Education http://lists.repec.org/mailman/listinfo/nep-edu Education 2026-10-05 Pathways to student performance: What entry pathway predicts better students’ first-year GPA outcomes? A case study of a Mekong region university, Vietnam https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:adl:wpaper:2026-13&r=&r=edu Vietnam’s expansion of university admission pathways has raised questions about whether high school (HS) transcripts or national exam scores better predict student success. Examining five entry cohorts (11, 127 students) at a Mekong regional university, this study compares how high school grades and national exam scores forecast first-year college performance across different fields of study. Results show that high school transcripts are a stronger and more reliable predictor of university academic performance than single-occasion national exam scores. Overall high school academic rank also serves as a clear indicator of achievement, with top-ranked high school students consistently outperforming their peers in college. The strength of these admission measures varies by discipline, showing the strongest predictive power in Natural Science and Technology programs and the lowest in Education. These findings demonstrate that consistent high school performance offers a clearer and more reliable forward-looking signal of university readiness than a single exam. Higher education leaders should retain transcript-based entry while standardising high school grading practices and adopting field-specific admission criteria. These findings support the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training’s decision to retain high school transcripts in university admissions despite some public calls for their abolition. Huong Thi Pham Tinh Doan Canh Nguyen admissions pathway; predictive validity; first-year GPA; transcript vs. exam; higher education, Vietnam 2026-09 The influence of peers' parental background on university enrollment: the role of education and occupation https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_1039_26&r=&r=edu This paper investigates the influence of peers' parents in shaping high school students' decisions to enroll in university, highlighting the joint role of their education level and occupation. Using a rich longitudinal dataset on Italian students, we track individuals from high school to university enrollment and exploit within-school and cross-cohort variation to identify peer effects. Our results show that peers' parental education positively impacts university enrollment, and more strongly so when paired with the type of occupation. These findings hold across students' and parents' gender and are more pronounced in non-academic schools and among students whose parents do not hold a university degree, suggesting that the peer effect is particularly relevant in contexts where the propensity to attend university is lower. The paper also finds that the peer effect is non-linear and strongest at intermediate levels of exposure, suggesting that a certain degree of diversity in the educational background of peers' parents may maximize the overall effect. Luca Brugnara Davide Dottori Francesca Modena Giulia Martina Tanzi university students' outcomes, peer effect, family background 2026-07 Who Goes Online? Selection and performance in Italian higher education https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_1040_26&r=&r=edu Online universities have expanded rapidly in Italy over the past two decades. Leveraging administrative data linked to standardized pre-university test scores, this paper examines the demographic profile and academic outcomes of online students. Compared to their peers in traditional institutions, online enrollees tend to be older, more frequently come from technical or vocational tracks, and have lower high-school grades and standardized test scores. Controlling for these initial disadvantages, they have lower dropout rates and higher on-time completion rates at the bachelor's level. However, performance declines when transitioning from an online bachelor's to a traditional master's degree program. Our findings also suggest that online universities make access to tertiary education viable for individuals who would otherwise be more likely to be excluded: enrollment growth has been concentrated in provinces with historically low participation in higher education and among students with an ex-ante lower likelihood of enrolling. Raffaello Bronzini Luca De Benedictis Edoardo Frattola Elena Lazzaro online education, higher education access, student performance, educational inequality 2026-07 Trade Liberalization and Human Capital Formation: Schooling, Learning, and Early Labor Market Outcomes in Peru https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:wfuewp:023632&r=&r=edu Trade liberalization can increase schooling while reducing what children learn. We study this tension in Peru, where large unilateral tariff reductions between 2007 and 2016 generated substantial local variation in import competition. Combining household surveys with administrative records of test performance, we examine effects on children's schooling, work, learning, and later outcomes. We document a trade-off between schooling quantity and learning quality: greater exposure increased attendance but reduced relative gains in math achievement. This pattern extends from primary into secondary school, where exposed districts saw even larger participation gains, yet the relative math learning gap continued to widen as affected cohorts aged. We trace these effects to countervailing income and substitution channels. Declining protected-sector opportunities lowered the opportunity cost of schooling, while negative income shocks led more children to work while in school and shifted students from private to public schools, where teachers per student fell. In the longer run, affected cohorts were more likely to complete secondary school but shifted away from university and toward technical and professional programs, and by young adulthood were less likely to be employed