Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Economics of education'

This dissertation consists of three essays in Economics of Education and Economic History. The first essay “Disentangling the Effects of Education on Health: A Sibling-pair Analysis” examines the causal effect of education on long-run physical health, using survey data on matched siblings. The second chapter “Good Bye Chiang Kai-shek? The Long-Lasting Effects of Education under the Authoritarian Regime in Taiwan” analyzes whether experiencing an authoritarian regime at an early age have long-lasting effects on people’s political outcomes, such as political attitudes, voting behavior, and national identity? The third chapter “Quantity-Quality Trade-off in Northeast China during the Qing Dynasty” paints a detailed picture of how, in the absence of an industrialization process, the regional popularization of education shaped the trade-off between human capital and fertility decisions in Northeast China during the Qing Dynasty.

This thesis examines three different aspects of education policy to ascertain their effects on individual outcomes, both in the classroom and in the labour market. The goal is to provide new empirical evidence using robust identification strategies that can inform better policy. The first chapter looks at the role of pre-primary education in Germany using the German Socio-Economic Panel data set (GSOEP) to determine if attending an early education programme for longer increases the probability of attending a higher-level secondary school at age fourteen. I employ family fixed effects estimation and quasi-experimental analysis to control for selection. The results of the family fixed effects estimation show a small and negative impact of attending early education for more years. In the quasi-experimental analysis, based upon a federal law change in 1996, I find no impact of more years of early education on later schooling outcomes. In the second chapter of this thesis, I again use the GSOEP to examine the recent German reform to extend the length of the primary school day. I exploit the quasi-experimental roll-out of reform to assign treatment to women and look at whether increasing school hours increases the likelihood that mothers enter into employment or extend their hours if already working. I find that the policy has an effect at the extensive margin, drawing more women into the labour market, but that there is no significant impact of the policy at the intensive margin. In the final chapter I turn my attention to how peers' non-cognitive traits impact an individual's learning outcomes. Using an educational panel from Flanders, Belgium, I use the linear-in- means model of peer effects as well as several non-linear models to see how peers' personalities in a classroom affect Dutch and math scores. The results show that having more conscientious peers on average positively impacts Dutch and math scores, but that a greater dispersion of conscientiousness hurts Dutch outcomes. I also find that having more extroverted peers on average hurts math performance.

Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Economics
William F. Blankenau
The first essay examines the allocation of education spending. Human capital investment in early childhood can lead to large and persistent gains. Beyond this window of opportunity, human capital accumulation is more costly. Despite this, government education spending is allocated disproportionately toward late childhood and young adulthood. The consequences of a reallocation are examined using an overlapping generations model with private and public spending on early and late childhood education. Taking as given the higher returns to early investment, the model shows the current allocation may nonetheless be appropriate. With a homogeneous population, this can hold for moderate levels of government spending. With heterogeneity, this can hold for middle income workers. Lower income workers, by contrast, may benefit from a reallocation. The second essay provides a detailed review of the human capital proxies used in growth regressions. Economic theory and intuition tells us that human capital is important for economic growth, and now most empirical growth studies include a human capital component. Human capital is a complex concept that is difficult to quantify in a single measure. A number of proxies have been proposed, with most focusing on an aspect of education. The consensus is that human capital is poorly proxied. For each of the most commonly used measures, I give a description, discuss trends, summarize the literature and results, compare advantages and disadvantages, and list data sets. This review will serve as a useful reference for any researcher including human capital in a growth regression. The final essay explores the importance of a variety of human capital measures for growth using the Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) approach proposed by Sala-i-Martin, Doppelhofer, and Miller (2004). BACE combines standard Bayesian methods with the classical approach to address the problem of model uncertainty. A new data set is constructed that includes 35 human capital variables. The analysis shows that multiple human capital measures are robustly significant for growth. Some of these variables are IQ scores, the duration of primary and secondary education, average years of primary education, average years of female higher education, and higher education enrollment.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2010.
Title from first page of PDF file (viewed June 10, 2010). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This Ph.D. thesis consists of three essays on Labour Economics and the Economics of Education, having the goal of contributing to the scientific discussion and shed new light on a number of empirical questions. The remaining of the chapter presents a general motivation for the study, together with the main findings and policy implications, which are fully developed throughout the thesis. Motivation There is an ongoing debate in Economics of Education on the merits and drawbacks of school choice as opposed to a community-based model, where schools only serve the local neighbourhood. Advocates of school choice base their arguments on the economic theory of market efficiency. First, a more market oriented education system should improve the match between pupils and schools. In this sense, allowing families to select schools on the basis of their preferences and teaching needs should result in an improvement in the average academic achievement. Moreover, increased choice should help breaking the link between residential and school segregation induced by a community-based model, with wealthier families living in more affluent neighbourhoods also attending the best schools. The benefits of choice should be even more pronounced for low income children who are typically segregated in poor neighbourhoods served by low quality schools (Gibbons et al., 2008). Second, school choice is believed to have beneficial effects also on school performance. Indeed, community-based schools operate in an almost monopolistic market, implying little incentives to innovate and improve teaching performance. In a world 1 Introduction where parents have strong preferences for quality, a choice based model would increase competition among schools with the ultimate result of boosting performance (Hastings et al., 2005; Burgess et al., 2009; Gibbons and Silva, 2011). On the other hand, scholars in favour of a community-school model claim that teachers are more likely to perform well in a more stable environment with relatively low turnover. Moreover, greater choice would replace the link between neighbourhood and school segregation with sorting across schools on the basis of family background characteristics. In this sense, they advocate that it would be more desirable to stick to a community-based model and improve the performance of lower quality schools via redistribution of resources. The first two chapters of this thesis aim at shading additional light on the advantages and disadvantages of school choice models. Specifically, I explore the effects of a programme introduced in the UK, which aimed at increasing choice among low income families, on both students' choices and school behaviour. The third chapter addresses a different empirical question. Typically, when workers are rewarded on the basis of team effort the possibility arises that individuals free ride. However, past literature emphasised the importance of externalities when groups of agents are concerned. Specifically, group effects such as social pressure or shame may be strong enough to completely offset free riding (Kandel and Lazear, 1992; Mas and Moretti, 2009). Using Italian social security data on private sector employees, the last chapter contributes to the existing literature by exploring externalities in workers' shirking, which I recover from information on sick leave episodes.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The over-arching concern of the three parts of the dissertation is how economics can and should influence education policymaking, the emphasis on the economics side being models of country development and the contribution made by human capital. Part I begins with a review of economic growth theory. How educational performance and country development have been measured is then discussed, with considerable attention going towards conceptual and measurement complexities associated with the latter. An approach is presented for expanding the number of countries whose educational quality can be compared, by expanding the number of linkable testing programmes. This approach, which above all allows for the inclusion of more African and Latin American countries, is one of the key contributions made by the dissertation to the existing body of knowledge. Three existing empirical growth models are examined, including work by Hanushek and Woessman on the relationship between educational quality and income. Part I ends with a discussion on how the economics literature can best be packaged to influence education policymaking. A ‘growth simulator’ tool in Excel for informing the policy discourse is presented. The production of this tool includes establishing empirically a feasible improvement trajectory for educational quality that policymakers can use and some analysis of how linguistic fractionalisation in a country evolves over time. This tool can be considered a further key output of the dissertation. A basic model for relating educational quality, via income growth, to teacher pay, is presented. Part II offers an analysis of UNESCO country-level data on enrolment and spending going back to 1970, with a view to establishing historical patterns that can inform education planners, particularly those in developing countries, on how budgets and enrolment expansion should be distributed across the levels of the education system. The analysis presented in Part II represents a novel way of using existing countrylevel data and can be seen as an important step towards filling a gap experienced by education policymakers, namely the paucity of empirical evidence that can guide decisions around the prioritisation of education levels. Part II moreover arrives at a few empirical findings, including the finding that enrolment and spending patterns have been systematically different in countries with faster economic growth and the finding that historical per student spending at the secondary level appears to play a larger role in development than was previously thought. Part III contrasts the available economic advice for education policymakers with what policymakers actually appear to believe in. The focus falls, in particular, on four developing countries: South Africa, Brazil, Chile and China. A few areas where economists could explore the data to a greater degree or communicate available findings differently, in the interests of better education policies, are identified. Part III partly serves as a demonstration of how comparisons between education systems can be better oriented towards providing advice to education policymakers on questions relating to efficiency and equity.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die oorkoepelende fokus van die drie gedeeltes van die verhandeling is hoe die studie van ekonomie beleid in die onderwyssektor kan en moet beïnvloed. Veral belangrik is modelle van die ekonomiese groei van lande en die rol van menslike kapitaal in hierdie modelle. Die eerste gedeelte van die verhandeling bied oorsig van die teorie rakende ekonomiese groei. Hoe onderwysprestasie en nasionale ontwikkeling gemeet word, word dan bespreek, met sterk fokus op die konseptuele en tegniese kompleksiteit van laasgenoemde. Metode word aangebied waardeur meer lande se onderwysgehalte vergelyk kan word, deur middel van die koppeling van data van groter aantal toetsprogramme. Hierdie metode, wat veral die insluiting van meer lande uit Afrika en Latyn-Amerika toelaat, is een van die kernbydraes van die verhandeling tot die bestaande korpus van kennis. Drie bestaande empiriese modelle van ekonomiese groei word geanaliseer, insluitende die werk van Hanushek en Woessman oor die verhouding tussen onderwysgehalte en inkomste. Die eerste gedeelte sluit af met bespreking oor hoe die ekonomiese literatuur optimaal aangebied kan word om beleidmaking in die onderwys te beïnvloed. Groei-simulasie hulpmiddel in Excel wat die beleidsdiskoers kan vergemaklik word aangebied en verduidelik. Die ontwikkeling van hierdie gereedskap maak dit moontlik om op empiriese basis moontlike trajek vir die verbetering van onderwysgehalte te bepaal, wat vir beleidsmakers nuttig kan wees, sowel as ontleding van hoe linguïstiese verbrokkeling in land histories kan ontwikkel. Hierdie gereedskap kan as verdere sleutelproduk van die verhandeling beskou work. Basiese model van hoe onderwysgehalte en die inkomste van onderwysers deur middel van ekonomiese groei gekoppel is, word ook aangebied. Die tweede gedeelte van die verhandeling bied ontleding van UNESCO se nasionale statistieke van lande oor skoolinskrywings en onderwysuitgawes vanaf 1970, met die oog op die identifikasie van belangrike historiese tendense vir onderwysbeplanners, veral in ontwikkelende lande. Die fokus hier is veral op hoe begrotings en inskrywings ideaal oor die verskillende vlakke van die onderwysstelsel versprei behoort te wees. Die ontleding in die tweede gedeelte verteenwoordig innoverende manier om die bestaande nasionale statistieke te gebruik en kan beskou word as belangrike stap om gaping te vul wat deur beleidsmakers in die onderwys ondervind word, naamlik die gebrek aan empiriese gegewens vir besluite oor prioritisering tussen onderwysvlakke. Die tweede gedeelte bied ook verskeie empiriese bevindinge, soos dat die tendense rakende inskrywings en besteding per student sistematies tussen lande met vinniger ekonomiese groei en ander lande verskil, asook dat historiese besteding per student op die sekondêre vlak blykbaar groter invloed op ontwikkeling het as wat vroeër gedink is. Die derde gedeelte van die verhandeling vergelyk die advies wat die ekonomiese literatuur aan beleidmakers in die onderwys bied met wat beleidmakers self blykbaar glo. Die fokus val op veral vier ontwikkelende lande: Suid-Afrika, Brasilië, Chili en China. Gebiede word bespreek waar ekonome in die belang van beter onderwysbeleid tot groter mate data kan analiseer of bevindings op beter maniere kan kommunikeer. Die derde gedeelte kan beskou word as demonstrasie van hoe vergelykings tussen verskeie onderwysstelsels beter georiënteer kan word om vir die beleidmaker in die onderwys advies te verskaf rakende kwessies van doeltreffendheid en gelykheid.

