data, in addition to the regular courses of the master program in which students are enrolled (i.e. their major). The admission process to the minor is characterized by rationing, resolved by random assignment of available slots to applicants. Exploiting the resulting exogenous variation for identification, we find that the program largely improved digital literacy of participants with low pre-treatment levels of numeracy. Despite the additional effort required by the program, we can rule out any slowdown in the progress of the academic career in the major master program of participating students. |
| Keywords: | tertiary education, minor, data literacy, human capital formation |
| JEL: | I20 J24 |
| Date: | 2025–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17803 |
| By: | Elizabeth Setren |
| Abstract: | Over sixty years following Brown vs. Board of Education, racial and socioeconomic segregation and lack of equal access to educational opportunities persist. Across the country, voluntary desegregation busing programs aim to ameliorate these imbalances and disparities. A longstanding Massachusetts program, METCO, buses K-12 students of color from Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts to 37 suburban districts that voluntarily enroll urban students. Supporters of the program argue that it prepares students to be active citizens in our multicultural society. Opponents question the value of the program and worry it may have a negative impact on suburban student outcomes. I estimate the causal effect of exposure to diversity through the METCO program by using two types of variation: difference-in-difference analysis of schools stopping and starting their METCO enrollment and two-stage least squares analysis of space availability for METCO students. Both methods rule out substantial test score, attendance, or suspension effects of having METCO peers. Classroom ability distribution and classroom suspension rates remain similar when METCO programs start and stop. There is no negative impact on college preparation, competitiveness, persistence, or graduation. |
| JEL: | I20 I21 I24 J15 |
| Date: | 2025–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33623 |
| By: | Bonander, Carl (University of Gothenburg); Hammar, Olle (Linnaeus University); Jakobsson, Niklas (Karlstad University); Bensch, Gunther (RWI); Holzmeister, Felix (University of Innsbruck); Brodeur, Abel (University of Ottawa) |
| Abstract: | Islam (2019) reports results from a randomized field experiment in Bangladesh that examines the effects of parent-teacher meetings on student test scores in primary schools. The reported findings suggest strong positive effects across multiple subjects. In this report, we demonstrate that the school-level randomization cannot have been conducted as the author claims. Specifically, we show that the nine included Bangladeshi unions all have a share of either 0% or 100% treated or control schools. Additionally, we uncover irregularities in baseline scores, which for the same students and subjects vary systematically across the author’s data files in ways that are unique to either the treatment or control group. We also discovered data on two unreported outcomes and data collected from the year before the study began. Results using these data cast further doubt on the validity of the original study. Moreover, in a survey asking parents to evaluate the parent-teacher meetings, we find that parents in the control schools were more positive about this intervention than those in the treated schools. We also find undisclosed connections to two additional RCTs. |
| Keywords: | field experiments, student outcomes, reproduction, Bangladesh |
| JEL: | B41 C12 I25 |
| Date: | 2025–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17781 |
| By: | Marty Haoyuan Chen; Ginger Zhe Jin |
| Abstract: | The past few years have seen a shift in many universities' admission policies from test-required to either test-optional or test-blind. This paper uses laboratory experiments to examine students' reporting behavior given their application package and the school's interpretation of non-reported standardized test scores. We find that voluntary disclosure is incomplete and selective, supporting the incentives of both partial unraveling and reverse unraveling. Subjects exhibit some ability to learn about the hidden school interpretation, though their learning is imperfect. Using a structural model of student reporting behavior, we simulate the potential tradeoff between academic preparedness and diversity in a school's admission cohort. We find that, if students have perfect information about the school's interpretation of non-reporting, test-blind is the worst and test-required is the best in both dimensions, while test-optional lies between the two extremes. When students do not have perfect information, some test-optional policies can generate more diversity than test-required, because some students with better observable attributes may underestimate the penalty on their non-reporting. This allows the school to admit more students that have worse observable attributes but report. We test the results’ robustness to a variety of extensions. |
| JEL: | D61 D63 D8 I23 I24 |
| Date: | 2025–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33660 |