A model of vertically differentiated education

We analyze the allocation of students who differ in their ability to two school types. We assume that there are peer effects (students learn more the better their classmates) and that the expected income after school also depends on the average productivity of peers. We derive the allocation under free school choice and decentralized determination of the academic level; we show that, compared to the social optimum, the level is suboptimal and too many students attend the better school type. A social planner can improve on the allocation under free school choice by prescribing a higher academic level.     

Migrant peers in the classroom: Is the academic performance of local students negatively affected?

This paper provides the first causal estimates of the impact of internal migrant peers on the academic performance of local students in developing countries. By exploiting the random assignment of students to classes within a school, I find that migrant peers have large and negative effects on the academic performance of local students in China and the negative spillover effects are concentrated among male students and among local students in large cities. The investigation of the underlying mechanisms suggests that the negative migrant spillover effects may come from the worsened learning environment or from the adjustment of teachers’ pedagogical practices in response to the migrant composition in the classroom.     

Exploring peer effects in education in Latin America and the Caribbean

This paper assesses peer group influence on academic performance of primary school students in Latin America and the Caribbean. Based on TERCE data set, we investigate peer effects in mathematics, language and sciences tests outcomes among sixth grade students. We apply a social interaction model which allows to identify endogenous and exogenous peer effects while controlling for group-level fixed effects. We explore some heterogeneities related to the school type (private, public or rural). The estimates suggest the existence of endogenous peer effects but their magnitude and significance depend on subject and school type.     

The Effects of Individual and School Factors on University Students' Academic Performance

This article examines the factors that influence university students'academic performance, focusing on the role of student background and school factors. Using data on the first‐year students at the University of Western Australia in 2001, two methodologies are employed. The first is analogous to an input‐output approach, and the second is a random coefficients model. A key finding is that high schools have an impact on the academic performance of students at university beyond students' own background characteristics. Both immersion and reinforcement effects are identified.     

New Evidence on the Effects of the Shortened School Duration in the German States: An Evaluation of Post‐secondary Education Decisions

Most German states have recently reduced the duration of university preparatory schooling from 13 to 12 years without changing the graduation requirements. We use nationwide data on high school graduates and the different timing of reform introduction in the federal states to identify the effects on post‐secondary education decisions and to evaluate potential effect mechanisms. The results show that university enrolment of female students decreased in the first year after graduation in all analyzed states, whereas participation in voluntary service or staying abroad increased. Furthermore, students from non‐academic families are more affected than students from an academic family background.     

Stuck in the middle: Impacts of grade configuration in public schools

We examine the implications of separating students of different grade levels across schools for the purposes of educational production. Specifically, we find that moving students from elementary to middle school in 6th or 7th grade causes significant drops in academic achievement. These effects are large (about 0.15 standard deviations), present for both math and English, and persist through grade 8, the last year for which we have achievement data. The effects are similar for boys and girls, but stronger for students with low levels of initial achievement. We instrument for middle school attendance using the grade range of the school students attended in grade 3, and employ specifications that control for student fixed effects. This leaves only one potential source of bias–correlation between grade range of a student's grade 3 school and unobservable characteristics that cause decreases in achievement precisely when students are due to switch schools–which we view as highly unlikely. We find little evidence that placing public school students into middle schools during adolescence is cost-effective.     

Identifying the effects of bullying victimization on schooling

I estimate whether bullying leads to worse academic outcomes for bullied students, exploiting state-year differences in anti-bullying laws, and within-law heterogeneity that provide variation in the probability of bullying victimization. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, I show that bullying increases the probability of skipping classes and dropping out of high school, and it decreases grade point average by up to 5%. Heterogeneity analysis shows that physical bullying imposes a greater burden on males, though females are relatively more sensitive to nonphysical bullying. These negative effects persist into adulthood as high school bullying decreases college performance and college graduation.     