En esta tesis se analiza cómo el sistema educativo actual afecta el desarrollo del capital humano de los estudiantes. En el primer capítulo se explora la función de las escuelas; en el segundo, el sistema de puntuación, y en el tercer capítulo se investigan las consecuencias de la edad obligatoria de inscripción en la escuela primaria, fijada en el año civil en el que cumplen 6 años. Para el análisis cuantitativo, he recopilado y analizado datos administrativos del universo de estudiantes en Cataluña matriculados en Primaria y Secundaria entre 2009 y 2015, datos referidos a su resultados de exámenes y características socio-económicas y demográficas. El primer capítulo se centra en escuelas públicas en Barcelona y en el segundo y tercer capítulo se usan datos de toda la Comunidad Autónoma. Los capítulos segundo y tercero han sido escritos con Caterina Calsamiglia. El primer capítulo es un estudio sobre cómo el entorno de las escuelas afecta a las habilidades cognitivas de los estudiantes y a su nivel educativo. Con este fin estimo un modelo estructural dinámico de acumulación de habilidades cognitivas y decisiones educativas para estudiantes de instituto. La característica clave del modelo es que permite identificar las distintas maneras en las que las escuelas afectan a los resultados de sus estudiantes. Encuentro grandes variaciones entre las escuelas en el efecto sobre el desarrollo de habilidades cognitivas y en el efecto de las elecciones de sus estudiantes en cuanto a la continuidad en el sistema educativo. En este sentido, el entorno escolar es particularmente relevante para estudiantes de familias de bajo nivel socioeconómico. Además, la probabilidad de acabar el instituto o de continuar a bachillerato estando en una escuela tiene una correlación baja con su rendimiento esperado en esa misma escuela. Los resultados de este estudio revelan que el hecho de basar evaluaciones de escuelas solo usando evaluaciones a nivel nacional podría resultar desventajoso para estudiantes de bajo nivel socioeconómico, ya que estos estos estudiantes se benefician más de escuelas que no solo ayudan a mejorar sus resultados en exámenes, sino que también les motivan para seguir en el sistema educativo. En el segundo capítulo se estudian las diferencias entre las evaluaciones de los profesores (nota media final) y los resultados en exámenes a nivel regional. Mostramos que la nota media final está rebajada en clases con estudiantes por encima de la media. En otras palabras, tener mejores compañeros perjudica las notas que un estudiante recibe de sus profesores. La posibilidad de acceder a la educación en las diversas modalidades se determina a base de una media de las evaluaciones recibidas por los profesores y de exámenes a nivel nacional, preparados y evaluados por personas externas. Los resultados de este capítulo identifican una distorsión que se crea al comparar estudiantes de distintas escuelas o clases a base de la nota media final. También encontramos alguna evidencia de selección estratégica de la escuela en años en los que la evaluación interna empieza a importar para el futuro. En el tercer capítulo estudiamos el efecto de la edad obligatoria de inscripción en primaria en el rendimiento escolar. A partir del punto de corte que determina cuándo los niños pueden acceder a la escuela, observamos mucha heterogeneidad en términos de madurez del alumnado que cohabita en una clase. Encontramos que niños relativamente menores sacan peores resultados en los exámenes, y también experimentan mayor grado de repetición. Estos efectos son homogéneos entre todos los niveles socioeconómicos y significativos en toda la distribución de resultados. Además, los niños menores suelen abandonar más y son los que tienen menos probabilidades para elegir la ruta académica en secundaria.
This thesis studies how the education system in place affects the human capital development of its students. Chapter 1 explores the role of schools, Chapter 2 studies the grading system, and Chapter 3 investigates the consequence of a specific regulation requiring that all students start primary education in the calendar year in which they turn 6. For the empirical analyses, I gathered and studied administrative data on attainment, test scores, socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the universe of Catalan students enrolled in primary and secondary education from 2009 to 2015. Chapter 1 focuses on public schools in Barcelona, while Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 exploit data for the entire region. The second and third chapters are coauthored with Caterina Calsamiglia. In Chapter 1, I study how the school environment affects students' cognitive skills and educational attainment. I estimate a dynamic structural model of cognitive skills accumulation and educational decisions of students enrolled in lower secondary education. Its key feature is that it allows me to separately identify the different channels through which schools affect student outcomes. I find large variation across schools both in their effect on cognitive skills development, and in their effects on students' educational choices above and beyond their level of cognitive skills. School environment is particularly relevant for choices of students with disadvantaged family background. Moreover their probabilities of graduating or enrolling in upper secondary education if they attend a given middle school have limited correlation with their expected performance in that school. Results suggest that evaluating and comparing schools using only nation-wide assessments may not favor disadvantaged students, who particularly benefit from schools which increase educational attainment, not only test scores. In Chapter 2, we study the differences between the evaluations assigned by teachers (GPA) and results in region-wide tests. We show that the GPA is strongly deflated in classes of above-average students. In other words, having better peers harms the evaluation obtained by a given student. Student access to education levels, tracks or majors is usually determined by their previous performance, measured either by internal exams, designed and graded by teachers in school, or external exams, designed and graded by central authorities. Our findings put forth a source of distortion that may arise in any system that uses internal grades to compare students across schools and classes. We also find suggestive evidence that school choice is impacted only the year when internal grades matter for future prospects. In Chapter 3, we study the effect of students' age at enrollment in primary school on their educational outcomes throughout primary and secondary education. Having a unique cut-off to determine when children can access school induces a large heterogeneity in maturity to coexist in a classroom. We show that relatively younger children do significantly worse both in tests administered at the school level and at the regional level, and they experience greater retention. These effects are homogeneous across socioeconomics and significant across the whole distribution of performance. Moreover younger children exhibit higher dropout rates and chose the academic track in secondary school less often.

This thesis is an examination of how aspects of the English secondary school system affect attainment of pupils, particularly those who are disadvantaged. The analysis is based on administrative data for all pupils enrolled in state schools in England. The thesis includes three self-contained chapters. In the first chapter we study whether substituting family with school inputs in the education production function of high ability pupils with low socio-economic status has an impact on their achievement in the exams at the end of compulsory education. We consider a selective, well-resourced boarding school admitting an unusually high share of talented pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and we estimate the effect of attending it with propensity score matching to obtain comparable control groups in selective day schools. Our main finding is that the probability of being in the top decile of achievement in the exams increases by about 17 percentage points compared to the baseline of 59% for controls. The second chapter investigates whether gender segregation in secondary schools affects achievement and subject choice in non-selective schools in England. The empirical analysis is based on a value added model for achievement and a linear probability model for subject choice, both of which incorporate neighbourhood fixed effects. A robustness check based on a reasonable assumption about the relationship between the selection on observables and unobservables reveals that gender segregation has no effect on achievement of girls and a small effect on achievement of boys in english; in addition it does affect the probability of taking advanced science subjects at A-level for girls. My main finding is that girls from disadvantaged background who attend single sex schools are 2.6 percentage points more likely to choose an advanced science subject at A-level compared to a baseline of 7.3% in co-ed schools. Using a survey of students in England I find that girls and boys in single sex schools have less gender-stereotyped tastes and self-assessment of their abilities. These results support the hypothesis that girls in same-gender classes are less exposed to gender stereotypes, therefore more confident in their abilities in science and maths and more motivated to study these subjects. The third chapter explores the effects of school competition on the academic per- formance of pupils. In the early 2000s the Labour government introduced academies, a new type of state-run school managed by a team of private co-sponsors. This reform broadened the choice of schools available to pupils and their parents increasing competitive pressure in the education sector. I use administrative pupil-level data to evaluate whether pupils in traditional secondary schools located near academies were affected by this new competition in the education market. Credible causal estimates of the short term impact of academies on neighbouring state schools are obtained by exploiting variation in both the timing and the number of academy entries. I find small positive effects on achievement in schools located within three miles from an academy: this finding suggests that increasing competition in the education market in England does not affect negatively the academic performance in less popular traditional schools and instead results in modest benefits particularly for more disadvantaged pupils.

