Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Information and Education written by Claudia Herresthal and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Information Education and Job Search written by Mame Fatou Irene Aminata Diagne and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Education written by Hwanoong Lee and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation comprises three essays on the Economics of Education. Its ultimate focus is to understand how different agents in the education market respond to releasing information about teacher and school performance and how public interventions influence human capital accumulation. The first essay "The Effect of Releasing Teacher Performance Information to Schools: Teachers' Response and Student Achievement" examines the effects of releasing teacher value-added (VA) information on student performance in two settings; in the first, VA data was released to all potential employers within the district, while in the second, only the current employer received the data. I find that student achievement increased only in the district where the VA scores were provided to all potential employers. These effects were driven solely by improved performance among ex-ante less-effective teachers; the null effects in the other setting, however, were driven by moderate declines in performance among ex-ante highly-effective teachers and small improvements among less-effective teachers. These results highlight the importance of understanding how the design features of VA disclosure translate into the productivity of teachers. The second essay "The Role of Credible Threats and School Competition within School Accountability Systems: Evidence from Focus Schools in Michigan" studies the impact of receiving accountability labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of Focus (schools with the largest achievement gaps) labels and find that schools receiving the Focus label improved the performance of low-achieving students relative to their barely non-Focus counterparts, and they did so without hurting high-achieving students. The positive achievement effects for Focus schools were entirely driven by Title 1 Focus schools that faced financial sanctions associated with being labeled the following year. There is no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine heterogeneous effects by looking at the number of alternative nearby schooling options. I find that when schools are exposed to a competitive choice environment, receiving the Focus label increased math test scores across the scoring distribution, while schools located in an uncompetitive choice environment improved the test scores of low achievers only. This evidence may suggest the importance of incorporating credible sanctions and school choice options into the school accountability system to maximize the effectiveness of the system on student achievement. Finally, the third essay "The Effects of School Accountability Systems Under NCLB Waiver: Evidence from Priority Schools in Michigan" investigates the impact of receiving Priority labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of the Priority (schools with the lowest performance) label and find no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine whether assigning the Priority label induced the changes in the composition of students. I define several key measures of student composition and find no evidence that the Priority designation influenced the student composition of schools.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Education written by Western Michigan University. Dept. of Economics and published by W E Upjohn Inst for. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Education written by Morgan Kusler Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on higher education and students' decision-making processes regarding their choices of academic disciplines, persistence, and modes of attrition. The first chapter is motivated by the underrepresentation of women in quantitatively oriented academic fields such as STEM, business, and economics. Some scholars have noted that the grade levels in these fields are substantially lower on average, and hypothesize that female students exhibit relatively stronger sensitivity to the grades they receive. This paper undertakes an examination of these issues using the rich Indiana University data set. We find that the phenomenon of women's stronger sensitivity to grades, as measured by their decisions about persisting in a chosen discipline, holds for STEM, business, and economics but does not universally extend to other academic disciplines. This empirical dichotomy suggests that stronger sensitivity to grades, rather than being a gender-specific characteristic, is more likely to reflect gender differences in the underlying preferences for academic fields.The second chapter analyzes the risky endeavor of enrolling in college with initially incomplete information, which can result in a student's decision to drop out without completing a degree. This paper studies the dropout decisions among students who abandon their initially chosen disciplines. This is the sub-population of students who are likely to have received negative feedback in terms of their performance in the initially chosen disciplines and are thus compelled to act on this information by choosing a mode of exiting, i.e., switching to an alternative discipline or dropping out. Our main focus is on how dropout probabilities conditional on exit from an initial discipline differ between men and women and how this difference depends on the discipline from which the student is departing and students' grade performance there. Our key empirical finding is that the direction of gender differences in conditional dropout propensities is field-dependent. Specifically, while men exhibit higher propensity than women to use the dropout mode of exit when they decide against persisting in STEM or Business and Economics, this phenomenon does not carry over to other starting academic categories, such as Social Sciences and Humanities, Education, and other professional schools.The third chapter begins by acknowledging that college students initially matriculate with incomplete information about their academic ability, interests, or the requirements for success in college. In this paper we examine the impact of student characteristics such as family income and gender on the initial choice of college discipline, persistence in it, or its subsequent adjustment. Using comprehensive student data provided by Indiana University Learning Analytics, we are able to explore whether such impact is discipline-specific. We show, in particular, that there is a positive correlation between family income and consistency of initial choices, i.e., persistence, is seen across all broad academic categories for both men and women, except for Social Sciences and Humanities where the magnitude of the effect of income is notably smaller, if not negligible. The paper also offers new evidence that higher education, rather than being a vehicle for social mobility, tends to strengthen the advantage gap between students from different family income levels.