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Author: Lars John Lefgren
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Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Author: Lars John Lefgren
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Author: Ricardo Meilman Lomaz Cohn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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This thesis is composed of three essays on economics of education. The first chapter is co-authored with Ciro Avitabile and Jesse Cunha and investigates the medium-term impact of early-life welfare transfers on children's learning. It studies children who were exposed to the randomized controlled trial of the Mexico's Food Support Program (Programa de Apoyo Alimentario), in which households were assigned to receive cash, in-kind food transfers, or nothing (a control). The findings show that in-kind transfers did not impact test scores, while cash transfers led to a significant and meaningful decrease in test scores. An analysis of the mechanisms driving these results reveals that both transfers led to an increase in child labor, which is likely detrimental to learning. In-kind food transfers, however, induced a greater consumption of several key micronutrients that are vital for brain development, which likely attenuated the negative impacts of child labor on learning. The second chapter, jointly with Jane Friesen and Simon Woodcock, studies sorting, peer effects and school effectiveness under a universal voucher program. Using student-level longitudinal data for the population of students enrolled in private and public schools, we estimate a model of test scores that includes student effects, school effects and peer effects. Our results provide both the first estimates of the contribution of peer ability to private school effectiveness and a novel set of estimates of the effect of private school cream-skimming on the achievement of public school students under a mature voucher program. We find evidence of substantial sorting that contributes meaningfully to achievement at private schools via peer effects but has little effect on the average outcomes of those left behind in public schools. The third chapter investigates the effect of a policy-induced increase in public school competition on private school enrollment and budget outcomes. I exploit a natural experiment created by the introduction of an open enrollment policy that expanded public school choice opportunities and increased competitive pressure on private schools. Using a new data set constructed from mandatory nonprofit information returns and school enrollment records, I find that an increase in public school competition modestly reduces private school enrollment. Catholic school enrollment is most responsive to increased public school choice, whereas other private schools such as Christian and other faith schools experience no reduction in enrollment. The negative enrollment effects are concentrated among high school age students. I find no evidence that private schools respond to this increased public school choice by adjusting their revenue and spending choices.
Author: Cristelle A. A. Kouame
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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This dissertation, in the standard three-essay format, covers three loosely connected topics that focus on education outcomes and the quality of a country's institutions in facilitating access to sanitation in Africa. Chapter 1 attempts to estimate peer effects on student effort. I present a structural model of friendship networks in which I introduce a student grade point average (GPA) as a positive function of the student's effort and their own characteristics. I show that my model is functionally different from the standard model as it captures heterogeneity based on whether students have friends or not. I estimate peer effects using the first wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and by applying the generalized method of moments (GMM) approach. I find that on average, a one-point increase in the mean GPA of student's peers induces the student to increase their effort that in turn increase their own GPA by 0.856 points. I also find that the estimated endogenous peer effect coefficient is significantly larger than the estimated coefficient obtained under the standard model. Furthermore, I consider an alternative specification by controlling for network endogeneity. I find that the size of the estimated peer effect does not change much. My results are robust and provide a consistent and efficient measure of peer effects, which can inform the efficiency of network-targeted public policies. Chapter 2 examines whether expansion in institutional quality broadens access to improved sanitation in Sub-Sahara Africa. This is a published paper with two co-authors. This paper employs a dynamic panel-data model and data from 44 Sub-Sahara African countries over the period 2002-2015 to estimate the direct effect of institutional quality on access to sanitation. The estimation techniques control for potential endogeneity of regressors and country-specific effects. The results indicate that institutional quality promotes access to improved sanitation with control of corruption, regulatory quality, and voice and accountability playing the most significant roles. The results also show a dichotomy between rural and urban areas in which aspects of institutions increase access to sanitation. Specifically, in urban areas, the populace's ability to participate in selecting government and expressing freedom through associations and free media drives access to sanitation. In contrast, efficient curbing of corruption, increasing rule of law, and enhancing the capacity of governments to formulate and implement sound policies facilitate access to sanitation in rural areas. This dichotomy generates important policy implications as countries move towards achieving the Sustainable Development goal, universal access to improved sanitation.Finally, Chapter 3 estimates partial correlation of teacher quality and language of instruction on student learning deprivation. I use a unique primary school-level dataset on standardized test scores of Senegalese and Mauritanian grade 4 students and teachers (cross-sectional data). Learning deprivation is a dichotomous variable that takes the value 1 if a student reading test score falls below the minimum reading proficiency level, and 0 if otherwise. An instrumental-variable probit model controls to some extent for the endogeneity of teacher quality due to unobserved school-specific factors correlated with both teacher quality and learning deprivation. After controlling for a range of student, socioeconomic, school, district and regional related variables, I find that a decrease of one in the average teacher test score at the school level (teacher quality) is associated with an increase of the likelihood of a student's being learning deprived by 6.05 percentage points. I also show that the learning deprivation of a student who is taught in French is 98 percentage points higher than that of a student who is taught in a familiar language, (i.e., Arabic). The results suggest that policymakers in developing countries should focus on teachers' subject knowledge in teacher recruitment, training, and compensation policies. They also shed light on the importance of using a familiar language.
