Why Young Boys Stumble: Early Tracking,Age and Gender Bias in the German School System

Abstract. After primary school, German pupils are given a secondary school track recommendation. This recommendation and the actual track choice are strongly associated with later life outcomes. Using data from the German PISA 2000 extension study, we analyze the effect of relative age on track recommendations and actual choice. Younger pupils and boys are less likely to be recommended to and enrolled in the academic track (Gymnasium), the most attractive track in terms of later life outcomes. Flexible enrollment and grade retention partly offset these effects. We find no convincing evidence that postponing the recommendation by lengthening primary school by 2 years reduces the age or gender bias.     

School Choice and Segregation: Evidence from an Admission Reform*

We evaluate the effects of school choice on segregation using data from an admission reform in the Stockholm upper secondary schools. Before 2000, the students were assigned to their nearest school, but from the fall of 2000, the students can apply to any school within Stockholm and admission decisions are solely based on grades. As expected, the new admission policy increased segregation by ability. However, segregation by family background, and especially segregation between immigrants and natives, also increased significantly. The increase in segregation by family background can be explained by ability sorting, but the increase in ethnic segregation can not.     

Gender Differences in Educational Attainment: Evidence on the Role of Tracking from a Finnish Quasi‐experiment

In this paper we study the relationship between the timing of tracking of pupils into vocational and academic secondary education and gender differences in educational attainment and income. It is argued that in a comprehensive system, where students are tracked into vocational and academic schools relatively late (age 15–16), girls are more likely to choose the academic track than boys. We exploit the Finnish comprehensive school reform of the 1970s to analyse this hypothesis. This changed the Finnish school system from a selective to a comprehensive structure and postponed tracking from the age of 10–11 to 15–16. Since the reform was not implemented at the same time throughout the country, we can observe members of the same cohorts under both systems. The shift to a comprehensive system was found to increase gender differences in the probability of choosing an academic secondary education and of continuing onto academic tertiary education. Moreover, the reform decreased the gender wage gap in adult income by four percentage points.     

Estimating the benefit of high school for university‐bound students: evidence of subject‐specific human capital accumulation

Numerous studies suggest that the value of high school education is large for potential dropouts, yet we know much less about the benefits for students who will go on to post‐secondary education. To help fill this gap I measure, using a recent Ontario high school reform, the value‐added (in terms of university grades) of an extra year of high‐school mathematics for university‐bound students. The estimated benefit is small for these students: 2.3 points on a 100‐point scale. This evidence helps to explain why the literature has found only modest effects of taking more mathematics in high school on wages.     

Information Shocks and the Dynamics of the Housing Market*

In this paper, we analyze housing‐market reactions to the release of previously unpublished information on school quality. Using high‐quality housing data, which precisely bracket the timing of the information shock, we investigate housing‐price dynamics within school‐catchment areas. We find a robust short‐term housing‐market reaction to the publication of school‐quality indicators, suggesting that this information was new to the households, and that households are willing to pay for better schools. The publication effect does not seem to be permanent as prices revert to pre‐publication levels after two to three months.     

What determines post-compulsory academic studies? Evidence from the longitudinal survey of young people in England

We show that educational attainments at the end of the compulsory schooling stage are powerful predictors for post-compulsory educational choices in England. In particular, the single academic success indicator of achieving the Government’s gold standard in GCSE is able to predict virtually all the observed incidences of post-compulsory studies for academic qualifications. Notwithstanding, Two-Stage Least Squares estimation which exploits variations in school starting age induced by school entry rules suggests that the least-squares effect of achieving the gold standard in GCSEs on studying for academic qualifications is due to ability bias or reverse causation.     

Reforms to Schooling in the UK: A Review of Some Major Reforms and their Evaluation

Abstract. We aim to give a brief overview of some important reforms to the school system in the UK and existing evidence on their consequences. These reforms include a change in the type of secondary school open to pupils – from a selective to comprehensive system; a change in the examination system; quasi-market reforms; area-based initiatives; reforms to the content and structure of teaching; payments to encourage the pursuit of education beyond compulsory schooling.     

Does Raising the Principal's Wage Improve the School's Outcomes? Quasi‐experimental Evidence from an Unusual Policy Experiment in Israel

This paper reports estimates of the causal effects of a 50 percent increase in the salary of headmasters of high schools in Israel. The results suggest that the program led to significant improvements in twelfth‐grade students' academic achievements. However, the effect was relatively modest, comprising increases of about 5–10 percent in the school mean matriculation rate, average score and number of subjects and credit units taken in matriculation programs. Based on these results and the lack of evidence regarding the effect of increasing teachers' salary, it seems that priority should be given to paying higher wages to school principals.     

Transforming Malaysia's Higher Education: Policies and Progress

Malaysia's higher education sector has a substantial number and diverse types of public and private providers, which have contributed toward improving access. Over time, with improved access, there are increasing policy efforts directed toward improving the quality of higher education to meet the desired human capital needed for advancing economic development. This paper assesses three key areas that have been undertaken to improve the quality of higher education, their measurements, achievements, outstanding challenges, and ensuing implications on future policy directions. The key performance indicators used for monitoring quality improvements show that some targets have been achieved. A review of the approach used to measure performance and a consolidation of the sector are needed for further quality improvement.     

Sorting,school performance and quality: Evidence from China

School choice reforms give talented students the option to sort out of low-performing schools but often leave disadvantaged students behind. This study shows how a Chinese city was successful in helping its low-performing schools to catch up by encouraging talented students to sort into these schools. The city identified eleven low-performing middle schools and guaranteed elite high school admission to their top ten-percent graduates. This study documents that the policy improved school performance by 0.19-0.26 standard deviations. Using data on lottery middle school assignment, I further test for potential mechanisms, including strategic sorting and improvement in school value-added.     