Essais sur l'économie de l'éducation
As stated by the World Bank “education is a powerful driver of development and of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and improving health, gender equality, peace and stability”. Moreover, yearly years of education are crucial for developing attitudes, values and skills which are permanent for entire life. However, education analyses are generally reduced to the academic learning while other aspects related to fair social system insuring equal access to education is neglected by policy makers in developing countries. Access to learning, success at secondary school and opportunity of higher education is socially and spatially conditioned. Despite the increase of the school enrolment, there remain a large number of students who fail to meet minimum standards of literacy and there are left behind. These students are generally coming from economically deprived backgrounds and their exclusion from school has several consequences for social cohesion, economic growth and for regional development. Equal access to education should be guaranteed by giving importance to the socioeconomic environment such as parents’ educational attainment which presents an important predictor of children education. As stated by the OECD (2013), “If your parents didn’t go to university, it is unlikely you will”. Indeed, parents are first educators of children and their educational attainments reflect the level of quality care provided for them. Government investment in primary education is crucial for learning continuity even though the quality of secondary education is of big interest especially for girls because they represent future mothers. This may represent an important reason to promote educational attainment for actual and future generations. Another type of educational determinants is the school quality. Participatory pedagogy, updated skills of teachers, procurement of adequate instructional material, etc., are important factors that can improve primary educational efficiency and reduce school dropout

Education is a fundamental input of human capital formation. In this dissertation we explore topics related to how much and what time of human capital individuals invest in, and the long term-consequences of these investments. We begin with by measuring the degree to which financial incentives can affect a college student’s field of study. Next, we attempt to identify genetic variants associated with increased educational attainment and examine the biological systems implicated by this analysis. Last, we test for heterogeneous treatment effects of education on health across the distribution of observed health and across a genetic predictor of health. In chapter 1, we examine whether students respond to immediate financial incentives when choosing their college major. From 2006-07 to 2010-11, low-income students in technical or foreign language majors could receive up to $8,000 in SMART Grants. Since income-eligibility was determined using a strict threshold, we determine the causal impact of this grant on student major with a regression discontinuity design. Using administrative data from public universities in Texas, we determine that income-eligible students were 3.2 percentage points more likely than their ineligible peers to major in targeted fields. We measure a larger impact of 10.2 percentage points at Brigham Young University. In chapter 2 we find that, educational attainment (EA) is strongly influenced by social and other environmental factors, but genetic factors are also estimated to account for at least 20% of the variation across individuals. We report the results of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for EA that extends our earlier discovery sample of 101,069 individuals to 293,723 individuals, and a replication in an independent sample of 111,349 individuals from the UK Biobank. We now identify 74 genome-wide significant loci associated with number of years of schooling completed. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with educational attainment are disproportionately found in genomic regions regulating gene expression in the fetal brain. Candidate genes are preferentially expressed in neural tissue, especially during the prenatal period, and enriched for biological pathways involved in neural development. Our findings demonstrate that, even for a behavioral phenotype that is mostly environmentally determined, a well-powered GWAS identifies replicable associated genetic variants that suggest biologically relevant pathways. Because EA is measured in large numbers of individuals, it will continue to be useful as a proxy phenotype in efforts to characterize the genetic influences of related phenotypes, including cognition and neuropsychiatric disease. In 1972, the mandatory minimum age at which a student could drop out of school in England and Wales was raised from 15 to 16, constraining roughly 15 percent of the student population. In chapter 3, we exploit this discontinuous increase in educational attainment to estimate the impact of education on body mass index (BMI) and diabetes approximately 40 years later. While previous literature found no significant effect of education on health, they were not able to investigate whether these effects vary along the distribution of health outcomes. We are able to detect large effects on BMI in the upper quantiles of observed BMI, as large as 2 BMI points at the 90th percentile of BMI, from a baseline of 35.6. Using a genetic predictor of BMI, we also find that those with higher genetic risk of obesity see smaller reductions in BMI as a result of the increase in compulsory schooling while large reductions are seen in those with low genetic risk. Taken together our results point to the importance of considering heterogeneity when estimating the impacts of education on health.
Economics

This thesis studies aspects related to the role of schools characteristics and their governance on students’ learning outcomes. The thesis contains three chapters. The first chapter explores the effect of exposing students to more science in high school on their enrolment and persistence in STEM majors at university. It exploits the different timing in the implementation of a reform that induced high schools in the UK to offer more science to high ability 14 year-old children. The findings show that a stronger science curriculum at high school increases the probability of enrolling and of graduating in a STEM major at university. Moreover, the effect masks substantial gender heterogeneity. It is indeed mostly concentrated on boys. Girls tend to choose more scientific subjects, but still the most female-dominated ones: they choose medicine, not engineering. The second chapter of this thesis analyses the effects of providing strong research incentives to university professors on the way they allocate effort between teaching and research and on the way they select into different types of universities. I find evidence that teaching and research efforts are substitute in the professors’ cost function: the impact of research incentives is positive on research activity and negative on teaching performance. Effects are stronger for young faculty members, who are exposed not only to monetary incentives but also to career concerns. Moreover, I find that less skilled researchers tend to leave the university under stronger research incentives. Since I estimate that teaching and research skills are positively correlated, this implies that also bad teachers tend to leave the university. The overall impact of stronger research incentives on the university teaching quality is therefore ambiguous: the negative effect on teaching performance for incumbent professors is compensated by the positive sorting effect, given by changes in the composition of teachers. The third chapter explores where do the large cross-country differences in students’ performances in international standardized tests come from. This chapter argues that, while most of the debate concentrates on country differences in the school systems, differences in cultural environments and parental inputs are instead of great importance. I show indeed that the school performance of second generation immigrants is closely related to the average one of native students who still study in their parents’ countries of origin. This holds true even after accounting for different family background characteristics, different schools attended and different patterns of selection into immigration. This pattern questions whether PISA scores should be interpreted only as a quality measure for a country’s educational system. They actually contain an important intergenerational and cultural component. Parental inputs are found indeed to explain a large part of the cross country variation in school performance, for instance they account for more than one third of the gap between East Asia and other regions.

This thesis wants to explore two different aspects of the Italian education system. The first two chapters are focused on the school starting age, the third one analyzes the introduction of the electronic logbook in Italian schools. In chapter 1 I use administrative data from INVALSI test in different grades to study the effects of early enrollment to the primary school, in other words, the effects on student achievement of being enrolled to the first grade at the age of 5 instead of 6. The number of early enrollers is much higher in the South Italy than in the North. To understand the reason of this difference is not the aim of this work. I found that there is strong selection in early enrollment, with early enrollers having higher ability on average. However, early enrollers are younger than regular enrollers at the moment of the test, and even if they are more skilled on average, the effect of age on scores remains significant. As a result, the North-South gap in Invalsi test scores is partially driven by the difference in average age at the moment of the test with students from the south younger than northerners. In chapter 2 I use survey data from a sample of parents in 5 primary schools located in Palermo, where the 50% of the students born between January and April are early enrollers. I found preliminary evidence of peer effects among parents at the moment of the choice for enrollment. In the last chapter I found that the introduction of the electronic logbook increased scores at the INVALSI tests for tenth graders but not for younger students. This could be due to the fact older students have more independence and the electronic logbook helps parents to monitor them.

Defence date: 12 February 2021
Examining board: Professor Andrea Ichino (European University Insitute); Professor Sule Alan (European University Insitute); Professor Manuel Bagues (University of Warwick); Professor Caterina Calsamiglia (Institute of Political Economy and Governance)
This thesis consists of three independent essays in economics of education. In the first chapter, I investigate the connection between cultural identities and parental schooling decisions. By leveraging the case of the Basque Country (Spain), this essay studies how parents trade off academic quality for being educated in the regional language. Using a discrete choice structural model, I show that households display strong preferences for the Basque-monolingual model. Results indicate a willingness to forego a substantial amount of mean academic performance to evade the Spanish and the bilingual models. By means of regression analysis, I find a strong association between nationalistic voting and educational language choices. This suggests that schooling decisions are significantly shaped by parents’ affiliation to the regional culture. In the second chapter, I test whether the cultural assimilation efforts of immigrant families mitigate discriminatory attitudes of schools. To this end, I sent fictitious visit requests to more than 2,500 schools located in the Community of Madrid (Spain). I find that Romanian families who gave a Spanish name to their child are 50% less discriminated than those who selected a Romanian name. Emails from families whose members have Romanian names are 12% less likely to receive a response than those from native Spanish-name families. The results show a consistent response pattern across school characteristics. The third chapter, co-authored with Lucas Gortazar and Ainhoa Vega-Bayo, studies the presence of systematic differences between teacher non-blind assessments and external quasiblindly graded standardized tests. We use a rich administrative database covering two cohorts from publicly-funded schools in the Basque Country. We find that systematic underassessment exists for boys, children with immigrant origin, and poorer students. The results indicate that stereotyping is a consistent mechanism through which our findings can be interpreted.
-- Part. 1 Identity and school choice : parental preferences for language educational models -- Part. 2 Cultural assimilation and ethnic discrimination : an audit study with schools -- Part. 3 Comparing teacher and external assessments : are boys, immigrants, and poorer students undergraded? -- Part. 4 References --

