Using information on birth and kindergarten start dates to generate an exogenous measure of the relative age of a student's peer group, we find that, controlling for age, females with older peers are more likely to use substances than females with younger peers. Because there is no reason to suspect that birth and kindergarten start dates should be correlated with the choice of school, the socioeconomic status of a child's peers, or neighborhood unobservables, we view our results with regard to females as providing support for the idea that peer behavior can be contagious.
This paper develops a framework to understand the role of interpersonal interactions in the labor market including task assignment and wages. Effective interpersonal interactions involve caring, to establish cooperation, and at the same time directness, to communicate in an unambiguous way. The ability to perform these tasks varies with personality and the importance of these tasks varies across jobs. An assignment model shows that people are most productive in jobs that match their style and earn less when they have to shift to other jobs. An oversupply of one attribute relative to the other reduces wages for people who are better with the attribute in greater supply. We present evidence that youth sociability affects job assignment in adulthood. The returns to interpersonal interactions are consistent with the assignment model.
This article uses a feature of the French system in which some novice teachers start their jobs before receiving any training. Moreover, thanks to administrative mistakes in forecasting the number of teachers, trained and untrained novice teachers are similar in 1991. We show that they are assigned to similar classes. In addition, we show that the same sample can be used to estimate the causal effect of class size. Our findings are: (1) teachers' training substantially improves students' test scores in mathematics, except for initially low-achieving students; (2) a small class is beneficial to students, especially to low-achieving ones.
We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the standard requires costly effort, secondary education needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools, as in Epple and Romano, 1998. An alternative configuration, with public schools offering a higher educational standard than private schools, is also possible, in spite of the fact that tuition levied by private schools is strictly positive. In our model, private schools can offer a lower educational standard at a positive price because they attract students with a relatively high cost of effort, who would find the high standards of the public school excessively demanding. With the key parameters calibrated on the available micro-econometric evidence from the US, our model predicts that majority voting in the US supports a system with high quality private schools and low quality public schools, as assumed by Epple and Romano, 1998. This system, however, is not the one that would be selected by the social planner, who prefers high quality public schools combined with low quality private schools.
Using self-reported academic cheating from the classes of 1959 through 2002 at the three major United States military service academies (Air Force, Army, and Navy), we measure how peer cheating influences individual cheating behavior. We find higher levels of peer cheating result in a substantially increased probability that an individual will cheat. One additional college student who cheated in high school drives approximately 0.33 to 0.47 additional college students to cheat. One additional college cheater drives approximately 0.61 to 0.75 additional college students to cheat. These results imply, in equilibrium, the social multiplier for academic cheating is approximately three.
A large literature examines the link between shocks to households and the educational attainment of children. We use new panel data to estimate the impact of shocks to teachers on student learning in Mathematics and English. Using absenteeism in the 30 days preceding the survey as a measure of these shocks, we find no impact for the full sample, but a large impact for a subsample for which we can control for unobserved changes in teacher heterogeneity: A 5 percent increase in the teacher’s absence rate reduces learning by 4 to 8 percent of average gains over the year. Health problems—primarily teachers’ own illness and the illnesses of their family members—account for more than 60 percent of teacher absences. This is not surprising in a country struggling with an HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Peer effects have figured prominently in debates on school vouchers, desegregation, ability tracking, and antipoverty programs. Compelling evidence of their existence remains scarce for plaguing endogeneity issues such as selection bias and the reflection problem. This paper is among the first to firmly establish the link between peer performance and student achievement, using a unique data set from China. We find strong evidence that peer effects exist and operate in a positive and nonlinear manner; reducing the variation of peer performance increases achievement; and our semiparametric estimates clarify the trade-offs facing policymakers in exploiting positive peer effects to increase future achievement.
This paper analyses the relationship between school resources and school characteristics in compulsory schooling. We argue that it is inherently difficult to estimate a “cost function” that can predict how much it costs to deliver a given level of output in terms of student performance. The literature has not established a convincing positive relationship between school production and school financial resources. Instead, it is possible to estimate a reduced form model relating resource use per student to different school and student body characteristics, leaving aside school outputs from the model. By condition on school district fixed effects, effectively eliminating from the model variation in demand for education across school districts, this model can be interpreted as a within-district “allocation model” of school spending. We use data from Norway and find that resource use is diminishing within the whole range of school size observed. Further, the results clearly show that extra resources are allocated to minority students and students with special needs.
