How does your kindergarten classroom affect your earnings? Evidence from Project Star

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. We then document four sets of experimental impacts. First, students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes. Class size does not have a significant effect on earnings at age 27, but this effect is imprecisely estimated. Second, students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings. Third, an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings. Students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classrooms in grades K–3—as measured by classmates' end-of-class test scores—have higher earnings, college attendance rates, and other outcomes. Finally, the effects of class quality fade out on test scores in later grades, but gains in noncognitive measures persist.     

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.     

Physical appearance and peer effects in academic performance

A large literature examines the role of peer effects in shaping student academic outcomes. This article adds to that literature by introducing a new kind of peer effect – the effect of classmate physical appearance. We document that college students are assigned higher grades when in a classroom with peers who are rated as very attractive. This effect is strongest for female students and appears to be concentrated among the courses of younger and male instructors.     

NONRESIDENT POSTSECONDARY ENROLLMENT GROWTH AND THE OUTCOMES OF IN‐STATE STUDENTS

We study the effects of exposure to nonresident students on the outcomes of undergraduate in‐state students during a period of high nonresident enrollment growth at the University of Missouri‐Columbia. Our models leverage within‐major, cross‐time variation in nonresident exposure for identification. We find no evidence that increased exposure to domestic nonresidents affects in‐state student outcomes and our null results are precisely estimated. We find evidence of modest negative impacts on in‐state students when their exposure to foreign students increases using our preferred specification. However, the identifying variation in exposure to foreign students in our data is limited and this result is not robust in all of our models. (JEL I23, I28, R23)     

Higher Education: Subsidizing Tuition versus Subsidizing Student Loans

We use a simple two‐period equilibrium framework to explore the effects of two different subsidization regimes for higher education on the formation of human capital and on the distribution of incomes. Individuals finance their investments in higher education through income‐contingent education loans as well as subsidies from the government. The subsidy is tax‐financed. We compare an egalitarian subsidy scheme, which reduces by a uniform amount the tuition charged to students, with a student loan subsidy which is proportional to the student's debt service obligation. We show that both types of subsidies reduce the economy‐wide underinvestment in higher education and lead to a more equal income distribution. Furthermore, according to some social welfare criterion, the student loan subsidy regime dominates the tuition subsidy regime if the subsidy level is predetermined, while the converse is true if the subsidy level constitutes a choice variable of the government.     

Does preschool education attendance matter? Evidence from a natural experiment in Spain

The non-compulsory and non-free of charge character of preschool education level before 3 years old in Spain raises some doubts about the exogenous nature of this variable. This article provides new evidence about the impact of preschool years on educational outcomes by exploiting a peculiar Spanish database that supplies information on two classrooms at fourth grade in primary schools where students were randomly allocated into each group. Using an identification strategy that reproduces a natural experiment, we find that belonging to the group with more average years of preschool education significantly and positively impacts on fourth-grade students’ average outcomes. Particularly, an increase of one standard deviation in the difference in years of preschool attendance results in an increase of 0.16 (0.13) standard deviations in the group achievement for mathematics (reading). In view of the importance of preschool education and considering that preschool attendance before 3 years old is related with socio-economic variables, we conclude that extending free preschool education to the 2-year-old age group in Spain should be considered especially for students in families with less favourable backgrounds.     

Learning teaching in the sustainability classroom

This article analyzes the experience of a particular sustainability learning classroom model, examining the classroom composition, structure, positioning, and atmosphere components in an experimental course on the topic of sustainable buildings. The course, called Angles on Green Building, offered as the second in a suite by the Learning City sustainability in higher education collaborative, experimented with content, which concerned the emerging practice and policy of green building, and with form, exploring the most appropriate pedagogical methods for the advancement of sustainability learning and action. The course took as its practical focus the green building industry in Vancouver, Canada, with an initial case study of the new Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), a green building and research facility planned for completion in 2009. This article uses evidence drawn from the instructors, students and visiting professionals in the course, together a diverse and interdisciplinary group from four different higher education institutions in Vancouver. Our findings contain lessons about the careful attention needed for instructors to design, run and implement courses in sustainability topics that enable students from widely different backgrounds and levels of self-directedness to engage with, take responsibility for, and transform their behaviours in favour of sustainability.     