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Education written by Richard Wells Patterson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines various economic factors that influence student academic performance. In the first essay, I explore the role of behavioral factors in educational performance by testing whether time-management tools can improve academic outcomes for online students. I design three software tools including (1) a commitment device that allows students to pre-commit to time limits on distracting Internet activities, (2) a reminder tool that is triggered by time spent on distracting websites, and (3) a focusing tool that allows students to block distracting sites when they go to the course website. I test the impact of these tools in a large-scale randomized experiment (n=657) conducted in a massive open online course (MOOC) hosted by Stanford University. Relative to students in the control group, students in the commitment device treatment spend 24% more time working on the course, receive course grades that are 0.29 standard deviations higher, and are 40% more likely to complete the course. In contrast, outcomes for students in the reminder and focusing treatments are not statistically distinguishable from the control. These results suggest that tools designed to address procrastination can have a significant impact on online student performance. In the second essay, I examine whether trends in parenting time could help explain the black-white test score gap. I use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to examine the patterns in the time black and white children receive from mothers at each age between birth and age 14 and compare these patterns to corresponding test-score gaps documented in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K). I observe that black children spend significantly less time with their mothers than white children in the first years of life and that differences are concentrated in activities that may be especially important during these years. Differences in parenting time, however, rapidly decline with age. Contrastingly, when socioeconomic variables are controlled, black-white test score gaps are small in kindergarten, but then grow over time. The results of this study suggest that contemporaneous differences in parent time are unlikely to be a significant factor in black-white test score trends. In the third essay, coauthored with Jordan Matsudaira, I study whether charter school unionization impacts student academic outcomes. We use administrative school-level data coupled with data on the timing of union recognition collected via our own public records requests (PRR) and records of unionization from the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to construct difference-in-difference estimates the of the impact of teacher unionization on student outcomes. We find that unionization has a positive and statically significant impact on student math performance and a positive but only marginally significant impact on english performance. In our preferred estimates, we find that unions increase average grade-level math test scores by 0.17-0.21 standard deviations (SD) and English scores by 0.06-0.08 SD. These estimates allow us to rule out even modest negative effects of unionization on student academic outcomes.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Information Systems written by Liangfei Qiu and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information technology and social media have been a driving force in the economy and have transformed all aspects of business in recent decades. Understanding social networks is necessary to evaluate their impacts and examine key business issues involving information and technological innovations. The dissertation contains three chapters exploring those issues. In the first chapter, I propose an optimal procurement mechanism for mobile data offloading, covering both technological and business aspects. The unprecedented growth of cellular traffic driven by web surfing, video streaming, and cloud-based services is creating challenges for cellular service providers to fulfill the unmet demand. My present work contributes to the existing literature by developing an analytical model, which considers the unique challenge of integrating the longer range cellular resource and shorter range WiFi hotspots. In the second chapter, I examine the effect of a social network on prediction markets using a controlled laboratory experiment. In prediction markets, people place bets on events that they think are most likely to happen, thus revealing in a sense the nature of their private information. Through a randomized experiment, I show that when the cost of information acquisition is low, a social-network-embedded prediction market outperforms a non-networked prediction market. The third chapter studies different forms of social learning in the context of location-based networks: observational learning and the saliency effect. In recent years, the location-sensing mobile devices offer geographic location capabilities to share users' information about their locations with their friends. In our context, observational learning corresponds to the fact that "check-ins" made by friends help users learn the quality information of a venue; the saliency effect refers to that check-ins lead some of the uninformed consumers to discover a new venue.