Education as a way of increasing human capital is considered to be a basic factor in the growth process of the aggregate economy, according to the perspective that social returns to education extend beyond private returns. Returns to investment into human capital and educational processes are very crucial issues to analyze. The leading theme in my research is the interest in the microeconomic aspect of human development both at theoretical and empirical level. In fact, this PhD thesis considers various aspects of the education system and its links with the labour market. It is composed by three chapters, each one corresponding to a self-contained paper, applying different methodologies (theoretical and empirical) and different perspectives. The first two chapters focus on the returns to education justified by the importance accorded to the investment in human capital as an explanation of wage differentials. The first chapter deals with the returns to higher education in 12 European countries, and with the evolution of wage inequality, in Europe. The second chapter provides empirical evidence of the returns to education acquired under communist regime. The third chapter explores the relationship between mental health and education decisions. Its aim is to examine how mental health predicts academic success. More in detail, the first chapter investigates the evolution of the returns to higher education and of the college wage premium in Europe over the last 15 years. While there has been intense debate in the empirical literature about the evolution of the college wage premium in the US, its evolution in Europe has been given little attention. This paper focuses on how does this evolution affect wage inequality and how does this evolution differ across age cohorts, in 12 European countries, using ECHP and EU-SILC data. Additionally, the paper explores whether there are cross-country differences in returns to education, and whether these are mainly driven by international differences in labour-market settings. The period analyzed is a period in which higher education participation rate increased dramatically: graduate supply considerably outstripped demand which ought to imply a fall in the premium. I use cross country variation in relative supply, demand and labour market institutions to look at their effects on the trend in the college wage gap. An important contribution to the literature is that I address possible concerns of endogeneity of relative supply by an instrumental variable strategy. I find some evidence of significant cross country differences in the level and the growth of the college wage premium. Results show a significant decline of college returns in countries with higher relative supply of skilled workers and a marked fall in college returns for recent cohorts for both men and women in all European countries. The estimated growth in the wage gap appears negatively correlated to changes in relative supply and positively correlated with the relative demand index. Institutional constraints also have a role in determining wage inequality. In the second chapter, together with my coauthors Giorgio Brunello and Lorenzo Rocco, using data for Germany and 23 other economies in Eastern and Western Europe, we estimate the monetary returns to education acquired under communism more than 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We show that, in the 2000s, Eastern European workers who completed their education under communism received in the 2000s similar returns to their education as did workers belonging to the same age cohorts who studied in Western Europe. This might suggest that education under communism is still as valuable as education attained in Western Europe. However, individuals educated under communism are more likely than their Western counterparts to be unemployed, retired and disabled, and therefore to earn lower or zero returns to their education. Moreover, when we allow the returns to preand post-secondary education to differ, we find that senior males who have attained only primary or secondary education under communism are penalized in the posttransition Eastern European labour markets, and that those who have completed post-secondary education under communism enjoy, in these markets, higher payoffs to their education than similarly educated Western European individuals employed in the West. In the last chapter, my coauthors Francesca Cornaglia and Sandra McNally and I, explore the relationship between mental health and education decisions. Mental health problems have been rising internationally. Although poor mental health has often been correlated with poor educational attainment and/or dropping out of education, there have been few longitudinal studies on this subject. It is crucial to understand the link between mental health and schooling success since mental health problems can affect human capital productivity having lifelong consequences. We address this issue using a recent english dataset. England is a very interesting country to undertake such an investigation because of both poor mental health and high drop-out rate of young people. The Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) allows us to measure mental health at age 14/15 and again at age 16/17. This is measured using the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ12), a screening instrument used to detect the presence of symptoms of mental illness and depression. We associate poor mental health with examination performance at age 16 and with the probability of being observed as being "not in education, employment or training" (NEET) at age 17/18. Our results show that "poor mental health" is associated with lower examination performance and with higher probability of being NEET. Decomposing the measure of poor mental health into its component parts: "anxiety and depression ", related to excessive worrying and difficulty controlling this worrying; "anhedonia and social dysfunction", related to reduced interest or pleasure in usual activities; and "loss of confidence or self-esteem", there is some evidence that loss of confidence or self-esteem drives the association between poor mental health and exam results for boys. For girls this factor is also important but the association is stronger for anhedonia and social dysfunction. Additionally, we investigate whether these associations are influenced by controlling for past behaviour. For example, mechanisms through which poor mental health might impact exam performance and the probability of being NEET include substance abuse and xiii playing truant from school. Results show that these mechanisms have a potential role to play in understanding the relationship between poor mental health and exam performance. From a policy perspective, this paper helps documenting the importance of the relationship between poor mental health, educational attainment and subsequent dropping-out behaviour, suggesting that there could be a causal mechanism. Hence, programmes aimed at improving the mental health of adolescents may be very important for improving educational attainment and reducing the number of young people who are "NEET"
L’ istruzione viene considerata da molti economisti come un investimento in un bene molto speciale: il capitale umano. Come per tutti i tipi di investimento, è molto interessante, oltre che utile, valutarne il rendimento. La tesi il cui titolo è "Essays on Economics of Education" è un compendio di tre articoli tra loro indipendenti che applicano metodologie diverse, sia teoriche che empiriche, e impiegano diverse prospettive. Il primo capitolo, "Returns to college over time: trends in Europe in the last 15 years", è un analisi dell’evoluzione del "college wage premium" e dei rendimenti dell’istruzione terziaria in Europa, cercando di trovare, in fattori di domanda-offerta ed istituzionali, le cause. Il secondo capitolo "Lost in transition? The returns to education aquired under communism in the first decade of the new millennium", analizza i rendimenti dell’istruzione acquisita durante il regime comunista a distanza di un decennio dopo la caduta del regime. Il terzo capitolo, "Mental health and Education decisions" investiga la relazione tra salute mentale e output scolastici (test scores e NEET) per un campione di adolescenti inglesi. Più in dettaglio, il primo capitolo studia l’andamento nel tempo del rendimento relativo dell’ istruzione terziaria in Europa come possibile causa della diseguaglianza salariale tra e all’ interno di gruppi di lavoratori con diverse skills. Questa tematica ha interessato molti studiosi, soprattutto a causa della crescente diseguaglianza salariale che si è osservata negli Stati Uniti a partire dalla fine degli anni 80. Nel tempo questo filone letterario si è consolidato soprattutto nell’indicare quali sono le sue potenziali cause (Skill Bias Technical Change, Rendimento del capitale umano e Istituzioni del mercato del lavoro). La maggior parte degli studi riguarda però gli Stati Uniti o alcuni paesi europei considerati singolarmente, ma solo pochi studi utilizzano un’ottica comparata che permette di analizzare anche il ruolo di istituzioni che variano tra paesi e non solo nel tempo, e questi pochi studi sono ormai datati. Questo è il primo studio che analizza questo fenomeno in Europa, osservando un intervallo temporale piuttosto peculiare. Il periodo esaminato è infatti caratterizzato da un ingente aumento della partecipazione nell’istruzione terziaria, e conseguentemente, un forte aumento dell’offerta di laureati nel mercato del lavoro, in conseguenza anche della politica comunitaria (Lisbona, 2000). Il dataset utilizzato è stato creato unendo dati ECHP e EU-SILC per ottenere un intervallo temporale di 15 anni (dal 1994 al 2009) per 12 paesi europei. I paesi europei sono divisi in due sottogruppi, quelli con elevata offerta relativa di laureati e quelli con bassa offerta relativa di laureati, poichè è plausibile che nei due sottogruppi di paesi l’interplay tra domanda e offerta relativa di laureati e l’effetto delle istituzioni possano essere diversi. I risultati mostrano l’esistenza di un’effettiva diminuzione dei rendimenti dell’istruzione terziaria in molti paesi europei, e questa diminuzione è più netta nei paesi con elevata offerta relativa di laureati. Si nota anche che tali rendimenti sono minori per le corti più giovani. Per quanto riguarda i fattori che possono spiegare le cause dell’andamento del "college wage premium", i fattori di domanda e offerta sono molto rilevanti. Un ulteriore notevole contributo alla letteratura è l’utilizzo di una strategia di stima basata sulle variabili strumentali, per evitare i problemi dervianti dalla postenziale endogeneità dell’offerta relativa di laureati. I risultati mostrano che l’aumento di offerta relativa ha impatto negativo e significativo in tutti i gruppi di paesi. Fattori istituzionali come salario minimo e sindacati sembrano giocare un ruolo abbastanza importante, in particolare in paesi con minore offerta relativa di laureati, paesi che hanno annche subito recentemente maggiori cambiamenti alle istituzioni riguardanti il mercato del lavoro. Il secondo capitolo tratta la tematica classica dei rendimenti dell’istruzione, in particolare, questo studio confronta i rendimenti del capitale umano accumulato in un’economia di mercato con quello accumulato nelle economie pianificate durante il regime comunista. L’istruzione accumulata in sistemi educativi centralizzati, dove la scelta dell’individuo non risente degli stessi benefici e costi delle economie di mercato, è generlamente considerata come meno adatta a un economia di mercato come quella dei giorni nostri, e dunque, si assume che i rendimenti di tale tipo di istruzione siano minori. Contrariamente alla letteratura precedente che utilizzava prevalentemente un approccio pre-post per ogni singolo paese, questa ricerca utilizza un’ottica comparativa e considera contemporaneamente diversi paesi europei. I dati utilizzati sono GSOEP, per la Germania, e EU-SILC, per i restanti 23 paesi. La strategia di stima è basata su un "quasi-esperimento", utilizzando gli individui dei paesi dell’Ovest come gruppo di controllo, per stimare i rendimenti dell’istruzione accumulata nei sistemi scolastici "comunisti" prima della transizione all’economia di mercato. Per ovviare al tipico problema di endogeneità in cui si incorre nella stima OLS dei rendimenti dell’istruzione, fornendo quindi una stima distorta che differisce tra i paesi essendo diverso il ruolo dell’abilità nell’accumulo di capitale umano nei diversi sistemi scolastici considerati, viene utilizzata la tecnica proposta da Card e Rothstein (2007). I dati vengono aggregati in celle (definita per età, genere, paese e anno), differenziando per genere e introducendo opportune e plausibili ipotesi sulla struttura del termine di errore. Una volta rilassata l’ipotesi di rendimenti costanti per ogni anno di istruzione, vengono esaminati anche i diversi rendimenti per i diversi livelli di istruzione. I risultati mostrano che i meno istruiti delle economie dell’Europa dell’EST hanno sofferto relativamente di più la transizione all’economia di mercato sia in termini di maggiore disoccupazione che in termini di salari inferiori, a parziale conferma dell’inadeguatezza dei livelli scolastici inferiori all’università di quei paesi. L’ultimo capitolo affronta una tematica meno standard: studia la relazione tra problemi di salute mentale e accumulo di capitale umano nel Regno Unito, paese con un triste primato sia in termini di benessere dei bambini e adolescenti, che in termini di individui che non stanno ricevendo un’istruzione, non hanno un impiego o altre attività assimilabili (tirocini, lavori domestici, ecc.), e che non stanno cercando un’occupazione (NEET - Not in education, employment of training). In questa ricerca si stima l’effetto della salute mentale sulla performance scolastica e sulla probabilità di essere NEET. Oltre a misurare l’effetto totale della salute mentale, misurata dal GHQ-General Health Questionnaire, si stima anche l’effetto di ogni singola componente della misura complessiva di salute mentale, riconoscendone la diversa importanza e significatività. Per l’analisi viene utilizzato un ampio studio longitudinale con tutti i vantaggi che esso comporta rispetto a quelli cross-section, molto più recente rispetto ad altri studi. I dati utilizzati sono presi dal LSYP, che riguarda un campione molto vasto di adolescenti Inglesi (14/15 anni nel 2004, seguiti fino al 2008). La natura longitudinale e la presenza di informazioni sui comportamenti rischiosi (consumo di sostanze rischiose come alcool, sigarette e cannabis e truancy- assenza ingiustificata da scuola) permette anche di investigare meglio i potenziali meccanismi indiretti dell’effetto dei problemi mentali sulla performance scolastica. In particolare si evidenzia che mentre esiste un effetto indiretto della salute mentale sulla performance scolastica che passa attraverso i comportamenti rischiosi, questo non sembrerebbe esistere sulla probabilità di essere NEET

En esta tesis se estudian temas de educación y economía laboral. Por un lado, el primer capítulo tiene como objetivo estimar el efecto causal de la educación en las actitudes acerca del rol de género (en concreto, si las mujeres tienen que abandonar el mercado laboral para cuidar de la familia, y si los hombres tienen más derecho que las mujeres a un empleo). Para ello, utilizo reformas educativas que aumentan el número de años de educación obligatoria para obtener una fuente de variación exógena que se puede utilizar como un instrumento para la educación. Utilizando datos de la Encuesta Social Europea para 14 países europeos, observamos que las reformas educativas ciertamente aumentan los años de escolaridad, pero solo para personas de una familia con bajo nivel educativo (en particular, las mujeres). Los resultados indican que, para este grupo, un año adicional de educación reduce significativamente la probabilidad de estar de acuerdo con el rol tradicional de género de las mujeres en más de 11 puntos porcentuales. El segundo capítulo estudia el impacto en la fertilidad de una política que otorga a los migrantes un estatus legal basado en la nacionalidad de su descendencia. Nuestra atención se centra en España, donde el Real Decreto de 2011 reconoció la capacidad de los padres indocumentados para convertirse en residentes legales en caso de tener un niño español menor de 18 años. Usando un enfoque cuasi-experimental que explota el cambio en los requisitos de elegibilidad de residencia legal, mostramos que el Real Decreto de 2011 incrementó la fertilidad entre las personas potencialmente afectadas por la reforma en aproximadamente el 34 por ciento. En el tercer capítulo, estudio el fenómeno de la sobreeducación en España. La sobreeducación, definida como tener un nivel educativo superior al que es necesario para el trabajo, es un fenómeno del mercado laboral que tiene una incidencia especial en España. En principio, la sobreeducación no tiene por qué ser un problema si es transitoria, pero cuando se vuelve persistente puede ocasionar importantes efectos negativos en la economía. Este artículo investiga la persistencia de la sobreeducación mediante la explotación de datos de la Muestra Continua Vidas Laborales aplicando modelos de duración. Al controlar por las características observadas, encuentro evidencia a favor de la hipótesis que sostiene que la sobreeducación es un fenómeno persistente en España.