The quality-access tradeoff in decentralizing public services: Evidence from education in the OECD and Spain

Decentralized delivery of public services should enhance constituents’ ability to hold politicians accountable and improve public service outcomes, according to theory. Yet, decentralization has not consistently yielded those improvements. This paper uses a novel cross-country panel from the OECD to show that decentralization generally improves students’ access to education, but in so doing, it creates congestion effects which diminish the overall quality of education that students receive. We argue that this is partially explained by the incentives of sub-central governments upon receiving their new authority. Sub-central governments are more incentivized than national ones to pursue policy improvements that are more visible and quicker to achieve, even when they are costly – like improving access – over improvements that are less visible and take longer to achieve – like increasing quality. Decentralization should therefore result in positive effects on education access and negative on quality, consistent with our findings. We directly test the impact of political incentives on responses to decentralization by exploiting the timing of education decentralization in Spain (1980–99), and variation in the political assertiveness of regional governments, using generalized difference-in-differences and synthetic controls. As predicted, the magnitude of decentralization's effects is greater for assertive regions, which are most incentivized to prioritize high visibility, costly policies.     

Online Teaching Resources: A New Journal Section

Most economics departments use end-of-term student evaluations of teaching, but the relationship between instructors' assessments of their own teaching and their students' assessments is unknown. The background survey for the nationally normed Test of Understanding in College Economics asked students and instructors to evaluate the instructor on five identical items. Using these data, the authors found that for instructors who speak English as their native language, speaking ability and enthusiasm are closely linked to self-ratings of teaching effectiveness. Students also value these traits but care more about instructors' preparation for class. Grading rigor is more important to students of instructors who speak English as a second language.     

Moving to safety and staying in school: The effects of violence on enrollment decisions in Mexico

There is a vast literature documenting negative impacts of crime on human capital accumulation, which has focused on large‐scale armed conflicts affecting both individuals and infrastructure. However, there is much less evidence in contexts where violence is not accompanied by the destruction of infrastructure. To fill this gap, this paper studies the effects of Mexico's War on Drugs (WoD) on individuals’ schooling decisions. Our results show only small effects of violence on total enrollment of children and young adults, in contrast to recent studies which find significant negative effects for some specific age‐by‐gender groups. Our analysis, which aims to assess the overall impacts of the WoD on enrollment decisions and takes advantage of various rounds of administrative data, the population census, and labor force surveys, shows that many families responded to the increase in violence by migrating to less affected municipalities. However, we find that their education decisions have been quite robust as greater violence did not affect their probability of being enrolled in school. In the long term, however, it is still possible that the increase in violence affects human capital accumulation through indirect effects arising in skill acquisition in early childhood and other stages.     

A Remark on Color‐Blind Affirmative Action

Faced with legal challenges to explicitly race‐contingent admissions policies, elite educational institutions have turned to criteria that meet diversity goals without being formally contingent on applicant identity. We establish that under weak conditions that apply generically, such color‐blind affirmative action policies must be nonmonotone, in the sense that within each social group, some students with lower scores are admitted while others with higher scores are denied. In addition, we argue that blind rules can generate greater disparities in mean scores across groups conditional on acceptance than would arise if explicitly race‐contingent policies were permitted.     

Does reducing student support affect scholastic performance? Evidence from a Dutch reform

This paper investigates the impact of student support on performance and time allocation of students in Dutch higher education. In 1996 the maximum duration of grants was reduced by 1 year, and thereby limited to the nominal duration of the study program. This reform could have had substantial financial consequences for students. We evaluate the effects of the reform using a difference-in-differences approach. Our main findings are that after the reform, students early in their study (i) switched less to other programs, (ii) obtained higher grades, while (iii) they did not spend more time studying or working. In addition, for students not older than 20 years when they started their study we find larger effects on all performance variables (switching, percentage of completed courses, graduation in the first year and grade point averages). These findings are consistent with recent evidence on heterogeneous treatment effects for higher ability students.     

Globalization,welfare, and the attitudes toward higher education

In this paper we study how the attitudes toward higher education may affect labor market outcomes in the context of globalization. In particular, we show that different educational attitudes are responsible for differences in the wage differential among countries. Using a matching model with two types of workers and firms, we find that there is a trade-off between the wage differential and the workers’ welfare, namely, that an economy that is less willing to educate itself will display a lower wage differential but will lose in terms of welfare. Moreover, from a policy perspective, we show that the negative effects on welfare due to this disinclination to study can be offset by increased labor market flexibility. All things considered, policy makers ought to keep in mind that both a positive attitude toward higher education and labor market flexibility, can lead to improved overall performance in this increasingly globalized world.     

Performance Payments for Groups: The Case of Carnivore Conservation in Northern Sweden

This paper presents a first empirical assessment of carnivore conservation under a performance payment scheme. In Sweden, reindeer herder villages are paid based on the number of lynx (lynx lynx) and wolverine (gulo gulo) offspring certified on their pastures. The villages decide on the internal payment distribution. It is generally assumed that benefit distribution rules are exogenous. We investigate them as an endogenous decision. The data reveals that villages’ group size has a direct negative effect on conservation outcomes and an indirect positive effect which impacts conservation outcomes through the benefit distribution rule. This result revises the collective action hypothesis on purely negative effects of group size.     