Download or read book Three Essays in the Economics of Education written by Linda Wang and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is made up of three chapters that examine student choices in Canada's higher education system: student choice of major (Chapter 1), of courses (Chapter 2), and to continue in college/university (rather than drop out) (Chapter 3). Chapter 1 studies the gender enrolment gap in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs in university. Conducting a survey at a leading Canadian university, I find that female students are more likely to underestimate their relative ranking than male students. In a follow-up randomized experiment, I provided treatment group students with information about their rankings and about expected future incomes for STEM and non-STEM majors. The treated students became 8.5 percentage points more likely to choose a STEM major, and these effects are driven by female students. The analysis indicates that undergraduate students do not correctly estimate their relative performance, and providing students with precise information helps them make more informed choices, encouraging them to change major to a STEM field. Chapter 2 (joint with Robert McMillan and Hammad Shaikh) examines why university students often seek to enrol in less advanced courses despite being eligible for challenging courses that may be more beneficial for the development of their skills. Through experiments, we find that providing an information session significantly increases the probability of eligible first years enrolling in the more rigorous second-year courses. When we send students emails about the advanced courses rather than invite them to an information session, the effects become statistically insignificant. Our results shed light on the determinants of student course selection. Chapter 3 studies how receiving first-year financial aid affects the second-year student re-enrolment decision. After controlling for institution fixed effects, I find that financial aid, despite its potential to improve student re-enrolment, has statistically insignificant effects. In contrast, student attitudes toward higher education do have statistically significant effects on re-enrolment rates: if students believe that it is a "right decision" to pursue post-secondary education, the probability of re-enrolment increases by 3 percentage points. This chapter demonstrates that student attitudes, rather than financial aid, play a key role in determining student decisions to continue studying.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Education written by Peter Sturmthal Bergman and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I study three separate questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I examine how information frictions between parents and their children affect human capital investment, and how much reducing those friction can improve student effort and achievement. I find that providing additional information to parents regarding missing assignments is a potentially cost-effective strategy to increase parental investments and improve student achievement. In Chapter 2, we measure the impact of high-quality charter schools on teen fertility using admission lotteries to several Los Angeles charter schools as a natural experiment. We find evidence that admission to high-quality charter schools can substantially reduce teen pregnancies. In Chapter 3, we semi-parametrically estimate teacher effects on student test scores using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District. We document that there is significantly more within-teacher variation in teachers' effects than across teacher variation. We find that interacting the teacher indicator variables with a function of the students' lagged test scores captures most of the nonlinearities, preserves the heterogeneity of teacher effects, and provides more accurate estimates.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Education written by Eric Parsons and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter in this dissertation follows a cohort of initially high performing Missouri students from grade-3 through grade-9 and examines which school factors influence their academic success. Three key findings emerge. First, in terms of performance on standardized tests, schools that are effective in promoting academic growth among low performing students are also generally effective with high performing students. Second, high performing students who attend disadvantaged schools are more likely to take Algebra I later relative to their counterparts who attend more advantaged schools. Third, somewhat surprisingly, increasing the number of high performing students in a school negatively affects high performing student outcomes. The second chapter in this dissertation looks at using test measurement error (TME) to improve the precision of value added estimates. I incorporate information about TME directly into VAMs, focusing on TME that derives from the testing instrument itself. In my analysis, I estimate VAMs using Missouri micro data and estimates of TME provided by a major test publisher. I find that inference from VAMs is improved by making simple TME adjustments to the models. This improvement is on the order of what one could expect if teacher-level sample sizes were increased by 11 to 17 percent.

