Economics of Education Review最新文献

Does religion affect the gender gap? Using data on inquisition trials to locate medieval Waldensian communities in the Italian municipalities of Piedmont and early 19th-century female literacy rates, we find that municipalities with a history of Waldensian presence display lower levels of the education gender gap, a pattern that persists to the present day. Moreover, women in these municipalities have higher levels of education, greater labor market participation, and increased political representation. Our results highlight the importance of cultural and social norms in shaping women’s empowerment and gender equality outcomes.

Research into the causal impact of formal education on political beliefs and ultimate voting behavior arrives at contradictory results. While some early work, e.g. Dee (2004) finds education induces more socially-liberal views, more recent works suggests that education makes individuals more fiscally conservative. We use quasi-experimental variation in schooling created by compulsory schooling laws (CSLs) to reconcile these results. Following Marshall (2019), we first examine a pooled sample of voter and find that policy-induced increases in education lead to voters being more likely to identify as, and vote for, Republican candidates, largely due to concerns regarding taxes. Delving further into this result, however, we find highly heterogeneous impacts of education, which depend on the efficacy of CSLs. In particular, in states where CSLs significantly increased educational attainment, impacted individuals become more fiscally conservative, but also exhibit greater support for traditional Democratic social issues like abortion rights and environmental protection, creating so-called “Rockefeller” Republicans. By contrast, voters educated in states where CSLs have no measured impact on educational attainment exhibit generally more conservative attitudes toward non-economics and social issues, which are traits that are consistent with so-called “Goldwater” Republicans.

We study the effects of a major change to the school accountability system in England. In 2015, the leading published school performance metric was switched from a threshold measure (essentially the fraction of students above a test score level) to an average score measure. Using 7 years of data on all secondary schools in England, we show that this intervention relatively reduced the test scores of students near the threshold, in favour of groups above the threshold (marginally) and below (substantially). We check the sensitivity of our results to different decisions, and present findings on heterogeneous treatments.

In light of the dramatic rise in mental health disorders amongst adolescents seen in the past decade across the world, there is an urgent need for robust evidence on what works to combat this trend. This paper provides the first robust evaluation of the impacts on school outcomes of 6-year funding programme (HeadStart) for area-level mental health interventions for adolescents. Exploiting educational administrative data on ten cohorts of state-educated secondary school students, we use the synthetic control method to construct counterfactual outcomes for areas that received the funding. We show that the funding did not affect students’ absenteeism or academic attainment, but it prevented around 800 students (c. 10% of students typically excluded yearly) from being excluded in its first year. The transient nature of this effect suggests that sustained funding for intervention may be a necessary but not sufficient condition to maintain programme effectiveness over time.

By using extensive Hungarian administrative data, this study aims to provide empirical evidence that former university ties strongly influence the labour market outcomes of individuals, even early in their careers. The estimates focus on the early career paths of graduates who obtained a master's degree between 2010 and 2017. As direct information on social contacts is not available in the dataset, we proxy university peers as students who started and finished the same university programmes (bachelor's or master's) in the same semester. Our results suggest that individuals are more likely to get hired by given firms if their former peers work there. The measured effects are considered significant and quite robust, even after controlling for the important sources of potential bias. Although we cannot present exact proof of the direct help of contacts, we provide suggestive evidence that seems to confirm the existence of such assistance. Our findings also revealed that the measured benefits are mainly attributable to connections from bachelor's studies. The effect of master's peers is mostly driven by the selection of individuals alongside prevalent study track-firm pathways. By comparing entries into new firms with and without peers, we also show that graduates with links have better labor market outcomes after hiring: they earn higher wages, obtain better and more prestigious positions, and stay longer at their new firm. The results draw attention to the importance of university peers in the labour market and contribute to the discussions about the determinants of early labour market success.

Student attendance at school is a necessary condition for learning and for other schooling benefits, yet absenteeism is a significant issue for students in many countries. Policies, programs, and research seeking to reduce absenteeism need to measure it accurately. This article describes seven different methods to measure student absenteeism, all used in at least one of 27 recently published studies in low- and middle-income countries. It also synthesizes evidence on the advantages and disadvantages of different methods, drawing on 17 studies that compare methods. We find that official school attendance records—a relatively cheap, nonintrusive method—often result in similar statistics as unannounced spot checks, but there are enough exceptions that policymakers and researchers may initially need to complement school records with spot checks. Student reports often understate absenteeism, and caregiver reports even more so. We discuss implications for researchers and for policymakers to improve measurement in education systems.

In view of school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines how a Home-Based Learning program affects learning outcomes of children in under-resourced communities. To overcome limited internet connectivity, the program provides remote instructions via phone calls and simple text messages along with automated voice calls to engage children enrolled in grades one to five in activity-based learning content. This intervention was conducted in three districts in the state of Odisha in India. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the intervention led to a statistically significant improvement in basic number recognition and arithmetic operations, and language learning scores of children by 4.69 percentage points and 5.52 percentage points, respectively. Our results are robust to alternative methods of estimation and application of Lee bounds, thus indicating that well-designed low cost interventions could be a useful supplement for continued learning in the face of sudden shocks in low income countries. With a rise in hybrid format of teaching and learning, such interventions have the capability to cushion the decline in learning levels and provide a safety net in the event of school closures.

We use detailed survey data to study the influence of automation technology on workers’ training participation. We find that workers who are exposed to substitution by automation are 15 percentage points less likely to participate in training than those who are not exposed to it. However, workers who leave occupations that are highly exposed to automation increase their training participation, while those who enter them train consistently less. The automation training gap is particularly pronounced for medium-skilled and male workers, and is largely driven by the lack of ICT training and training for soft skills. Moreover, workers in exposed occupations receive less financial and nonfinancial training support from their firms, and the training gap is almost entirely related to a gap in firm-financed training courses.

Increased education affects market and non-market outcomes. This paper investigates the causal impact of the extension of compulsory education from 6 to 9 years on females’ education, marriage, and fertility outcomes in Thailand. Using data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) and a donut-hole Regression Discontinuity (RD) design, we show that the new law increases lower secondary school completion in girls, leading to decreased probabilities of giving birth in the school-age years (14–17 years). The policy primarily affects the marginal child leading to the postponement of the timing of their fertility to after-school years. We also document heterogeneity and show that the fertility effects are stronger for Muslim women. The policy leads to a consistent drop in the probability of marriage and cumulative births for Muslim women, which sustain beyond the completion of schooling years. The results hold with alternative empirical model specifications and falsification tests.

This paper studies a large-scale educational expansion to assess whether shocks to educational inputs affect the academic achievement of adult education students. I analyze the effects of a Swedish program that rapidly doubled enrollment in adult education, thus straining school resources. The program targeted low-educated, unemployed adults aged 25 and older. Therefore, my analysis focuses on students under age 25 to reduce the risk that changes in the characteristics of the study sample drive my findings. First, I show that students in regions subject to stronger enrollment expansions experienced stronger negative shocks to educational inputs, including teacher credentials, per-pupil expenditure, and peer quality. Second, I show that the stronger negative shocks to these inputs coincided with larger increases in course dropout. Taken together, the two sets of results suggest a causal link between educational inputs and students’ academic progress in adult education.