This dissertation contains three essays in the economics of development. The first essay investigates the effects of the decentralization of governance over education to communities in terms of individual education outcomes. The next essay relates to the first by exploring the factors that drive communities to adopt decentralized governance, including forms of decentralized governance over education. The last essay returns to the topic of education by examining a policy aimed at decreasing the costs of post-secondary education for a minority group. Each essay probes these topics within the context of First Nations in Canada. The first essay examines the substantial impacts of education decentralization on high school attendance and completion through the analysis of First Nation education self-government agreements in Canada. These agreements are important institutional arrangements that transfer the authority over education from the federal government to First Nations. I exploit confidential microdata and exogenous variation in the implementation of education self-government agreements to perform the analysis. My results indicate that self-government agreements focused exclusively on education increase high school attendance by 5 to 9 percentage points and high school completion by 3 to 5 percentage points. However, the effects on high school completion rates under multi-sectoral self-government agreements implemented together with comprehensive land claim agreements and for self-government agreements that focus on education alone differ dramatically for women and men. High school completion improves by 8 to 11 percentage points for women, but drops by a staggering 17 to 25 percentage points for men. These results have important policy implications for education decentralization in general, along with implications for the particular case of First Nation education self-governance in Canada. The second essay identifies the determinants of decentralized governance by exploring the First Nation self-government agreement claim and implementation processes. I use a novel dataset on self-government agreements and confidential microdata to perform the analysis. My results support the notion that we can treat self-government treatment variables as exogenous, when controlling for reserve fixed effects. This is not an onerous condition to impose. Specifically, I do not find any factors of economic or statistical significance for claims for my richest and most-preferred specification, which includes controlling for reserve fixed effects. Contrary to the results for claims, I find that education and income are important factors for implementation, but only conditional on a reserve having previously made a claim. However, this significance disappears, once I relax this condition and compare the determinants of implementation against reserves that may or may not have made a claim. The third essay examines the substantial impacts of a targeted policy that provides postsecondary tuition and living expense subsidies for Aboriginal Canadians. To identify the effects of the policy, I exploit a reform of the policy's eligibility requirements in 1985 that lead to a large increase in the number of individuals with access to the subsidies. My results indicate that the reform lead to economically and statistically significant increases in the likelihood of attaining any post-secondary education for a group of women whose eligibility was particularly targeted by the reform and for women generally. These increases range from about 4 to 7 percentage points. The effects for men are positive, but much smaller and not significant.

This thesis is composed of three distinct chapters. The first two contribute to the economics of higher education literature, while the third estimates a structural model of household behavior. Chapter 1 presents a study assessing the impact of grading standards (GS) in Italian departments on the labor market outcomes of university graduates. The influence of heterogeneous GS on labor market performance can occur through two different channels: a productivity and a signaling effect. The empirical papers trying to answer the same research question are quite rare due to limitations in data availability. This study provides first evidence on the dynamic effects of GS on university graduates in Italy, evaluating the impact on wages, employment and overeducation. The analysis is performed using unique data provided by Almalaurea on graduates in years 2008 and 2009 matched with department-level information on research quality and resources. Italy is an interesting case study since university graduation rates are low but, at the same time, returns to higher education are below the average of other developed countries. The human capital accumulated is also quite low. The PIAAC data, measuring the level of skills in OECD countries by level of education, place Italian university graduates at the bottom of the ranking. For these reasons it is important to find policies that can increase the average productivity of highly educated workers. Furthermore, in the last decades the increased supply in the market for higher education and the 3+2 reform lead to a larger heterogeneity in quality and in GS between institutions. The estimation strategy is divided in two steps. Firstly, we estimate a proxy for GS as the part of final grades which cannot be explained by differences in individual characteristics (student's quality) and other relevant inputs (quality of the institution attended). Then, the effect of GS on wage and other labor market outcomes is estimated. We show that differences in GS are large across departments. More generous grades are associated to a wage penalty on the labor market 5 years after graduation. In particular, graduates from 'generous' departments earn 3.4% less than people who studied in the 'strict' departments, they have a lower employment rate and a higher probability of being too educated for their jobs. The effects on wages are stronger for high ability workers while employment is more affected for low ability and female graduates. Chapter 2 assesses the impact of the first Italian Research Evaluation Exercise (REE) on students' enrollment choices. All Italian REEs have been followed by lively debates. Critics of REE maintain that they are very expensive and excessively based on quantitative (e.g., bibliometric) indicators. Advocates of REEs rebut that in a period of shrinking public funding of Higher Education it is more important than ever to allocate resources in an effective and efficient way. However, there is no evidence on the effect of the REE on students' choices. Our paper is related to the literature which, especially in the US, has investigated the effects on student application and matriculation decisions of ratings and rankings of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) produced by private `intermediaries'. We provide a first assessment of the impact of the 'Valutazione Triennale della Ricerca' (VTR) on student choices using a before-after estimator which exploits differential treatment intensities across HEIs. In particular, we investigate whether departments that received a better score also beneted of more student enrolments and enrolments of students with better entry qualications after the VTR. This identication strategy enables us to control for both department-specific time invariant unobservable heterogeneity and pre-existing department trends. The analysis is performed using data on enrollment at the department level between 2002 and 2011 merged with data on research quality of departments from the first REE accomplished in Italy (the VTR). Italy is an interesting case study since enrollment has been decreasing in Italy in the last decade, especially in the South, so assessing the effect of research quality on the quantity and quality of enrolled students is important. Our analysis demonstrates that increasing the percentage of excellent products by one standard deviation at the department level increases student enrollments by 6.5 percent. Effects are larger for high quality students, namely those with better high school final marks (10 percent) or coming from the academic track (11.8 percent). Departments in the top quartile of the quality distribution gained more from a good performance in the evaluation exercise. Effect magnitudes appear to be similar across all macro-regions (North, Centre and South and Islands), but are precisely estimated only for universities in Northern Italy. Finally, Chapter 3 presents and estimates a model of household behavior with endogenous labor supply and fertility choices. The estimated model is then used to assess the effect of a childbirth transfer on household decisions. We contribute to the recent literature (Adda et al., 2015) performing ex-ante structural evaluations of policies having the objective to modify the fertility and labor supply behavior of households. The model is estimated using the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) for the period 1984-2014, a dataset collected by the Bank of Italy every two years. The model parameters are estimated through the Method of Simulated Moments. We obtain moments from households in the 1960 cohort, i.e. people born in years 1957-1963. Structural estimation offer some important advantages with respect to reduced form approaches. First, it allows to model different sources of endogeneity (ex. self-selection into labor market participation). Second, it provides parameters from a theoretical model that can be used to simulate the effects of policy experiments. The model is able to explain quite well the behavior of men and women in the cohort. Preliminary results show that the permanent childbirth transfer is successful in increasing the total fertility rate of married women, even if it has a negative effect on employment.

This dissertation consists of three chapters that investigate students’ and teachers’ incentive programs, and the intergenerational infant health consequences of a labor market policy. In the first chapter, I perform a randomized control trial at a distance learning university to compare three different monetary incentive schemes varying students’ performance target in the same educational environment. I show that the performance target implemented interacts with some of the characteristics of the students incentivized, such as intrinsic motivation and experience with the incentivized task. Moreover, a novel finding of this study is that incentives foster students’ strategic behavior that is triggered by the way performance is measured. In the second chapter, I examine how tying teachers’ pay to students’ performance affects the latter’s achievements. I show that a nationwide program implemented in Peru giving monetary rewards to teachers conditional on their students’ performance, has a precisely estimated zero impact on students’ grades. Finally, in the third chapter I investigate the effect of a child labor regulation that increased the minimum legal age to work from 14 to 16 years old, on fertility and infant health outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that the reform increased educational attainment, and decreased marriage and fertility. Interestingly, I show that the reform was detrimental for the health of the offspring at the moment of delivery.
Aquesta tesi s’estructura en tres capítols que investiguen els programes d’incentius per als estudiants i professors, i les conseqüències intergeneracionals per a la salut infantil d’ una política de mercat de treball. En el primer capítol vaig duu a terme un experiment de camp en una universitat d’educació a distància amb la finalitatat de comparar tres incentius monetaris diferents en el mateix entorn educatiu, variant l’objectiu de rendiment dels estudiants incentivat. Mostro que l’objectiu de rendiment implementat interactua amb algunes de les característiques dels estudiants, com ara la seva motivació intrínseca i l’experiència que tenen amb la tasca incentivada. D’altra banda, també trobo que els incentius fomenten el comportament estratègic dels estudiants com a conseqüència de la manera en la que es mesura el seu rendiment. En el segon capítol examino com afecta a l’assoliment dels estudiants el fet de que la retribució dels seus professors estigui lligada al seu rendiment acadèmic. A aquests efectes, analitzo un programa nacional implementat a Perú que dóna una recompensa monetària als mestres condicionada al rendiment dels seus alumnes. El programa té un efecte nul precisament estimat sobre les qualificacions dels estudiants. Finalment, en el tercer capítol investigo l’efecte sobre la fertilitat i la salut del canvi legislatiu que va augmentar l’edat mínima legal per treballar de 14 a 16 anys. Utilitzant una estratègia de diferències en diferències, arribo a la conclusió que la reforma va incrementar el nivell d’educació, alhora que va disminuir la fertilitat i probabilitat de contraure matrimoni. Addicionalment, mostro que la reforma va ser perjudicial per a la salut de la descendència en el moment del part.

