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on Education |
| By: | Asim, Salman; Gera, Ravinder Madron Casley; Harris, Donna Oretha; Dercon, Stefan |
| Abstract: | Evidence from high-income countries suggests that the quality of school leadership has measurable impacts on teacher behaviors and student learning achievement. However, there is a lack of rigorous evidence in low-income contexts, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. This study tests the impact on student progression and test scores of a two-year, multi-phase intervention to strengthen leadership skills for head teachers, deputy head teachers, and sub-district education officials. The intervention consists of two phases of classroom training along with follow-up visits, implemented over two years. It focuses on skills related to making more efficient use of resources; motivating and incentivizing teachers to improve performance; and curating a culture in which students and teachers are all motivated to strengthen learning. A randomized controlled trial was conducted in 1, 198 schools in all districts of Malawi, providing evidence of the impact of the intervention at scale. The findings show that the intervention improved student test scores by 0.1 standard deviations, equivalent to around eight weeks of additional learning, as well as improving progression rates. The outcomes were achieved primarily as a result of improvements in the provision of remedial classes. |
| Date: | 2024–07–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10846 |
| By: | Andrew L. Dabalen; Justice Tei Mensah; Nsabimana, Aimable |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the medium-term effects of policy- driven income shocks on human capital accumulation in low-income environments. Using administrative data on test scores of the universe of primary school students in Rwanda and the staggered rollout of coffee mills in the country, it shows a positive spillover effect of the coffee mills on students’ performance. Early life exposure to coffee mills is associated with a 0.09 standard deviation (4 percent) increase in student test scores. Improvements in household welfare, child health, and school attendance are likely operative channels of impact. |
| Date: | 2024–12–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10993 |
| By: | Jonas Feld (IAAEU; University of Trier); Joanna Tyrowicz (Group for Research in Applied Economics (GRAPE); University of Warsaw; Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)) |
| Abstract: | We provide novel evidence on the inequality of returns to immigrant skills in hosting economies. Although migrant wage gaps are well established in the literature, less is known about the origins of their heterogeneity. We propose a potential rationale for this gap related to the linguistic proximity between the destination and origin countries. We exploit individual-level data from nine diverse destination countries, with migrants from a highly heterogeneous group of origin countries, for both recent and long-term migrants. We find that lower linguistic proximity between origin and destination is associated with a higher average wage penalty for highly skilled migrants and a substantially lower position in the wage distribution. |
| Keywords: | migration, linguistic proximity, returns to education |
| JEL: | F22 I23 I26 Z13 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fme:wpaper:102 |
| By: | Wu, Hanbo |
| Abstract: | Current research on education reform has focused chiefly on positive shocks that intend to equalize educational opportunity, while negative shocks that impede school access have rarely been investigated. What would happen to someone exposed simultaneously to both types of shocks? I tackle this question in the context of Vietnam, where a universal primary education reform (a positive shock) and an introduction of tuition fee for secondary education (a negative shock) took place almost at the same time but affected different cohorts. I find that the negative shock decreased individual years of schooling, whereas the positive shock increased it. The beneficial effect of the positive shock outstrips the adverse effect of the negative shock, resulting in an overall improvement in educational attainment for those exposed to both shocks. The favorable joint effect on schooling is more pronounced for socioeconomically disadvantaged rural residents, women, and ethnic minorities. Educational assortative mating, intergenerational persistence of education, and labor market outcomes are also examined in this article. |
| Date: | 2025–02–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:2km56_v1 |
| By: | Justin C. Wiltsire (Department of Economics, University of Victoria) |
| Abstract: | Non-resident students are often accused of negatively affecting academic quality and crowding out resident students. We present new evidence on this relationship by exploiting the removal of an enrollment cap on non-resident students at a highly ranked state flagship university. We find this policy yielded a 29 percent increase in non-resident enrollment (coming almost entirely from domestic—rather than international—students), and a consequent 47 percent increase in tuition revenue which funded large increases in financial aid disbursed at the university, particularly for low-income resident students. We find no evidence of negative effects on several measures of academic quality or resident-student enrollment. |
| Keywords: | Higher Education Finance; Non-Resident Students; Regional Migration; Enrollment Caps |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vic:vicddp:2408 |
| By: | Guinea Martín, Daniel; Rojas Mora, Julio |
| Abstract: | Chile's 2015 School Inclusion Act promotes the phasing out of copays in so-called privatevoucher schools (largely equivalent to charter schools elsewhere). Our main research question is, What is the impact of reducing copays on (1) socioeconomic segregation, an intended target of the reform, and (2) ethnic segregation, a separate and much smaller dimension of school segregation that nonetheless might also be a ected by the reform asminorities tend to be poorer? We analyze the entire student body in primary education between 2016 and 2018 with an strategy based on three instrumental variables: (1) variationin monthly municipality unemployment and activity rates; (2) student-to-teacher ratios in public schools; and, (3) a crime index. We conclude that dropping copays would eliminate more than two thirds of socioeconomic segregation and almost half of ethnic segregation. In the article we also compare our favored administrative-led defnition of three socioeconomic statuses (low, mid and high) with alternatives based on mother's educational level or household income that rely on a sizeable sample of around 80 percent of the student body. We conclude that these sample-based alternatives lead to biased (1) segregation measurements and (2) estimates of the effect on copays on segregation. |
| Keywords: | Chile; Ethnicity; Instrumental variables; School segregation; Socioeconomic status; Mutual information index |
| Date: | 2025–02–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:werepe:45948 |