Economics of Education Review最新文献

I examine productivity and selection effects of K-12 teacher tenure by leveraging variation from New Jersey’s TEACHNJ Act, which extended the pretenure period. Using a difference-in-differences design, I evaluate the productivity effects of tenure by comparing fourth-year tenured and pretenured teachers. I find math value-added declines but English language arts value-added and ratings remain unchanged. Focusing on labor market effects, I compare teachers hired before and after TEACHNJ within the same district and experience level. TEACHNJ disproportionately increased male and Black teacher turnover, as the policy was tied to subjective evaluation criteria. TEACHNJ did not impact the quality of the teacher labor market as measured by value-added, though higher rated teachers often filled new vacancies. This matches principal–agent models where schools only use ratings to guide personnel decisions. Overall, tenure generates small declines in math value-added, while reforms tied to subjective evaluations disproportionately increase male and Black teacher turnover.

We use data from a randomized early childhood education program to estimate the production technology of early life skills. Estimates indicate that, for more disadvantaged children, parental investment is a more effective input for producing skills than childcare. The reverse is true for the more advantaged. The program increases childcare for all children; it increases parental investment for the more disadvantaged. Therefore, our results indicate that programs stimulating parental investment promote mobility across the distribution of early life skills. We thus micro-found recent studies showing that successful early childhood education programs foster parental investment on top of offering high-quality childcare.

This paper evaluates the impact of a reform which replaced universal basic grants by income-contingent loans on enrolment in Dutch higher education using administrative data of ten complete student cohorts. Estimates of differences between cohorts show no negative effect of the policy on enrolment. Moreover, difference-in-differences estimates exploiting variation in eligibility for supplementary grants show no negative effect on enrolment. These findings suggest that a system of income-contingent loans can facilitate an increase of private contributions without harming access to higher education.

In rural West Africa, the rate of out-of-school children is high and delayed entry to primary school is common, particularly for girls. Using the randomized roll-out of a large-scale unconditional cash transfer program in Mali, we examine its impact on child schooling by age and sex. The program leads to significant improvements in schooling outcomes for girls, but not boys. Improvements are especially salient among younger (ages 6–9) and older (ages 15–18) girls. Complementary analysis reveals that the program reduces the time younger girls spend in agricultural work at home and the time older girls spend in domestic work as well as self-employment. Households in the program also spend more on education for older girls in terms of school fees, materials, and transport.

In this study, we examine the impact of a student's household socioeconomic status (SES) rank within a class on two critical factors affecting the accumulation of human capital: school bullying victimization and school absence. We identify the effect from the variation of a within-class SES rank of students assigned to different schools and classes, controlling the absolute level of SES and class fixed effects. Using the data from middle-school students in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), we find that, although the absolute level of SES is negatively associated with these incidences, students with a high SES rank within a class are more likely to be the victims of school bullying and to be absent from school. We confirm that these results are robust when the sample is restricted to schools where students' assignment to classes is as good as random.

We investigate the impact of the 2005 UK Disability Discrimination Act on the educational and employment outcomes for older children with disabilities, using data from the UK Labour Force Surveys. The Act established new legal requirements on employers and qualification awarding bodies to accommodate individuals with disabilities. Furthermore, prior to 2013 children in England and Wales could leave education at age 16, providing a unique opportunity to analyse the 2005 Act's influence on their educational and employment outcomes. Compared to children without disabilities, we found the 2005 Act reduced the likelihood of continuing in education and increased the likelihood of entering the labour market (employed or unemployed) for children meeting both the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act definition of disability and who were reported as work-limited. We also ‘decompose’ average outcomes between children's groups, identifying effects attributable to observable characteristics, discrimination, and unobservable health-related productivity gaps.

Early-life environments can have long-lasting effects on individuals’ later life courses. Interestingly, research on the effects of school reforms has hardly adopted this perspective. Therefore, we investigate a staggered school reform that reduced the number of school years and increased weekly instructional time for secondary school students in most German federal states. We analyze this quasi-experiment in a difference-in-differences framework using nationally representative large-scale survey data on 69,513 students who attended university between 1998 and 2016. Using both TWFE and weighted-group ATT estimators, we find negative effects of reform exposure on hours spent attending classes and on self-study. Moreover, reform exposure increased the time gap between school completion and higher education entry. Our results support the view that research should examine unintended long-term effects of school reforms on individual life courses.

Early childhood education programs have been found to effectively promote children's social and cognitive development. However, the health impact of these programs is less understood. Using a quasi-experiment of the first universal child care reform in China from 2010, this paper aims to identify whether the preschool reform produces any short-term effects on health-related outcomes of preschoolers (3-6 years old). Specifically, this reform expands access to affordable preschools that provide full-day center-based education, with school meals and essential health services on campus. I exploit the variation in the number of newly established preschools across provinces and implement difference-in-differences and triple-difference strategies. Results confirm the effectiveness of this reform by showing a strong and positive impact on preschool attendance. This paper then documents the benefits to alleviating underweight among preschoolers. Estimates show a larger effect in rural areas, suggesting that the reform narrows rural-urban disparities in education access and undernutrition prevention. I also explore the impact on caregivers’ health consciousness and find improved health-seeking behavior when children get sick.

We estimate associations between foundational cognitive skills (inhibitory control, working memory, long-term memory, and implicit learning) measured at age 12 and educational outcomes measured at ages 15 and 19–20 in Ethiopia and Peru, using the Young Lives data. The estimates adjust for rich sets of controls and include measurements of children's baseline abilities. For a subset of the outcomes, we exploit within-household variation. Working memory and long-term memory are consistently and positively associated with subsequent domain-specific cognitive achievement tests (measuring specifically numeracy, vocabulary and literacy achievement) in both countries, university enrolment in Peru (long-term memory) and lower secondary-school completion in Ethiopia (working memory). Inhibitory control predicts subsequent math-test scores in both countries, grade attainment (Ethiopia), and university enrolment (Peru). Value-added estimates show that these skills play roles during adolescence, with the memory-related skills predicting higher domain-specific test scores (Peru and Ethiopia) and grade attainment (Ethiopia), while inhibitory control has associations with math (both countries). These results provide additional evidence to justify the importance of promoting investments in cognitive skills throughout childhood and adolescence, and elucidate how such investments impact educational achievements.

This paper is concerned with identifying whether selective high schools may have an effect on students’ post-secondary trajectories and labor market prospects. It uses data from Tunisia, a country in which unemployment rates for post-secondary graduates are higher than for non-graduates, particularly for women—although there is significant variation across types of diplomas and fields of study. Our main finding is that admission to an elite high school raises students’ probability to eventually get assigned to a university program associated with a lower post-graduation unemployment rate. This is particularly true for women. Focusing then on students who would have applied to post-secondary programs regardless of admission to an elite high school, we show that this effect is the result of an increase in the competitiveness of their applications rather than of a change in their probability to apply to programs lower post-graduation unemployment rate.