Does grade retention affect students’ achievement? Some evidence from Spain

Grade retention practices are at the forefront of the educational debate. In this article, we measure the effect of grade retention on Spanish students’ achievement by using data from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We find that grade retention has a negative impact on educational outcomes, but we confirm the importance of endogenous selection which makes observed differences between repeaters and nonrepeaters appear about 14% lower than they actually are. The effect on scores of repeating is much smaller (–10% of nonrepeaters’ average) than the counterfactual reduction that nonrepeaters would suffer had they been retained as repeaters (–24% of their average). Furthermore, those who repeated a grade during primary education suffered more than those who repeated a grade in secondary school, although the effect of repeating at both times is, as expected, larger.     

New insights into an old problem – enhancing student learning outcomes in an introductory statistics course

Many students enrolled in first year introductory statistics courses believe learning statistics is a waste of time and fear they will fail. In this study, we explored the impacts on learning outcomes for students in an introductory statistics course by allowing students to arbitrarily choose their own sequence of learning from three key learning activities, namely tutorials, Peer-Assisted Study Sessions and Computer-Managed Learning quizzes. Unlike the old regime where the learning activities followed a strict, rigid sequence, a new regime allowed students to freely choose when, where and how they engaged with the course learning activities. This allowed increased opportunities for students to receive relevant and timely feedback. Using a total of 1187 students enrolled in semester 2 of 2011, 2012 and 2013, data were collected on students’ scores from 7 assessment tasks. Our experimental design ensured as many course features as possible remained constant between the control cohorts (of 2011 and 2012) and the experimental cohort (2013), thereby avoiding potential sample selection problems. The findings showed student learning outcomes in the new regime improved significantly. Interestingly, the effects were found to be greatest in the lower percentile of the score distribution.     

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.     

Economic reforms and human development: evidence from transition economies

Do market-oriented economic reforms result in higher levels of human well-being? This article studies the impact of macro-level institutional and infrastructure reforms on the economic, educational and health dimensions of human well-being among 25 transition economies. We use panel data econometrics based on the LSDVC technique to analyse the effects of market-oriented reforms on the human development index (HDI), as a measure of human well-being, from 1992 to 2007. The results show the complexity of reform impacts in transition countries. They show that institutional and economic reforms led to positive economic effect and significant impacts on other dimensions of human development. We find some positive economic impacts from infrastructure sectors reforms. However, not every reform measure appears to generate positive impacts. Large-scale privatizations show negative effects in health and economic outcomes. The overall results show the importance of the interaction among different reform measures and the combined effect of these on human development.     

过程、结果维度的环境治理与企业财务绩效

目前国内外对于环境治理与企业财务绩效之间关系的研究,结论不一致且不能有效比较,可能是由于没有区分环境治理的不同维度,而高成本的环境治理过程与环境治理结果之间的关系尚不明确。本文基于2009—2017年A股公司年报手工搜集企业环境治理数据,基于权衡理论、自然资源理论和TLGT效应等,检验了环境治理过程和结果与企业财务绩效之间的非线性关系。结果发现:环境治理过程正向影响环境治理结果,而环境治理过程和结果两个维度都与企业财务绩效呈U型关系,较差的环境治理过程和结果均负向影响财务绩效,而较好的环境治理过程和结果均正向影响财务绩效,并且环境治理结果在环境治理过程和企业财务绩效之间发挥非线性中介作用。进一步检验发现,过程维度的环境治理仅通过成本效应路径影响财务绩效,而结果维度的环境治理同时通过成本效应路径和差异化效应路径影响财务绩效。本文基于中国的制度背景将环境治理划分为治理过程和治理结果两个维度,为企业环境治理与财务绩效之间的关系提供了经验证据,并对促进中国企业环境治理提供了一定启示。     

The psychological effects of academic labeling: The case of class tracks

This paper studies the psychological effects of academic labeling. Exploiting the class tracking policy in a Chinese university, we identify the psychological impacts of the academic labels associated with class tracks on the students via a regression discontinuity design in the track assignment rule. We establish causal evidence of positive effects of a better academic label on the academic self-concept and self-expectation of students as well as their academic interest. Our setup ensures that the identified effects of the labels are through the mechanism of student responses, not teachers and schools, suggesting that previous literature focusing on the mechanism of teachers and schools may have neglected an important channel through which academic labels may impact students.