My dissertation focuses on economics of higher education. Specifically, I study how scientists’ social network gives indications on their later career (Chapter 1), the universities’ research performance (Chapter2), and the overall production of research outputs (Chapter3). Building on the current surge of social network analysis, all the papers are built upon networks of co-authors. This thesis contributes to the study of social networks. It documents the prevalence of research collaborations and how they impact the production of science, making a case for taking this phenomenon into account when designing funding mechanisms. Chapter 1 looks at how a researcher’s professional network influences her career path, and I specifically consider the career of young economists on the American academic market. I exploit an original dataset building from the researchers’ individual vitae and their publication records. I investigate the impact of social network on career path by looking at the correlation between early career network metrics and the quality of the institutional affiliation of the researcher. I find that the number of social ties a researcher has as well as her relative position in the research network matters for explaining career mobility and success, even when controlling for publications. Having more co-authors boost the early career, while a higher quality of publications matters on the long run. In Chapter 2, I look at the impact of inter-university partnerships on the production of research outputs.Using an original data set of scientific publications and universities’ budgets, I analyze the network of research in Spain based on the network of Spanish co- authors. I show how the growth in research productivity of Spanish institutions before the crisis was linked to the increase in universities’ budgets and in inter- university collaborations. The results show that the size of the university is the key factor to understand universities productivity. The network multiplier is significant and positive, indicating that collaboration has a positive effect. Finally, in the context of the current crisis, I am able to identify the universities that are the least productive, taking into account their own characteristics and the indirect effects of the collaborations. This analysis has clear policy implications,as the least productive universities could be targeted to minimize the impact of further budgets cuts.Finally, Chapter 3 focuses on the link between the composition of the scientists’ workforce and the amount of research produced. Using Chapter 2’s dataset enriched by a list of the applicants to the two most prestigious postdoctoral grants in Spain, I am able to identify the young researchers in the co-authorship network. I study the link between the number of young researchers and the total research output. All three chapters show how important collaborations are in the production of science. The first chapter shows how some network metrics correlate with career outcomes, giving indication on how much to engage in collaborative work. The second paper shows how network analysis can be used to produce performance rankings of universities taking into account the partnerships. Finally, the third chapter makes a case for the importance of policies targeting young scientists. Further research can be done to understand the link between competition for students and resources and the co-authorship network, or the endogenous process of career changes and changes in the network.
Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2006.
Thesis research directed by: Economics. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2007.
Thesis research directed by: Economics. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

The first two substantive chapters of the thesis estimate the effect of single sex secondary school education on educational achievement and labour market out- comes. The last chapter evaluates the impact of a tax credit aimed to encourage disabled people to work. The analysis is carried out using data from the UK and particular attention is paid to issues of endogeneity. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the association between single sex education and indi- viduals' achievement at school and in the labour market, respectively using data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS). The main findings from Chapter 2 suggest, after accounting for endogeneity, that single sex schooling increases the probability of continuing with education at the age of 16 by 14 percentage points (ppts). However, no effect was found for other educational outcomes. The analysis in Chapter 3 suggests the existence of a positive relationship with fulltime employment at the age of 33, and a positive effect on individuals' wages among those working fulltime at the age of 23. The quantile regression analysis suggested that the effect is mainly observed at the lower-middle part of the wage distribution. Finally, we found evidence that women from single sex schools are more likely to have a professional partner. In Chapter 4, using data from the UK Labour Force Survey, we evaluate the effectiveness of the Disabled Person's Tax Credit (DPTC). Using a difference in differences approach, we find an increase of 6.5 ppts in the employment rates of lone mothers with a disability and an increase of 5 ppts in the looking for a job probability of single men. This thesis contributes to the existing literature on the effects of single sex education by using a different identification strategy from other authors. It also provides evidence of the effectiveness of the DPTC, which has not been studied in a comprehensive way until now.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2017.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 120-123).
This dissertation consists of three essays in the economics of education. The first chapter uses Boston charter school admissions lotteries to estimate the effects of charter enrollment on special needs students' classification and achievement. Charter schools remove special needs classifications and move special education students into more inclusive classrooms at a rate over two times higher than traditional public schools. Despite this reduction in special needs services, charters increase special needs students' test scores, likelihood of meeting a high school graduation requirement, and likelihood of earning a state merit scholarship. Charters benefit even the most disadvantaged special needs students: those with the lowest test scores and those who receive the most services at the time of lottery. Non-experimental evidence suggests that the classification removal explains at most 26 percent of the achievement gains for special needs students and has no detrimental effect. The results show that special needs students can achieve gains without the traditional set of special needs services in the charter environment. The second chapter, coauthored with Sarah Cohodes and Chris Walters, studies whether schools that boost student outcomes can replicate their success at new campuses. We analyze a policy reform that allowed effective charter schools in Boston to replicate their school models at new locations. Estimates based on randomized admission lotteries show that replicate charter schools generate large achievement gains on par with those produced by their parent campuses. The average effectiveness of Boston's charter middle school sector increased after the reform despite a doubling of charter market share. The third chapter uses experimental evidence in two Boston charter schools to estimate the effect of a math and English Language Arts tablet educational program. I find that the personalized learning technology can substantially increase test scores, narrowing the math black-white achievement gap by up to 22% if implemented well. Correct implementation of technology matters: one study site had low technology usage and had noisy, null results. Students of varying ability experience similar effects suggesting that the targeting of student's learning gaps promotes gains. This paper demonstrates the ability of technology to enhance student learning if students spend enough time with the educational technology. More work is needed to identify optimal amount of time for learning programs and the relative effectiveness of different education technology.
by Elizabeth M. Setren.
1. Special Education and English Language Learners in Boston Charter Schools: Impact and Classification -- 2. Can Successful Schools Replicate? Scaling Up Boston's Charter School Sector -- 3. Race to the Tablet? The Impact of Personalized Table Educational Programs.
Ph. D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2016.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 109-115).
This dissertation combines three essays on the economics of education. The essays share a common focus on comparing experimental and non-experimental econometric methods. I present findings from randomized evaluations of two prominent education interventions for low-income students. In the spirit of LaLonde's (1986) pioneering re-analysis of experimental evidence on federal job training programs, I leverage the experimental data to assess nonexperimental methods for evaluating program impacts. The first chapter - written jointly with Joshua Angrist, David Autor, and Amanda Pallais - reports early results from a randomized evaluation of the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (STBF) scholarship, a large, privately-funded financial aid program for applicants to Nebraska's public colleges. Randomly-assigned scholarship offers boosted average grants received by $6,300 per year and dramatically improved enrollment and retention, especially for groups with historically-low persistence rates. Four years after award receipt, nonwhite students and first-generation college goers were nearly 20 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in college. Awards generated similarly large gains for students with the weakest high school GPAs in the eligible applicant pool. Over time, scholarships shifted many students from two- to four-year colleges, reducing associate's degree completion in the process. The economic returns to scholarship support will therefore likely hinge on whether award winners convert their extended enrollment into bachelor's degrees. The oldest study cohort will record its four-year graduation rate in the summer of 2016, but many students will likely take five or more years to finish. A complete picture of award impacts on degree receipt may therefore still be several years away. In the second chapter, I assess how selection bias distorts non-experimental estimates of STBF scholarship impacts. I show that observed gaps in retention rates between scholarship winners and rejected applicants overstate the causal effect of scholarships on dropout by nearly double. Controlling for high school GPA and Expected Family Contribution (EFC) - two widely-used criteria for awarding merit aid - explains roughly half the gap between the experimental benchmarks and observed enrollment rates. Conditional on GPA and EFC, however, additional demographic traits like race, gender, and parental education have little explanatory power. Thus, scholarship winners are positively selected on potential enrollment in the absence of treatment, and a variety of observational estimation strategies overstate the causal impacts of scholarships on enrollment and retention. Among the replication strategies, Kline's (2011) Oaxaca-Blinder procedure outperforms both discrete covariate matching and propensity score weighting on bias and precision. Because STBF award effects are larger for students who are less likely to win scholarships, linear regression estimates are even bigger than the biased estimates of treatment on treated (TOT) effects. In the final chapter, I use experimental estimates of Teach for America's (TFA) impacts on student achievement to validate a non-experimental strategy for measuring the long-run effects of hiring TFA teachers. Randomized evaluations show that TFA teachers outperform colleagues in boosting achievement at hard-to-staff schools. Despite this cross-sectional evidence, TFA's long-run effects remain unknown, a key concern for policymakers. High turnover among TFA recruits - who commit to serve for just two years - may undercut the long-run returns to hiring non-TFA teachers, who improve steeply with experience. To assess this potential tradeoff, I measure the short- and long-run effects of TFA hiring in North Carolina, where schools have employed TFA teachers since the program's founding in 1990. I identify TFA hiring effects by exploiting quasi-random variation in teacher hiring shocks across grades within schools. In the short run, TFA rookies increase math scores markedly relative to the non-TFA teachers schools might otherwise hire; TFA's initial advantage in reading is modest. When schools replace exiting TFA teachers with new TFA recruits, these gains more than offset the costs of lost experience, increasing long-run achievement. On the other hand, when TFA supply fluctuates, schools may have to replace exiting TFA teachers with inexperienced and lower-performing non-TFA hires. On net, short run achievement gains from one-shot TFA hiring still exceed the costs. JEL Classification: C93, I22, J63.
by Sally Lindquist Hudson.
joint work with Joshua Angrist, David Autor, and Amanda Pallais -- Early results from a randomized evaluation of post-secondary aid / Selection bias in observational estimates of financial aid impacts -- The dynamic effects of teach for America in hard-to-staff schools.
Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2007.
Includes bibliographical references.
This thesis consists of three essays on the economics of education.The first chapter estimates the effects of participating in the National School Lunch Program in the middle of the 20th century on educational attainment and adult health. My instrumental variables strategy exploits a change of the formula used by the federal government to allocate funding to the states that was phased in beginning in 1963. Identification is achieved by the fact that different birth cohorts were exposed to different degrees to the original formula and the new formula, along with the fact that the change of the formula affected states differentially by per capita income. Participation in the program as a child appears to have few long-run effects on health, but the effects on educational attainment are sizable. The second chapter studies the issue of racial diversity in higher education. I estimate the effects of college racial diversity on post-college earnings, civic behavior, and satisfaction with the college attended. I use the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey, which allows me to control for exposure to racial diversity prior to college. Moreover, I use two techniques from Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) to address the issue of selection on unobservables. Single-equation estimates suggest a positive effect of diversity on voting behavior and on satisfaction with the college attended, but I do not find an effect on other outcomes. Moreover, the estimates are very sensitive to the assumptions made about selection on unobservables.The third chapter studies university affirmative action bans. I use information on the timing of bans along with data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the American Community Survey (ACS) to estimate the effects of such bans on college enrollment and educational attainment.
(cont.) I use a triple difference strategy that uses whites as a comparison group for underrepresented minorities and that exploits variation in the bans over states and across time. I find no adverse impact of bans on overall minority college attendance rates and educational attainment relative to whites, and I find no effect of the bans on minority enrollment in public colleges or four-year colleges.
by Peter Hinrichs.
Ph.D.