and earned lower wages. Trade reforms can thus expand school access while weakening skill formation, revealing human-capital costs that enrollment metrics may miss Ryan Abman Leah Lakdawala Clark Lundberg Eduardo Nakasone trade liberalization; import competition; human capital; schooling; learning; child labor; Peru 2026-09 Can Early Exposure to the Teaching Profession Increase Teacher Supply and Diversity? New Evidence on the Teacher Pipeline https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35776&r=&r=edu We examine whether early exposure to the teaching career has the potential to expand the size and diversity of new teacher supply. Exploiting the staggered expansion of high school education courses across Texas, we find little evidence that these courses increased new teacher supply or diversity despite course takers being substantially more diverse than the teacher workforce. High school education course takers who become teachers are similarly effective and more likely to be retained than their peers. Most course takers drop out of the teacher pipeline prior to college enrollment where racial gaps in 4-year college going serve as major barriers. Our findings suggest that early exposure without support to increase college going is unlikely to increase teacher supply or diversity. Danielle Sanderson Edwards Matthew A. Kraft 2026-09 When Does EdTech Work? Evidence from a Scalable Home-Based Intervention with School Complementarity https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:idb:brikps:14736&r=&r=edu Despite growing investment in education technology, evidence on how to integrate digital tools eectively into public education systems remains limited. Substituting classroom instruction with computer-aided learning has often failed to improve outcomes, even though schools remain the most direct route to scale educational innovations. This paper studies an alternative approach: delivering personalized educational software to households, where smartphone access is widespread, while experimentally varying school involvement. We evaluate Leo Leo, an adaptive early literacy app for young children, using a randomized controlled trial in 105 public schools in Nuevo León, Mexico. Schools were assigned to either (i) a family-only intervention providing access to the app, (ii) a combined family-and-school intervention that additionally provided teachers and principals with information on childrens progress, or (iii) a control group that received neither the app nor school support. The home-based technology generates robust gains in early literacy, with suggestive positive spillovers to early numeracy, when complemented by school support; the family-only intervention produces no signicant learning gains. Descriptive mechanism analyses are most consistent with greater child engagement with the software as the leading channel. We nd no indication that changes in parental inputs play a role, based on a household survey with a lower response than the student assessment. Overall, the results show that while home-based delivery of educational technology can enhance scalability, institutional involvement remains critical for translating scalable technology into learning gains. Bloomfield, Juanita Balsa, Ana Cid, Alejandro 2026-09 Enhancing university students' retention: the role of faculty members https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_1038_26&r=&r=edu This paper examines how the characteristics of the faculty members, mainly in terms of gender and age, affect university students' retention. Using student-level administrative data from the census of Italian university students, we exploit the quasi-random variation in the exposure to female and young professors across cohorts, within the same degree program, department, and university. Students' retention improves when the characteristics of the students match those of faculty members: while younger professors benefit all students, female faculty members have positive effects on female students only. Francesca Modena Giulia Martina Tanzi Marco Tonello Antonio Veronico university, student retention, dropout, professors' gender and age 2026-07 Educating like China https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13003&r=&r=edu This paper shows that human capital accumulation can accelerate structural transformation without accelerating growth. We study China's 1999 higher education expansion, a large, rapid, and largely unanticipated increase in college graduates. We find that more exposed prefectures experienced larger increases in the skilled-labor share and shifted employment and value added from agriculture toward services. The reallocation extended to low-skilled workers. Consumer services absorbed most of the increase in employment, while producer services accounted for a disproportionate share of high-skilled employment growth. Yet more-exposed prefectures did not grow faster. A four-sector model rationalizes these patterns, showing how greater skill supply can generate broad-based servitization, but also a Baumol-type growth penalty when labor reallocates toward slower-growing sectors. Our findings highlight that the payoff to higher education depends not only on how much skill it creates, but also on whether the resulting structural transformation directs resources toward the economy’s engines of productivity growth. Federica Coelli Difei Ouyang Weidi Yuan Yuan Zi human capital, structural transformation, higher education expansion, servitization, China 2026 On the Complementarity of K-12 Personal Finance and Economic Education: Evidence from Online Modules https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedlwp:103812&r=&r=edu We compile data from 2.4 million economics and personal finance module assignments completed by 513, 000 K-12 students on an educational online platform. We exploit variation in the order in which these students complete the modules–economics or personal finance first– to estimate directional spillovers. The spillover runs one way. Controlling for school demographics, students who take