Can information and counseling help students from poor rural areas go to high school? Evidence from China

Recent studies have shown that only about two-thirds of the students from poor, rural areas in China finish junior high school and enter high school. One factor that may be behind the low rates of high school attendance is that students may be misinformed about the returns to schooling or lack career planning skills. We therefore conduct a cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) using a sample of 131 junior high schools and more than 12,000 students to test the effects of providing information on returns or career planning skills on student dropout, academic achievement and plans to go to high school. Contrary to previous studies, we find that information does not have significant effects on student outcomes. Unlike information, counseling does have an effect. However, the effect is somewhat surprising. Our findings suggest that counseling increases dropouts and seems to lower academic achievement. In our analysis of the causal chain, we conclude that financial constraints and the poor quality of education in junior high schools in poor, rural areas (the venue of the study) may be contributing to the absence of positive impacts on student outcomes from information and counseling. The negative effects of counseling on dropout may also be due to the high and growing wages for unskilled labor (high opportunity costs) in China’s transitioning economy. It is possible that when our counseling curriculum informed the students about the reality of how difficult were the requirements for entering academic high school, it may have induced them to revise their benefit-cost calculations and come to the realization that they are better off dropping out and/or working less hard in school.     

Race-based affirmative action for higher education in Brazil: Impact assessment on performance,time, and delay in completion*

This paper aims to investigate the impact of race-based affirmative action for higher education in Brazil, through the effects of applying under a quota versus the open system for Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, on academic performance, time, and delay in completion. The data used were obtained by the survey of the National Student Performance Examination (Enade) from 2016 to 2018. Through the propensity score matching methodologies, entropy balancing, empirical quantile regression strategy, and Lewbel method, a small statistically significant negative impact on students' performance was observed. Significant effects on time and delay in completion were not found in most of the estimators used. We also observed that older students and students who are male, lack, or Indigenous are more likely to choose to enter via racial quotas, while students who live with their parents or spouse and students who have some source of income are less likely to participate in the policy.     

Drinking and academic performance in high school

I investigate the extent to which negative alcohol use coefficients in Grade Point Average regressions reflect unobserved heterogeneity rather than direct effects of drinking, using 2001 and 2003 Youth Risk Behaviour Survey data on high school students. Results illustrate that omitted factors are quite important. Drinking coefficient magnitudes fall substantially in regressions that control for risk and time preference, mental health, self-esteem and consumption of other addictive substances. Moreover, the impact of binge drinking is negligible for students who are less risk averse, heavily discount the future or use other drugs. However, effects that remain significant after accounting for unobserved heterogeneity and are relatively large for risk averse, future-oriented and drug-free students suggest that binge drinking might slightly worsen academic performance. Consistent with this, the relationship between grades and drinking without binging is small and insignificant on the extensive margin and positive on the intensive margin.     

Quasi-Experimental Evidence of Peer Effects in First-Year Economics Courses at a Chinese University

The authors of this article implement a quasi-experimental strategy to estimate peer effects in economic education by exploiting the institutional setting in a large public university in China, where roommates are randomly assigned conditional on a student's major and province of origin. They found significant impacts of peer academic quality, measured as roommates’ average scores on the national College Entrance Exam, on first-year economics students’ scores in first-year microeconomics, macroeconomics, and accounting courses. They also found nonlinearity in peer effects: Roommates’ academic ability has significant effects for academically weak students but not for academically strong students.     

Academic Achievement and Part-Time Employment of High School Students

Two-stage least squares estimation is used to show that modest levels of part-time employment by high school students may not interfere with student academic performance.     

基础教育中的同伴效应估计

对基础教育阶段不良同伴带来的短期和中长期效应的评估已经成为劳动经济学的热点话题.文章根据最新的2014年中国教育追踪调查( China Education Panel Survey, CEPS)微观数据,考察了不良同伴对学生标准化考试成绩的影响.为了克服反射(reflection)和自选择问题带来的估计偏误,文章依据班级上不良学生的比例而非传统文献采用的同伴成绩来刻画学生所处的班级环境,并控制了组群的自然特征.在控制学生个体特征和家庭因素后发现,学生所在班级中存在不良同伴,会对学生自身的学习成绩造成显著的负面影响,这一作用在高年级(初三)表现得尤为明显.班级不良同伴比例提高10%会带来平均成绩下降约2分.分样本的回归显示,男性学生、家庭经济状况不佳的学生和住校生的学习成绩对班级不良同伴的反应更敏感.而学校类型的异质性分析则表明,同伴效应在办学情况较差的学校和乡镇/农村学校表现得更明显.进一步的分位数回归结果表明,不良同伴产生的负面效应对成绩较差的学生影响更大.文章的研究发现有利于丰富学界对教育生产函数的认识,也为今后的教育政策提供有益参考.     