The first chapter proposes a theory on how students’ social background affects school teaching and job opportunities. We study a set-up where students differ in ability and social background, and we analyse the interaction between a school and an employer. Students with disadvantaged background are penalised compared to other students: they receive less teaching and/or are less likely to be hired. A surprising result is that policy aiming to subsidise education for disadvantaged students might in fact decrease their job opportunities. The second chapter argues that assortative matching can explain over-education. Education determines individuals’ income and, due to the presence of assortative matching, the quality of the partner, who can be a colleague or a spouse. Thus an individual acquires some education to improve the expected partner’s quality. But since everybody does that, the expected partner’s quality does not increases and over-education emerges. Public intervention can solve over-education through a progressive income tax. The third chapter examines how higher education affects job and marital satisfaction. We build up a model with assortative matching where individuals decide whether to attend university both for obtaining job satisfaction and for increasing the probability to be matched with an educated partner. The theoretical results suggest that, as assortative matching increases, the number of educated individuals increases, their job satisfaction falls while their marital satisfaction increases. We test our model using the British Household Panel Survey data for the years 2003-2006. Our empirical findings support the theoretical results.

This PhD thesis consists of three independently written chapters. The first investigates the effect of centralised pay regulation of teachers on school performance, finding schools add less value to their pupils in areas where teachers' outside options are higher. The second chapter uses a discrete choice dynamic model to investigate the effect of a severe budget cut to a conditional cash transfer programme in England that paid young people from low-income households to attend post-compulsory schooling. The structural estimate of the effect on participation is found to be similar to reduced-form equivalent comparing England with the rest of the UK. The structural approach has the advantage of further counterfactual policy analysis, from which a policy alternative of removing the over-16 element of the Child Benefit is highlighted as a potentially superior alternative. Finally, the third chapter tests a new approximation technique for estimating large discrete choice dynamic models. The new technique is found to perform well compared to the incumbent technique that is most commonly applied in the literature and is shown to potentially be considerably faster.

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Esta tese contém três artigos que investigam problemas relacionados à Economia do Trabalho, Desenvolvimento Econômico e Economia da Educação.
In this paper we study the allocation of public expenditures across educational stages in a developing country. We construct a general equilibrium model that features heterogeneous agents, credit restrictions, basic and tertiary education, public and private educational institutions. We calibrate the model’s parameters using Brazilian data. Simulations show three of the model’s features. First, economic inequality is mainly explained through endogenous educational decisions, instead of exogenous ability shocks. Second, abolishing public educational institutions contracts GDP by 5.5%, decreases welfare of households in the first income quartile by 7%, and does not affect significantly the welfare of the remaining households. Third, borrowing constraints are tight for the poorest agents in the economy. In the main exercise, we find that reallocating public expenditures from tertiary towards basic education to mimic Denmark’s allocation of public expenditures across educational stages decreases GDP, aggregate welfare and the Gini coefficient by 1.5%, 0.2% and 2%, respectively.

Nowadays and more generally, discrepancies in economic growth between otherwise similar countries are vast and in a large extent unexplained by economic theory. Economists in their endeavour of disentangling this puzzle bring education in the frontline as empirical evidence indicates that in some cases reforms in education are significant in explaining shifts in economic performance. This thesis consists of three papers which address different questions in related fields regarding the economics of education. The second chapter of this thesis concerns the effect of releasing information to students about their relative performance within their school and nationwide. Knowing how one's characteristics compare to those of other individuals is important in every setting of economic decision making. This chapter examines the effects of providing relative performance information on students' short and long term outcomes. I exploit a large scale natural experiment that took place in Greece. Using unique primary data on students' performance throughout senior high school, we find an asymmetric response to feedback: high-achieving students improve their final-year performance by 0.15 of a standard deviation, whereas the final-year performance of low-achieving students drops by 0.3 of a standard deviation. The results are consistently more pronounced for females indicating greater sensitivity to feedback. I also document the long-term effects of feedback: high-achieving students reduce their repetition rate for the national exams; they enrol into university departments that are more selective by 0.15 of a standard deviation and their expected annual earnings increase by 0.17 of a standard deviation. By contrast, the results for low-achieving students are negative. I provide suggestive evidence that feedback encourages students from low-income neighbourhoods to enrol in university and to study in higher-quality programs, which may, in the long run, reduce income inequality. The third chapter of this thesis examines the extent to which college decisions among adolescents depend on the decisions of their peers. In the recent years, the importance of one's group of peers-be that friends, colleagues, neighbors- has been widely emphasized in the literature. In this paper, I ask whether individuals derive utility from conformity in college enrolment. I propose a new methodology in mitigating re ection and endogeneity issues in identifying social interactions. The instrument that I propose is the percentage of females in one's school, neighbourhood and preferacture the year before. Evidence from the psychology literature support our assumption that the prevalence of females creates a less violent and disruptive environment. I exploit a special institutional setting, in which schools are very close to each other, allowing for students from different schools to interact. I investigate utility spillovers from the educational choices of students in consecutive cohorts. Spatial variation allows us to identify social interactions in groups of various sizes, using a new dataset that spans the universe of high school graduates. I find positive and significant externalities in the decision to enrol in college among peers who belong to the same social group. Results indicate that students who attend high school with 10% more classmates who enrol in college are 4.5 % percentage points more likely to themselves attend college. In the forth chapter, I investigate the causal effect of school attendance on students' performance. I exploit a natural experiment that changed the school absences allowance for the high achieving students in order to identify the effect of school attendance on educational outcomes. I use a novel dataset that contains class attendance information about students in eleventh and twelfth grade. The natural experiment took place in Greece in 2007 and provided higher performing students with 50 more hours of excused absences from school. I start off by using a Regression Discontinuity approach in order to measure the change in total absences and exam score due to the reform around the cut-off. The regression discontinuity cannot find an effect around the cut-off. The reason behind that is that the effect might not be caused by students around the threshold but by students in the right tail of the performance distribution. Next, I employ a combination of differences-in-differences and instrumental variables techniques in order to identify returns to absences. Our estimates show significant negative returns to absences.

Le premier chapitre de cette thèse s'intéresse à l'impact des biais dans les pratiques d'évaluation des enseignants en fonction du sexe des élèves, sur le progrès des élèves, leurs choix scolaires, et les inégalités de réussite entre filles et garçons. Le second chapitre s'intéresse au processus d'affectation des enseignants français dans les académies puis les établissements. Ce chapitre présente l'algorithme utilisé actuellement par le ministère pour affecter les enseignants, en souligne les limites en termes de mobilité, et présente une classe de mécanismes d'affectation alternatifs. Nous montrons les propriétés de ces mécanismes, et analysons empiriquement, l'impact qu'aurait le passage de l'algorithme actuel à l'un des algorithmes alternatifs que nous suggérons. Le dernier chapitre enrichit le second en incorporant des différences d'attractivité entre académies dans l'algorithme. Cela permet de finement réguler les flux annuels de sortie d'enseignants de ces académies
The first chapter of this thesis examines the impact of teacher gender bias on students' progress, their schooling trajectories, and achievement inequalities between boys and girls. The second chapter looks at the algorithm used in France to assign teachers to regions and then to schools. This chapter presents the algorithm currently used, emphasizes its limits in terms of mobility, and presents a class of alternative allocation mechanisms. We show what the properties of these mechanisms are, and empirically analyze what would be the impact of a transition from the current algorithm to an alternative algorithms on teachers' welfare, schools' welfare and fairness. The last chapter enriches the second one by incorporating differences in attractiveness between regions in the algorithm. This allows to finely regulate the annual outgoing flow of teachers in these regions

This dissertation includes three essays in the field of economics of education. The first essay provides estimates of the long-run impacts of tracking high-achieving students using data from a Boston Public Schools (BPS) program, Advanced Work Class (AWC). AWC is an accelerated curriculum in 4th through 6th grades with dedicated classrooms. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach based on the AWC entrance exam, I find that AWC has little impact on test scores. However, it improves longer-term academic outcomes including Algebra 1 enrollment by 8th grade, AP exam taking, and college enrollment. The college enrollment effect is particularly large for elite institutions. Testing potential channels for program effects provides suggestive evidence that teacher effectiveness and math acceleration account for AWC effects, with little evidence that peer effects contribute to gains. The second essay uses item-level information from standardized tests to investigate whether large test score gains attributed to Boston charter schools can be explained by score inflation. To do so, I estimate the impact of charter school attendance on subscales of the test scores and examine them for evidence of score inflation. If charter schools are teaching to the test to a greater extent than their counterparts, one would expect to see higher scores on commonly tested standards, higher stakes subjects, and frequently tested topics. However, despite incentives to reallocate effort toward highly-tested content, and to coach to item type, I find no evidence of this type of test preparation. Boston charter middle schools perform consistently across all standardized test subscales. The third essay analyzes a Massachusetts merit aid program that gives high-scoring students tuition waivers at in-state public colleges with lower graduation rates than available alternative colleges. A regression discontinuity design comparing students just above and below the eligibility threshold finds that students are remarkably willing to forgo college quality and that scholarship use actually lowered college completion rates. These results suggest that college quality affects college completion rates. The theoretical prediction that in-kind subsidies of public institutions can reduce consumption of the subsidized good is shown to be empirically important.
Public Policy

Le résumé en français n'a pas été communiqué par l'auteur
This thesis is composed of three chapters. The first two chapters consider specific aspects of the educational path and how these relate to, in the first case, earnings and occupation choice and, in the second, progress through school. The third chapter studies how variations in municipal finance affect investments in education. The first chapter of this thesis estimates the importance of two aspects of human capital accumulation: the acquisition of job-related skills, and the student's discovery of his relative abilities across disciplines. Specifically, we measure whether additional years of multi-disciplinary education help students make a better choice of specialization, and at what cost in foregone specialized human capital. We document that, in the cross section, students who choose their major later are more likely to change fields on the labor market. We then build and estimate a dynamic model of college education which captures the tradeoff between discovering comparative advantage and acquiring occupation-specific skills. Estimates suggest that delaying specialization is informative, although noisy. Working in the field of comparative advantage accounts for up to 20% of a well-matched worker's earnings. While education is transferable across fields with only a 10% penalty, workers who wish to change fields incur a large, one-time cost. The second chapter considers the impact of automatically promoting young children from one grade level to the next on retention and grade progression in primary school. Exploiting variation in grade repetition practices in Brazil, we study the effect of automatic promotion cycles on grade attainment and academic persistence of primary school children. The dynamic policy environment allows us to estimate the impact of the policy when applied at different times during schooling, both in the short term and as children exposed to the policy progress through primary school. We find that automatic promotion increases grade attainment: one year of exposure to the policy is associated with 3 students out of 100 studying one grade level above where they would be absent the policy. This effect persists over time, and cumulates with further exposure to the policy. The third chapter moves away from students to focus on education infrastructure. In the paper we seek to answer the question of how transfers from the federal government in Brazil affect both education spending and the resources available for education at the municipal level. We find that increased transfers lead to an immediate rise in current and capital spending. These increases are focused on education and welfare expenditure in poorer municipalities, while richer municipalities expand capital spending in the transport and housing sectors. Furthermore, particularly in wealthier municipalities, increases in transfers cause a short-term increase in local tax revenues. Positive transfer shocks are associated with increases in the number of teachers and, to a lesser extent, the number of classrooms. Transfers are also associated with substantial re-allocation of resources across schools offering classes at different levels, with secondary schools and schools teaching senior primary grades expanding at the expense of junior primary schools