Evidence on teacher behavior is essential for the understanding of the performance of school systems. In this paper we utilize rich data to study the teachers’ quit decision in Norway. We distinguish between decisions to move between public schools within school districts, to another school district in the same labor market region, across labor market regions, and whether to leave public schools. The results indicate that the quit propensity to all four destinations is negatively related to student performance. The result is qualitatively independent of whether student performance is measured by exam results or teacher graduation.
This paper explores the relationship between teacher testing and teacher effectiveness using a unique data set that links teachers to their individual students. The findings show a positive relationship between some teacher licensure tests and student achievement. But, they also suggest that states face significant tradeoffs when they require particular performance levels as a precondition to becoming a teacher. Some teachers whom we might wish were not in the teacher work force based on their contribution toward student achievement are eligible to teach based on their performance on the tests; other individuals who would be effective teachers are ineligible. For example, the results suggest that upping the elementary teacher licensure test standard from the one currently used in North Carolina to the higher standard used in Connecticut would lead to the exclusion of less than 0.5 percent of the teacher work force estimated to be very ineffective teachers, but would also result in the exclusion of 7 percent of the teacher work force estimated to be effective teachers.
In this paper, we describe the results of a study assessing the relationship between the certification of teachers by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and elementary-level student achievement. We examine whether NBPTS assesses the most effective applicants, whether certification by NBPTS serves as a signal of teacher quality, and whether completing the NBPTS assessment process serves as a catalyst for increasing teacher effectiveness. We find consistent evidence that NBPTS is identifying the more effective teacher applicants and that National Board Certified Teachers are generally more effective than teachers who never applied to the program. The statistical significance and magnitude of the "NBPTS effect," however, differs significantly by grade level and student type. We do not find evidence that the NBPTS certification process itself does anything to increase teacher effectiveness.
This paper uses a feature of the French system in which some novice teachers start their jobs before receiving any training. Moreover, thanks to administrative mistakes in forecasting the number of teachers, trained and untrained novice teachers are similar in 1991. We show that they are assigned to similar classes. In addition, we show that the same sample can be used to estimate the causal effect of class size. Our findings are: (1) teachers’ training substantially improves students’ test scores in mathematics, except for initially low-achieving students; (2) a small class is beneficial to students, especially to low-achieving ones.
We provide an assessment of the French ZEP (Zones d’Education Prioritaire), a program started in 1982 that channels additional resources to schools in disadvantaged areas and encourages the development of new teaching projects. Focusing on middle-schools, we first evaluate the impact of the ZEP status on resources, their utilization (teacher bonuses versus teaching hours) and key establishments characteristics such as class sizes, school enrolments, teachers’ qualifications and experience, and student composition and mobility. We then estimate the impact of the ZEP program on four measures of individual student achievement: obtaining at least one diploma by the end of schooling, reaching 8th grade, reaching 10th grade and success at the Baccalauréat (the national examination at the end of high school). We take into account the endogeneity of the ZEP status by using both difference in differences and instrumental variables based on political variables. The results are the same in all cases: there is no impact on student success of the ZEP program.
Despite its high relevance to current policy debates, estimating the causal effect of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) investment on educational standards remains fraught with difficulties. We exploit a change in the rules governing ICT funding across different school districts of England to devise an Instrumental Variable strategy to identify the causal impact of ICT expenditure on pupil outcomes. The approach identifies the effect of being a 'winner' or a 'loser' in the new system of ICT funding allocation to schools. Our findings suggest a positive impact on primary school performance in English and Science, though not for Mathematics. Copyright 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation Royal Economic Society 2007.
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This paper reviews international evidence on the effects of expenditures and class size on student achievement. International student achievement tests such as the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams provide rich data on student performance and family background and on school resources in countries around the world. The paper uses those data to present both the aggregate picture and microeconometric evidence on the association between educational expenditures and student performance. The aggregate results suggest that higher educational expenditures are not systematically associated with superior student performance across countries or over time.
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