economics first score 3.42 points higher on personal finance post-tests; taking personal finance first raises economics post-tests by 0.15 points on the same specification. A placebo using exposure that occurs after the outcome puts the return at 0.8 to 1.4 points per pre-treatment module. The advantage does not shrink as the gap between subjects grows, and it is largest in raw points for lower-performing students, 5.1 compared with 1.6, though mostly because higher-performing students sit at the test ceiling. Economics appears to supply foundational concepts that personal finance does not. When both subjects are taught, the order matters: economics first is the better order, and one or two economics modules capture most of the available gain. Manu García Diego Mendez-Carbajo economic education; financial literacy; K-12 education; online learning; curriculum design 2026-09-23 The Returns to International Migration in a Free Mobility Setting: Evidence from Austria and Germany https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ihs:ihsdps:number5&r=&r=edu How big are the gains to international migration? How do they vary across migrants? We study these questions using linked administrative data for Austria and Germany, focusing on migrants who were steadily employed 2-4 years before their move and using their previous co-workers as a comparison group for a difference-in-differences design. We combine data from the origin and destination countries for 5 years after the move, allowing us to assess the gains for those who remain in the destination and those who return. On average, migrants from Austria to Germany experience an immediate and persistent rise of around 13% in their daily wage relative to their matched co-workers, while migrants from Germany to Austria gain about 4%. The higher returns for Austrians are mainly driven by higher average wages in Germany, rather than by differential selection of migrants. Consistent with a dynamic learning model, the returns to migration are largest for migrants who remain in the destination country, smaller for those who return after 1-4 years, and zero or even slightly negative for those who return in less than a year. They are also larger for migrants who follow established cross-border networks between workplaces. To help interpret our findings we conduct a parallel analysis ofdomestic migrants who move to a larger city (Vienna or one of the 5 largest cities in Germany). “Big city†movers experience gains in wages of about 5% for Austrians and 10% for Germans. Again the gains are largest for those who remain in the destination city, with smaller effects for those who move on. Weber, Andrea Card, David Dauth, Wolfgang Frimmel, Wolfgang Schmieder, Julia Winter-Ebmer, Rudolf 2026-09 Home Bias in Early Labor Location Choices: Does University Location Matter? https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bge:wpaper:1594&r=&r=edu Geographic mobility facilitates labor-market adjustment, yet home bias can impede relocation and perpetuate regional disparities, including in the provision of essential services. Using administrative records covering the universe of Spanish medical graduates who selected their first job between 1986 and 2019, we examine whether university lo- cation shapes early-career mobility. We first document substantial home attachment: more than half of graduates begin their careers in their home province. We then show that university location has a large effect on subsequent location choices. Completing a medical degree in one's home province increases the probability of starting work there by 22 percentage points. The effect of opening a medical school on aggregate home bias depends on the local labor market's capacity to absorb additional graduates. Finally, a nationwide liberalization of university admissions reduced students' propensity to study in their home university district and, through this channel, significantly weakened home bias. These findings show that the location of higher-education institutions and the de- sign of admissions policies can shape the geographic allocation of skilled workers at labor-market entry. Marina Díez-Rituerto Javier Gardeazabal Nagore Iriberri Pedro Rey Biel home bias, labor mobility, university location 2026-09 Do non-financial incentives work better for women? Two classroom experiments on calibration https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:war:wpaper:2026-37&r=&r=edu This paper reports the results of two experiments exploring the effects of monetary and non-monetary incentives on overconfidence and underconfidence. It additionally explores the moderating effects of gender. The participants of both experiments are university students taking their academic tests. Right before the tests, they predict weather their score will be higher or lower than the average in their class group. Overplacement is defined as expecting a better-than-average score but actually getting a below-average score. Similarly, underplacement occurs when a subject expects a below-average score but ends up above the average. Half of the subjects are incentivized: some receive money and others a handmade gift conditional on predicting correctly. Experiment 1 is conducted weekly for nine tests and involves students of one course. Experiment 2 involves students of four different courses, and the grade predictions are made on the final exam only. While Experiment 2 shows no significant results, the main finding from Experiment 1 is that the handmade gift reduces the likelihood of overplacement and underplacement for women, making them significantly better calibrated than men. Experiment 1 also shows that overplacement, but not underplacement, is more likely when the stakes are high (midterm and final tests compared to the weekly quizzes). Finally, there is limited support for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Hayk Amirkhanyan overconfidence, overplacement, underconfidence, non-monetary incentives, gender differences, Dunning-Kruger effect 2026 Aligning School and Work: How After-School Care Shapes