Resources and Student Achievement—Evidence from a Swedish Policy Reform*

A policy change is used to estimate the effect of teacher density on student performance. We find that an increase in teacher density has a positive effect on student achievement. The baseline estimate—obtained by using the grade‐point average as the outcome variable—implies that resource increases corresponding to the class‐size reduction in the STAR experiment (a reduction of seven students) improves performance by 2.6 percentile ranks (or 0.08 standard deviations). When we used test‐score data for men, potentially a more objective measure of student performance, the effect of resources appears to be twice as large.     

Enrollment expansion and quality differentiation across higher education systems

While the impact of a higher college wage premium on enrollment expansion is well understood, the link between university quality differentiation and student outcomes in this context has received less attention. To address this issue, we model different higher education systems. Academic standards decline in a differentiated, U.S.-type education system - as a low-quality segment emerges - but also in a system in which a uniform standard is politically determined, as in most European countries, since the interests of marginal students matter for the chosen standard. In the absence of full information about graduates' skills, employers put more weight on university reputation than on individual human capital signal. Thus, higher differentiation can decrease the effort and skill of medium-ability students. Obtaining the preferred academic standard is particularly important for high-and low-ability students, hence the trend toward more unequal societies raises political support for strongly differentiated systems.     

Tuition Fees and the Dual Income Tax: The Optimality of the Nordic Income Tax System Reconsidered

Abstract. We examine the optimal tax and education policy in the case of a dual income tax. Incorporating an educational sector and endogenous capital taxation, we show that the results in Nielsen and Sørensen's study are vulnerable with respect to assumptions on the elasticity of unskilled labor supply. Tax progressivity results residually, whereas educational policy guarantees an optimal tax wedge on, but not necessarily efficiency in, educational investment. The less elastic are the unobservable educational investment and skilled labor (the latter relative to unskilled labor supply), and the more educational policy cares about the skilled labor supply, the more progressive the tax system will be. Education will be subsidized on a net basis if the complementarity effect on the skilled labor supply is strong and important; however, there is also an offsetting substitutability effect of the unskilled labor supply at play.     

Do School Subsidies Promote Human Capital Investment among the Poor?*

We investigate the hypothesis that conditioning transfers to poor families on school attendance leads to a reallocation of household resources which enhances the human capital of the next generation, via the effect of the conditionality on the shadow price of human capital and (possibly) via the effect of the transfers on household bargaining. We introduce a model to study the effects of conditional transfers on intra‐household allocations, and provide suggestive evidence of the importance of price effects using data from a conditional transfer program in Mexico.     

Higher Education in the United States: Laissez-Faire,Differentiation, and Research

The U.S. higher education system stands out in three dimensions. First, it has the highest number of leading research universities. Second, it displays significant differentiation: multiple types of institutions offer services that differ in cost, prestige, etc. Third, it has a laissez-faire/free-market orientation: private and public entities are free to open schools and compete; essentially all schools enjoy substantial autonomy. This paper makes the case that these features are systematically related. The development of the American higher education market—which allowed market forces to operate and lacked centralized planning—contributed to the emergence of differentiation and a set of leading research universities.     

The Happiness of Young Australians: Empirical Evidence on the Role of Labour Market Experience

Data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth are used to investigate factors that influence young Australians' self-reported levels of 'happiness' during the school-to-work transition, focusing on the role of labour market experience. Panel logit models are fitted to control for individual effects. Fixed individual personality traits and marital status strongly influence reported happiness. There is evidence of declining well-being with duration of unemployment and of the importance of job quality, rather than just having a job. The validity of Clark and Oswald's (1994) assertion that empirical findings from happiness research show that unemployment is involuntary is questioned.     

School competition and the quality of education: introducing market incentives into public services

Existing research indicates that introducing school choice and competition into the public education system might improve the quality of schooling. Yet, up to date most empirical work on school choice has concentrated on developed countries and it is far from obvious that the experience of these countries can be of any guidance for transition economies. Our work intends to fill this gap. We concentrate on the case of Poland. We argue that in Poland, school choice and competition tends to improve average education quality and efficiency of public education expenditure.     

Evaluation of the Reggio approach to early education

We evaluate the Reggio Approach using non-experimental data on individuals from the cities of Reggio Emilia, Parma and Padova belonging to one of five age cohorts: ages 50, 40, 30, 18, and 6 as of 2012. The treated were exposed to municipally offered infant-toddler (ages 0–3) and preschool (ages 3–6) programs in Reggio Emilia. The control group either did not receive formal childcare or were exposed to programs offered by municipal systems (outside of Reggio Emilia), or by state or religious systems (in all three cities). We exploit the city-cohort structure of the data to estimate treatment effects using three strategies: difference-in-differences, matching, and matched-difference-in-differences. Most positive and significant effects are generated from comparisons of the treated with individuals who did not receive formal childcare. Relative to not receiving formal care, the Reggio Approach significantly boosts outcomes related to employment, socio-emotional skills, high school graduation, participation in elections, and obesity. Comparisons with individuals exposed to alternative forms of childcare do not yield strong patterns of positive and significant effects. This suggests that differences between the Reggio Approach and other alternatives are not sufficiently large to result in significant differences in outcomes. This interpretation is supported by a survey we conduct, which documents increasing similarities in the administrative and pedagogical practices of childcare systems in the three cities over time.