Download or read book Education Matters written by Alan B. Krueger and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A summary of economic research on education conducted by Krueger in the 1990s. The papers are divided into four major sections: estimating the payoff of completing more education; estimating the payoff of school quality; issues related to race and education; and changes in educational payoff over time, including technological change. A final two essays consider education and economic growth, with a focus on Sweden, and evaluate whether American schools are "broken." Krueger (economics and public affairs, Princeton U.) is also author of Education matters and served as the chief economist of the U.S. Labor Department of in 1994 and 1995. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Two Essays on the Economics of Education written by Nicolás A. Grau Veloso and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Education and Innovation written by Nicola Bianchi and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays on the economics of education and innovation. In the first essay, I study the effects of increased access to higher education by examining a dramatic 1961 Italian reform that increased university enrollment in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields by more than 200 percent in a few years. The peculiar features of the reform allow me to identify students who were unaffected, directly affected, and indirectly affected. They also allow me to identify key channels through which the effects ran. Using data I collected from tax returns and hand-written transcripts on more than 27,000 students, I show that the direct effects of the reform were as intended: many more students enrolled and many more obtained degrees. However, I also find that those induced to enroll earned no more than students in earlier cohorts who were denied access to university. I reconcile these surprising results by showing that the education expansion reduced returns to skill and lowered university learning through congestion and peer effects. I also demonstrate that apparently inframarginal students were significantly affected: the most able of them abandoned STEM majors rather than accept lower returns and lower human capital. The promotion of STEM education, realized by inducing more students to enroll in university STEM majors, might have large positive externalities by fostering the production of innovation. In the second essay (joint work with Michela Giorcelli), we use the 1961 Italian reform of college admissions as a positive shock to the amount of STEM workers in the economy. We isolate the effect of the policy on invention using a variety of techniques. At the individual level, we link the school and income data of students that were in school around the policy implementation with information on each Italian patent that they owned or developed. At the national level, we exploit differential increases of STEM skills in municipalities that were at varying distance from a STEM school. In both cases, we do not find strong evidence that easier access to university STEM majors led to higher level of patenting. In the third essay (joint work with Joerg Baten and Petra Moser), we investigate whether compulsory licensing - which allows governments to license patents with- out the consent of patent-owners - discourages invention. Our analysis exploits new historical data on German patents to examine the effects of compulsory licensing under the US Trading-with-the-Enemy Act on invention in Germany. We find that compulsory licensing was associated with a 28 percent increase in invention. Historical evidence indicates that, as a result of war-related demands, fields with licensing were negatively selected, so that OLS estimates may underestimate the positive effects of compulsory licensing on future inventions.