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2019
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "The third chapter (co-authored with Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak)"--Page 3.
Includes bibliographical references.
This thesis consists of three chapters that study how characteristics of peers and schools affect human capital. The first chapter reports estimates of academic and social peer effects from a large-scale field experiment at selective boarding schools in Peru. The experimental design overcomes some methodological challenges in the peer effects literature. I randomly varied the characteristics of neighbors in dormitories with two treatments: (a) less or more sociable peers (identified by their position in the school's friendship network before the intervention) and (b) lower- or higher-achieving peers (identified by admission test scores). While more sociable peers enhance the formation of social skills, higher-achieving peers do not improve academic achievement; in fact, they further reduce the academic performance of lower-achieving students. These results appear to be driven by students' self-confidence.
The second chapter studies whether students prefer friends who are similar to them and whether these preferences persist when students have to interact frequently. I use network surveys and exploit variation in the exact position of the students in the allocation to dormitories at selective boarding schools in Peru. Students are more likely to form social relations with peers who are of their same poverty status, academic level, and sociability. However, students who are neighbors in the allocation to dormitories are more likely to become friends, and this occurs regardless of their type. Furthermore, being exposed to peers of a different type also encourages more diverse friendships and study groups that go beyond the neighbors in the dormitories. The third chapter (co-authored with Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak) evaluates mismatch in Chicago's selective public exam schools, which admit students using neighborhood-based diversity criteria as well as test scores.
Regression discontinuity estimates for applicants favored by affirmative action indeed show no gains in reading and substantial negative effects of exam school attendance on math scores. These results hold for more selective schools and for applicants most likely to benefit from affirmative-action, a pattern suggestive of mismatch. However, exam school effects in Chicago are explained by the high quality of schools attended by applicants who are not offered an exam school seat. Specifically, mismatch arises because exam school admission diverts many applicants from high-performing Noble Network charter schools, where they would have done well.
by Román Andrés Zárate.
Ph. D.
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics

Research and policy-making in education have historically focused on quantitative measures of education when assessing the state of education across countries. Recently, large-scale cross-national tests of cognitive skills have emerged as one way of moving beyond mere quantitative indicators of education, and instead allow researchers to incorporate qualitative elements of education, most notably what students know and can do. Notwithstanding the above, research and development initiatives too often assess these complementary aspects separately, which can lead to biased conclusions. To resolve this issue, the research presented here follows the method developed by Spaull and Taylor (2015) and provides composite measures of educational quantity (grade completion) and quality (learning outcomes) for six Francophone African countries. These composite measures are termed access to literacy and access to numeracy for literacy and numeracy rates respectively. This work also explores quantity and quality indicators separately to ascertain whether problems of access to schooling, or problems of quality among those already enrolled, is a more pertinent development issue. Finally, this work also contributes to understanding the extent and nature of inequalities, by looking at gender and socioeconomic status groups separately when considering (1) access, (2) learning outcomes, and (3) a composite measure of access and learning. Results of this work point to an education crisis within these African countries where both non-enrolment and a lack of learning within schools are contributing to dismal educational outcomes, even at the grade 2 level but especially at the grade 5 level. For example, only 18% and 25% of the grade 5 cohort investigated have access to literacy and access to numeracy, respectively, in Togo. Furthermore, inequality within socioeconomic groups is extremely large resulting in near zero estimates of competency levels for the most economically disadvantaged in some countries. Gender discrimination is dwarfed by economic discrimination but mean estimates suggest that while educational opportunities are similar for males and females at a grade 2 level, gender discrimination may already be visible at the grade 5 level.

The first of these three papers is an empirical study estimating the impact of peer academic support on university course grades. Results suggest that, on average, about twelve peer academic support sessions increase a student's course grade by approximately one full grade point, holding constant a student's academic ability and socioeconomic status. Supplemental instruction is potentially a more effective method of peer academic support than individual peer academic support sessions and low-performing students benefit more from peer academic support than high-performing students.

The second paper analyzes the educational impact of Native American tribal casino in Washington State. We empirically study the effect tribal casinos have on the dropout rate of schools located near tribal casinos. Next we examine the impact on the dropout rate from per capita payments. Since each federally recognized tribes is a sovereign nations, each tribe makes its own laws governing the payout of these payments. These payments are largely funded by casinos. In Washington State all tribes that make per capita payments put minor tribal member's payments in trust funds that are not technically accessible until the minor child turns 18. These trust funds are having an effect on the dropout rate of young Native American adults.

The third paper examines the effect of the gender of the student, tutor and professor on the duration between tutoring sessions. Results suggest that the female students have a shorter duration between tutoring sessions. The gender of the tutor or the gender of the instructor had no effect on our results however if the student and instructor were the same gender the duration between tutoring sessions shorter. This was true for both male and female students.

Questa tesi è una raccolta di due capitoli che indagano due temi distinti di ricerca in economia del lavoro e dell'istruzione. Nel primo capitolo, si studiano gli effetti causali di una nuova politica di ammissione selettiva introdotta presso il Dipartimento di Economia di una importante università private situata nel nord d'Italia. Si trovano significativi miglioramenti nei risultati accademici degli studenti del primo anno che sono esposti alla nuova politica di ammissione in termini di una riduzione del tasso di abbandono scolastico e di un aumento dei crediti compiuti. Nel secondo capitolo di questa tesi, da un'altra parte, si fornisce un'evidenza recente sulla struttura dinamica e di autocovarianza del reddito di lavoro maschile italiano e si caratterizzano gli shock sul reddito del lavoro per tutto il ciclo di vita sfruttando dei dati amministrativa di grande scala provenienti dagli archivi dell'INPS. Osserviamo un aumento sostanziale della varianza del reddito degli individui di età compresa tra 50 e 60 anni. Tali risultati suggeriscono che questo aumento della varianza è guidato dall'aumento della varianza sia del componente transitorio che permanente della disuguaglianza di reddito. Tuttavia, l'accelerazione per gli individui sopra i 50 anni è causato dalla fluttuazione della varianza dei shock transitori.
This thesis is a collection of two chapters that investigate two different research topics in labor and education economics. In the first chapter, we study the causal effects of a new selective admission policy introduced in the Department of Economics at a leading private university located in the North of Italy. We find significant improvements in the academic outcomes of first year students who are exposed to this new admission policy in terms of reduction in the drop-out rate and increase in the average credits. In the second chapter of this thesis, on the other hand, we provide up-to-date evidence on the dynamic and autocovariance structures of Italian males' labor income and characterize labor income shocks over the life-cycle by exploiting a large-scale administrative data from the archives of Italian Social Security Administration (INPS). We observe a substantial increase in the variance of log-incomes of individuals between the ages of 50 and 60. Our results suggest that the latter increase in the variance is driven by the increases in the variances of both transitory and permanent components of income inequality. However, the accelerating pattern after age 50 is caused by the fluctuations in the variance of transitory shocks.

Questa tesi è una raccolta di due capitoli che indagano due temi distinti di ricerca in economia del lavoro e dell'istruzione. Nel primo capitolo, si studiano gli effetti causali di una nuova politica di ammissione selettiva introdotta presso il Dipartimento di Economia di una importante università private situata nel nord d'Italia. Si trovano significativi miglioramenti nei risultati accademici degli studenti del primo anno che sono esposti alla nuova politica di ammissione in termini di una riduzione del tasso di abbandono scolastico e di un aumento dei crediti compiuti. Nel secondo capitolo di questa tesi, da un'altra parte, si fornisce un'evidenza recente sulla struttura dinamica e di autocovarianza del reddito di lavoro maschile italiano e si caratterizzano gli shock sul reddito del lavoro per tutto il ciclo di vita sfruttando dei dati amministrativa di grande scala provenienti dagli archivi dell'INPS. Osserviamo un aumento sostanziale della varianza del reddito degli individui di età compresa tra 50 e 60 anni. Tali risultati suggeriscono che questo aumento della varianza è guidato dall'aumento della varianza sia del componente transitorio che permanente della disuguaglianza di reddito. Tuttavia, l'accelerazione per gli individui sopra i 50 anni è causato dalla fluttuazione della varianza dei shock transitori.
This thesis is a collection of two chapters that investigate two different research topics in labor and education economics. In the first chapter, we study the causal effects of a new selective admission policy introduced in the Department of Economics at a leading private university located in the North of Italy. We find significant improvements in the academic outcomes of first year students who are exposed to this new admission policy in terms of reduction in the drop-out rate and increase in the average credits. In the second chapter of this thesis, on the other hand, we provide up-to-date evidence on the dynamic and autocovariance structures of Italian males' labor income and characterize labor income shocks over the life-cycle by exploiting a large-scale administrative data from the archives of Italian Social Security Administration (INPS). We observe a substantial increase in the variance of log-incomes of individuals between the ages of 50 and 60. Our results suggest that the latter increase in the variance is driven by the increases in the variances of both transitory and permanent components of income inequality. However, the accelerating pattern after age 50 is caused by the fluctuations in the variance of transitory shocks.

Education today is inseparable from the accumulation of human capital. The New York Times called human capital the most important asset in our portfolio. In my dissertation, I analyze the effectiveness of different educational policies and programs in Mexico and the United States. In the first chapter of my dissertation I study the differences in the academic performance of students in the double-shift schooling system in Mexico. The double-shift schooling system is a common policy in countries with constrained resources. This policy is viewed as a way to serve more students. In Mexico, people believe that the morning shift provides better educational opportunities than the afternoon shift. This belief and, as a result, the excess demand for the morning shift have created a biased selection of better students into the morning session. The results suggest that a non-random assignment of students to schooling sessions explains the apparent academic inequality between students from different sessions. The second chapter of my dissertation evaluates the Gifted and Talented Program in the elementary schools of TUSD. Gifted education and tracking ability programs have attracted a great deal of attention from education and economic researchers. However, there is no definite conclusion about the effects of these programs. In addition, the program placement is likely to be endogenous with respect to outcomes. The results suggest that there is a positive effect of the self-contained program, however, the instrumental variables estimation show no evidence of the effect. In the third chapter I study school preferences under the open enrollment policy in the U. S. Some of the nation's largest districts are forced to close schools because of declines in student enrollment and budget cuts. Public schools are losing enrollment to charter schools. Moreover, under the open enrollment law students are opting out to other, more attractive, neighboring districts. In order to keep schools open the school administration needs to understand what characteristics of schools would attract and keep students in schools. The results show that students are more likely to choose big schools in wealthier neighborhoods, with low mobility rates, and higher average scores.