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In this article, we evaluate the extent of the causal effect of parental education on the education of their children. We review this empirical literature and propose a multivariate meta-regression analysis. Our database is composed of a large set of both published and unpublished papers written in the period 2002-2014. The articles considered differ in the data sources, explanatory variables, econometric strategy applied, and the type of publication. In spite of the large heterogeneity of studies and evidence for publication bias, we find a transmission of education from parents to their children that amounts to 0.15. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we measure the contribution of an additional year of schooling on skills acquisition for a cohort of young adults in Madagascar. We estimate a value-added model of learning achievement that includes test scores measured at adolescence, thereby reducing the potential for omitted variable bias. We demonstrate that schooling increases cognitive skills among young adults. The value-added of a year of schooling during adolescence is 0.15 to 0.26 standard deviation. Our results show the skills gap widens in adolescence, as students with higher cognitive skills complete more grades, accumulating more skills in their transition to adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel approach to investigating the determinants of academic performance: GPA and time to degree. We match administrative records with questionnaire responses for a large set of undergraduate students from one Italian public university. By exploiting reforms implemented by the University, we estimate the effect of the excess time to degree on GPA and find a strong negative relationship. Our results shed light on two crucial outcomes of academic performance, which may also determine the students' bargaining power in the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses representative student data from St. Petersburg, Russia to analyze school segregation by parental socioeconomic status and student academic performance. The proposed systematic segregation indices account for ordinal variables and take expected segregation into account. We decompose segregation by school type, school, and classes and compare the results to results obtained from PISA for urban areas in Russia and six European countries. Segregation by socioeconomic status is moderate in St. Petersburg and Russia, as compared to other European countries. Segregation between schools and school types reflects parental choice, whereas within-school segregation along the lines of student performance reflects school policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the survey of the Ministry of Education, Nepal-2005 for School Leaving Certificate Exam, this paper analyzes public and private school performance in Nepal. The ordinary least square estimates suggest that private school students perform better than public school students. However, the problem of self-selection bias arises, as private school students can fundamentally differ from public school students. This study adopts the propensity score matching technique to account for this problem. The results, even after using the propensity score matching technique, suggest a positive private school effect for the data used in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Italy, this paper investigates whether financial literacy skills play a role in shaping the value that high school students place on schooling. I hypothesize that higher financial literacy may foster students’ awareness of the financial and non-financial benefits of gaining additional education, together with the costs associated with poor school outcomes. Results from OLS and IV estimates suggest that higher financial literacy increases students’ perceived value of schooling by boosting their time commitment to education. Conversely, there is no evidence that financial literacy shapes students’ attitudes towards school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most of the world's disabled people live in developing countries, little is known about the consequences of disability in this part of the world. Using the DHS-MICS 2011 data of Cameroon, this paper contributes to the literature by providing new robust estimates of the effect of child disability on education in a developing country context. It controls for unobserved heterogeneity within the households by using a 'true' sibling fixed effect model and also accounts for the severity of disability. The results show that moderate and severe disabilities reduce the probability that a child attends school and diminish school progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates if the provision of financial incentives has an impact on the performance of students in educational tests. The analysis is based on data from an experiment with high school students who answered multiple-choice items from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). As in TIMSS, the setup did not discourage students from guessing. Students with a salary based on individual performance did not score significantly better than students with a fixed payout or a payout based on the performance of the entire group. However, incentives have an impact. The group with individualized payments showed significantly more guessing activities than the others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence from cross-country studies suggests that the sustainability of India's rapid economic growth will be conditioned by the quality of its education. This paper analyzed a 2005 World Bank-sponsored survey of Grade Nine students in the states of Rajasthan and Orissa. The survey used internationally comparable items from the 1999 Trends of Mathematics Study to provide the first international benchmark for education quality in India for three decades. The study finds that only 15% and 25% of students in Rajasthan and Orissa, respectively, have achieved the expected international average of these items. The study further shows that increasing