Part-time work, school success and school leaving

In this paper, we analyse part-time employment of teenagers still in full-time education, their academic performance, and their school leaving decisions. Our estimation strategy takes account of the possible interdependencies of these events and distinguishes between two alternative states to full time education: entering the labour force full time and going on to further training. We model this decision in a flexible way. Our analysis is based on data from the UK National Child Development Study, which has an unusually rich set of variables on school and parental characteristics. Our main finding is that working part time while in full-time education has only small adverse effects on exam performance for females, and no effects for males. The effect of part-time work on the decision to stay on at school is also negative, but small, and marginally significant for males, but not for females. Other important determinants of exam success as well as the continuation decision are parental ambitions about the child’s future academic career.     

Peer effects in medical school

Using data on the universe of students who graduated from US medical schools between 1996 and 1998, we examine whether the abilities and specialty preferences of a medical school class affect a student's academic achievement in medical school and his choice of specialty. We mitigate the selection problem by including school-specific fixed effects, and show that this method yields an upper bound on peer effects for our data. We estimate positive peer effects that disappear when school-specific fixed effects are added to control for the endogeneity of a peer group. We find no evidence that peer effects are stronger for blacks, that peer groups are formed along racial lines, or that students with relatively low ability benefit more from their peers than students with relatively high-ability. However, we do find some evidence that peer groups form along gender lines.     

University attendance and academic performance: Encouraging student engagement

Absenteeism in higher education has motivated the investigation of its effect on academic performance. This paper examines the effect of implementing an incentive scheme on seminar PPA (prior preparation and attendance) and performance focusing on a cohort of international postgraduate students over two academic years in two conversion economics (quantitative and non-quantitative) modules at a Scottish business school. The results show that the scheme leads to an increase in the class PPA in both modules and in the probability of passing the quantitative module, however academic performance is affected at a lesser extent.     

Student employment and academic performance: an empirical exploration of the primary orientation theory

This study empirically assesses the thesis that student employment only hurts academic performance for students with a primary orientation towards work (versus school). To this end, we analyse unique data on tertiary education students’ intensity of and motivation for student employment by means of a state-of-the art moderation model. We find, indeed, only a negative association between hours of student work and the percentage of courses passed for work-oriented students. This finding may explain the contradictory results in the literature neglecting this factor.     

How Would One Extra Year of High School Affect Academic Performance in University? Evidence from an Educational Policy Change

This paper uses a unique policy change in Ontario, Canada, to provide direct evidence on how reducing the length of high school would impact student performance in university. After a five‐year educational program was eliminated from Ontario high schools and replaced with a four‐year program, two graduating cohorts with different amounts of high school education simultaneously entered university. The results demonstrate that students who receive one less year of high school education perform significantly worse than their counterparts in all subjects, even after the age difference between the cohorts is accounted for.     

中国高等特殊教育生师比问题的研究

高等特殊教育是高等教育的一部分,其教育对象为健全人和残疾人。合理的生师比是该教育体系的成功实施的重要因素。对健全人实施的特殊教育师资培养项目的生师比可以参照国家规定的普通高校的生师比,对残疾人实施的高等教育项目的生师比目前没有国家标准,是中国残疾人高等教育教师配备的一个空白。试图通过对现有各级各类学校的现有政策的研究分析,提出适合残疾人高等教育的生师比。     

WASTIN’ AWAY IN MARGARITAVILLE? NEW EVIDENCE ON THE ACADEMIC EFFECTS OF TEENAGE BINGE DRINKING

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study examines the relationship between teenage binge drinking and three measures of academic performance: grade point average, out-of-school suspensions, and unexcused absences from school. While ordinary least square estimates show that binge drinking is associated with diminished academic performance, individual fixed-effects estimates suggest that much of this relationship can be explained by unmeasured heterogeneity. After controlling for individual fixed effects and for changes in drug use, psychological well-being, and time preference, binge drinking has a much smaller and often statistically insignificant effect on school performance. ( JEL I10, I21, I18)