Author: Curtis Lockwood Reynolds
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Author: Regina R. Umpstead
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education and state
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Author: Alex Johann
Publisher:
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Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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The two arms of my dissertation research are on bringing the role of neighborhood peers and cohort exposure into the school context and investigating gender gaps in noncognitive skills. Both projects are united in expanding our understanding of human capital. Much of the research in the economics of education focuses on the efficacy of specific policies, which is valuable in its own right. However, my research looks upstream of existing policy frameworks to better understand human capital accumulation at a more fundamental level. Through this approach, my dissertation research helps devise new frameworks and tools that not only build upon our current successes but also expand the bounds of what we think is possible.In my first chapter, In the School, Down the Block: Achievement Effects of Peers in the School, Neighborhood, and Cohort, I estimate the effect of mean peer ability on students? test scores using data on all Michigan public school students over thirteen years. I consider peers in the same cohort at school?as well as peers in adjacent cohorts, and peers living on the same block. I contribute two novel findings to the literature. First, school peer effects are much stronger than block effects. For peers in the same cohort, the school effect is 10 times larger. Second, cohort membership plays a substantial role in determining peer influence in schools but not in neighborhoods. For students in the same school, the adjacent-cohort peer effect is 40-80% smaller than the same-cohort effect. Meanwhile, for students living on the same block, peer effects are similar, regardless of cohort. These results are robust to a regression discontinuity design focusing on students near the birthdate cutoff for entry into kindergarten. I also find evidence that peers in the older cohort matter more than peers in the younger cohort, particularly in the school context, suggesting that relative age also plays a role in determining peer influence.My second and third chapters, Equalizing Inputs, Enduring Gaps: Examining Changes in Levels and Correlates of Gender Gaps in Noncognitive Skills Over Time and Raising Boys, Raising Girls: Modeling Gender Differences in the Process of Early Childhood Skill Formation, approach the issue of gender gaps in noncognitive skills with two alternative analytic frameworks. In both papers, I leverage the smaller but more in-depth ECLS-K datasets to combine information on teacher-reported noncognitive skills in elementary school with background characteristics and extensive data on parental education activities. The second chapter, Equalizing Inputs, Enduring Gaps: Examining Changes in Levels and Correlates of Gender Gaps in Noncognitive Skills Over Time, takes a more descriptive and correlative approach by examining changes over time in boy-girl gender gaps between the two waves of the ECLS-K survey, finding that gender gaps in noncognitive skills remain large and persistent between the 1998-1999 and 2010-2011 nationally representative kindergarten cohorts. Additionally, I use factor analysis and Oaxaca- Blinder decomposition to examine changes in observable inputs to noncognitive skills over time and find that changes in these inputs would predict a narrowing of gender gaps between the two cohorts, despite no such change occurring.℗ My third chapter, Raising Boys, Raising Girls: Modeling Gender Differences in the Dynamic Process of Early Childhood Skill Formation, uses a more structural approach on the same datasets to attempt to provide an answer to the mystery raised in the first: if our usual predictors do not appear valid, what causes gender gaps in noncognitive skills? Differences in inputs? Or differences in production functions? Specifically, I apply the Technology of Skill Formation model proposed by Cunha and Heckman (2008) that takes a Markov chain approach and incorporates both cognitive and noncognitive skills to estimate parameters of skill investment over time. This approach leverages the panel structure of the ECLS-K datasets as well as the availability of both cognitive and noncognitive skill measures. Results are inconclusive, as correctly measuring and determining meaningful parental inputs in the investment process is tricky. I test the robustness of the Cunha and Heckman (2008) model to modeling assumptions and measurement of parental inputs, and find 1) the value-added model sufficiently captures the process of skill formation, relative to the cumulative model of Todd and Wolpin (2003), and 2) parental investment as captured by the measures available in the ECLS-K do not have a statistically detectable impact on the formation of noncognitive skills, regardless of the specification used.
Author:
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ISBN:
Category : Dissertation abstracts
Languages : en
Pages : 776
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Author: Rokhaya Dieye
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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The aim of this thesis is to investigate identification of peer effects and their application on a large set of outcomes, going from school attendance to obesity. The relevance of this research relies on three main points: 1) it allows better measurrement of effects stemming from social interactions, thus providing some answer to the numerous econometric issues that make the study of peer effects a lot challenging; 2) it improves our comprehension of negative social phenomena, including the incidence of school dropouts and obesity; 3) it proposes better public policies aiming at fighting against such phenomena by exploiting social network effects that contribute to amplify them. The different objectives of this thesis are investigated in three different chapters. The first chapter proposes a new strategy for estimating the influence of the social network on individual decisions in a network context using randomized experiments. It combinates the structural social network model developed by Bramoullé et al. [2009] and randomized experiments. New identification conditions that mostly require balance in the characteristics of friends between treatment and control groups are provided. The model is estimated and validated on experimental data collected for the evaluation of a scholarship program in Colombia. By design, randomization is at the student-level. Friendship data reveals that treated and untreated students interact together. Besides providing evidence of peer effects in schooling, the chapter concludes that ignoring peer effects would have led to an overestimation of the program actual impact. The aim of the second chapter is to propose a model that accounts for heterogeneity in peer effects between individual categories in a network setting. Identification conditions of a network-based interactions model that generalizes the one proposed by Bramoullé et al. [2009] are derived, and heterogeneity of peer effects is allowed within and between categories of individuals. Using the Add-Health dataset, the study explores heterogeneity in adolescents weight using both gender and racial categorizations. The results show that the positive endogenous effect found using the homogeneous model is actually heterogeneous when considering both gender and racial categorizations, as for example, females seem to be more influenced by their female friends than by their male friends. While the first two chapters consider friendship networks in an attempt to identify the effects that result from social interactions, the third chapter considers the course-overlaps network. The model is local agregate and has the feature, unlike other studies of peer effects, that the interaction matrix accounts for the extensive and intensive margins. Interactions of this type are better to design school policies. The chapter then proceeds to estimation of peer effects in overall GPA and GPAs in both mathematics and science courses using the Add Heakth and AHAA datasets. The results reveal the presence of positive and significant social interaction effects using both 2SLS and GMM estimation techniques.
Author: Te-Fen Lo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Charter schools
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Author: Artur Minkin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 114
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