Download or read book Essays in the Economics of Education written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Special Education written by Katelyn M. Heath and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 13 percent of U.S. public school students participate in special education programs annually, at a cost of roughly $40 billion. However, the causal impacts of special education services remains unclear. In Chapter 1, which is coauthored with Briana Ballis, we use administrative data from Texas to produce the first causal estimates of the long-run effects of losing access to special education. Our research design exploits variation in special education placement driven by a policy change in Texas that required school districts to reduce special education enrollment to 8.5 percent. We show that this policy led to sharp reductions in special education participation. Our difference-in-differences estimates imply that special education students enrolled in the average district experienced a 12 percent increase in the likelihood of special education removal, a 2.6 percent decrease in the likelihood of high school completion, and a 3.7 percent decrease in the likelihood of college enrollment. For students on the margin of special education placement decisions, our instrumental variables estimates imply that special education removal decreases high school completion by 52.2 percentage points and college enrollment by 37.8 percentage points. Lower-income and minority students experience larger increases in special education removal, and the negative impacts of special education removal on educational attainment are concentrated among these students. These results suggest that marginal participants experience long-run benefits from special education services. In chapter 2, also co-authored with Briana Ballis, we provide the first causal estimates of the long-run impacts of limiting minority student access to special education, as well as the first causal spillover effects of limiting access to special education on general education students. Under the same policy change that was utilized in Chapter 1, Texas capped district-level black and Hispanic disproportionality, defined as the percent of black or Hispanic students in special education relative to the percent in a district overall. We employ a dose-response difference-in-differences estimation strategy with administrative data from Texas. We find that the black disproportionality cap led to small gains in high school completion and college attainment for black students in special and general education. In contrast, the cap on special education enrollment led to reductions in high school and college completion for black and Hispanic students in special and general education. We provide suggestive evidence that these heterogeneous treatment effects could be driven by unobserved differences in special education misclassification. In Chapter 3, I explore the impacts of state special education funding formulas on special education funding, enrollment, and overall student performance. In 2008, New Jersey overhauled its state finance system for funding public school districts. This included changing the way special education funds are distributed across districts, from a census to a block grant system. Prior to 2008, categorical aid was given to local school districts for each additional student classified as special education. After the policy change, New Jersey implemented a block grant formula that gives each district an amount of money based on the total district enrollment and the statewide average special education classification rate. I implement a difference-in-differences specification that exploits variation in treatment intensity across districts based on their pre-policy special education rates to estimate the impacts of this funding change on special education funding per pupil, special education enrollment, and overall student achievement. I find that the policy reduced district-level special education funding per pupil (both special and general education pupils) by about 4%, reduced total special education funding by about 7%, and reduced special edeucation enrollment by about 1.2%. However, I do not find economically meaningful impacts of the funding change on special and general education performance on math or reading or exams, or on the proportion of students who drop out of high school.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Education written by Andrew Jacob Bibler and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Economics of Education written by Clémence Idoux and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is composed of three essays on the economics of education. The first essay is about the heterogeneity of gains from selective school admission. The question of who benefits from selective school enrollment remains controversial. I show that Boston exam schools have heterogeneous effects on achievement. Impact differences are driven primarily by the quality of an applicant's non-exam-school alternative rather than by student demographic characteristics like race. Admission policies prioritizing students with the weakest schooling alternatives have the potential to increase the impact of exam schools on academic achievement. In particular, simulations of alternative admissions criteria suggests schemes that reserve seats for students with lower-quality neighborhood schools are likely to yield the largest gains. The second essay is about understanding the impact of selective school admission screens on segregation in New York City schools. 70 years after \textit{Brown v. Board of Education}, US school districts are still economically and racially segregated. School segregation is especially apparent in NYC, the largest US school district. I analyze the impact of two integration plans which reduced the role of screens in admission in two local NYC school districts. I show that abolishing selective admissions reduced both economic and racial segregation. Amending selective admission criteria also elicits substantial behavioral response from applicants. I find evidence that reducing the role of admission screens leads to White and high-income enrollment losses, which decreases the effect of the plans. On the other hand, applicants' changes in application behavior in response to the reforms increased the plans' impact on segregation. The final essay is about predicting the effect of changes in school admission on students' enrollment. Such predictions are based on estimated student preferences, which in turn are obtained from the ranked order lists they submit. A concern is that an applicant with fixed preferences might submit different lists when faced with different admission criteria. For instance, an applicant could strategically take into account their probability of admission at each school, therefore violating the truthfulness assumption. A solution is to estimate preferences allowing students to strategically choose over all possible lists, but this runs into the curse of dimensionality as the choice space is large. This paper provides a model of applicants' list formation which presumes applicants use a simple heuristic in selecting their lists. In the model, applicants fill their list sequentially, without fully internalizing the dynamic consequences of each choice. Using this simplification, I estimate applicants' preferences, circumventing the dimensionality problem. I leverage an admission reform in NYC to estimate the model. Allowing applicants to deviate from truthfulness affects substantially their estimated preferences.