Maternal Labor Supply https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18949&r=&r=edu This paper examines the labor market effects of China's After-School Care policy—commonly known as the After-School 3:30 PM Service reform—on maternal employment and earnings. Introduced in 2017, the policy addresses the longstanding mismatch between early school dismissal times and standard work schedules by extending on-campus supervision and enrichment activities into the late afternoon. Exploiting the staggered rollout of the program across counties and over time, we show that the policy significantly increases mothers' labor supply and earnings. We document null effects for fathers. The policy operates by reducing maternal housework time, enabling longer commutes, and facilitating access to formal employment, while also inducing firms to increase job postings for female workers. Effects are concentrated among mothers with egalitarian gender attitudes, with minimal impact on those holding traditional views. Fang, Guanfu Qian, Benyu Zhao, Zhong after-school care, maternal labor supply, gender norms 2026-09 The Early Impacts of AI on Employment among Recent College Graduates https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18945&r=&r=edu The impact of AI on the employment prospects of recent college graduates is hotly debated with no consensus on the magnitude of impacts nor even the timing of those potential impacts. Using CPS microdata, we provide the first estimates of the effects of AI on the unemployment of recent college graduates in June, July and August 2026. Taking an agnostic approach to defining treatment timing, we find that unemployment rates did not spike in summer 2026 relative to summer months in previous years and did not rise in a significant way relative to older college graduates or young workers without a college degree. We also find no evidence of a statistically significant increase in summer 2026 even after adding the “sidelined unemployed.†We estimate difference-in-differences and event-study interaction models using both older college graduates and young non-college graduates as comparison groups and do not find evidence of an increase in relative unemployment rates. Finally, we estimate models in which we interact 2026 unemployment with AI exposure and remote work availability by occupation and find some evidence of a positive relationship with remote work availability. Fairlie, Robert Wu, Jane AI, technological change, unemployment, job loss, college graduates 2026-09 The Gender Gap in STEM Majors: The (Un)-Importance of Life Goals https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18936&r=&r=edu There is a large gender gap in who chooses STEM majors, yet decades of research have failed to explain this gap in its entirety. We use extensive data on incoming college freshmen to estimate the importance of ability (both test-based and self-assessed), life goals, other self-assessed traits, high school courses, and family background in explaining the gender gap in STEM majors. Even with this detailed data, we can explain only 39% of the gender gap. A Gelbach decomposition shows that self-assessed ability (26%) and high school courses (12%) account for the bulk of the explained gap, while goals explain little and in fact controlling for goals slightly widens the gender gap. Goals are similarly uninformative of the gender gap in STEM persistence from freshman to senior year. On the other hand, goals contribute substantially to gender differences in biology and some non- STEM majors, particularly business, education, and health, but remain uninformative of the gap for the majority of STEM subjects. We conclude that while life goals are strongly related to major choice, gender-based differences in these goals are not the missing piece to the STEM gender gap puzzle. Leighton, Margaret Speer, Jamin gender gaps, STEM, college major, life goals 2026-09 Education Quality and Economic Growth: A New International Measure of Quality of Education https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:adl:wpaper:2026-09&r=&r=edu This paper explores the impact of education quality on economic growth in 37 OECD countries. We developed a new dataset that combines mixed-frequency data, including low-frequency data (every three years) from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and annual data from the World Development Indicators (WDI), covering the period from 2000 to 2018. Our study investigates the relationship between education quality and economic growth. We found that a 1% increase in educational quality contribute to an annual economic growth rate of 2.8%. This result is significantly higher than previous research, which, based on cross-sectional PISA data, reported growth rates ranging from 0.4% to 2.3%. Hammed Oluwaseyi Musibau Joaquin Vespignani Maria Belen Yanotti economic growth; education quality; PISA data; Chow–Lin Procedure 2026-08 The Limits of Rank-Dependent Priorities in School Choice https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.39425&r=&r=edu Many school choice mechanisms give students higher priority at schools they rank highly and aim to reward students' eagerness. This paper studies whether a centralized mechanism can incorporate such rank-dependent priorities while preserving truthful reporting. I consider a mechanism that jointly specifies how reported preferences modify schools' original priorities and how assignments are determined based on the modified priorities. I require the modification rule to satisfy rank monotonicity and the resulting matching to be stable with respect to the modified priorities. These two requirements jointly capture the policy objective of rewarding eagerness. My main result shows that any mechanism satisfying these requirements as well as strategy-proofness is outcome equivalent to the student-proposing Deferred Acceptance mechanism using the original priorities. Thus, if eagerness affects the outcome while the rank-dependent policy goal is maintained, the mechanism must be manipulable. Masato Eguchi 2026-09