students' opportunity to learn through better pedagogical practices and enhanced schooling experience can increase performance, while mitigating between-school inequality, and reducing the achievement gap between boys and girls, holding other factors constant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the determinants of academic success using a unique administrative data set of a German university. We show that high school grades are strongly associated with both graduation probabilities and final grades, whereas variables measuring social origin or income have only a smaller impact. Moreover, the link between high school performance and university success is shown to vary substantially across faculties. In some fields of study, the probability of graduating is rather low, while grades are quite good conditional on high school performance. In others, weaker students have a greater chance of graduating, but grades are more differentiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses immigrants’ educational mismatch and its impact on wages in Spain. The incidence of immigrants’ education–occupation mismatch in the Spanish labour market can largely be explained by the mismatch in the last job held in the home country. The probability of having been over-educated in the home country has a higher effect on the probability of being over-educated in the first job in Spain. Those who were over-educated in their first job are more likely to continue being over-educated in their current job in Spain. Finally, over-educated immigrants earn significantly lower wages compared to their non-over-educated counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private tutoring has become popular throughout the world. However, evidence for the effect of private tutoring on students' academic outcome is inconclusive; therefore, this paper presents an alternative framework: a nonparametric bounds method. The present examination uses, for the first time, a large representative data-set in a European setting to identify the causal effect of self-initiated private tutoring. Under relatively weak assumptions, I find some evidence that private tutoring improves students' outcome in reading. However, the results indicate a heterogeneous and nonlinear effect of private tutoring, e.g. a threshold may exist after which private tutoring becomes ineffective or even detrimental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze class size effects on college students exploiting data from a project offering special remedial courses in mathematics and language skills to freshmen enrolled at an Italian medium-sized public university. To estimate the effects of class size, we exploit the fact that students and teachers are virtually randomly assigned to teaching classes of different sizes. From our analysis, it emerges that controlling for a number of individual characteristics, larger classes determine a significant and sizeable negative effect on student performance in mathematics. Importantly, this negative effect is significantly larger for low-ability students and negligible for high-ability ones. On the other hand, class size effects do not appear to be relevant for student achievement in language skills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The main aim of this paper is to identify those school-level and locality-level factors that significantly affect each of the three stages in a young adult's educational trajectory in North West England: GCSE results, track taken at age 16 and 'A'-level scores. By applying three-level models to data collected as part of the EFFNATIS project, we find no evidence of any locality-level effects. Overall, none of the explanatory variables conventionally considered to affect educational attainment had a consistent effect across all three stages. Rather, each explanatory variable had a contingent effect at specific points within the overall trajectory of educational outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model of educational production that tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize net benefits, while the government chooses educational spending to maximize its net benefits. In the jointly determined equilibrium, schooling quality is shown to depend on several institutionally determined parameters. The impact on student performance of institutions such as central examinations, centralization versus school autonomy, teachers' influence, parental influence, and competition from private schools is analyzed. Furthermore, the model can rationalize why positive resource effects may be lacking in educational production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to examine a few factors characterizing preferences, curriculum, and learning strategies that influence academic success and failure. On the basis of a proportional odds model, our findings reveal that good performance by the student depends on: (i) the time spent on physical training, (ii) the subjects chosen at high school, and (iii) the study of previously given examinations as a learning strategy. The results do not support the contention that the average score at high school, preparation by reading course literature prior to lectures, and time spent studying are important variables with regard to academic achievement. Our results suggest three policy implications: (i) to encourage students to engage in some kind of physical training, (ii) to guide students regarding how they should use the previously given examinations, and (iii) to require that students do course-work on the mathematics of economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the relative academic achievement in primary school of second-generation immigrant children in the UK. The education progress of these groups of children is of historical interest and is also relevant to the policy debate today, since ethnic minority students in England continue to have lower levels of achievement in primary school, though they go on to catch up with their white counterparts in secondary school. We use rich data for a cohort born in 1970 and find that children born to South Asian or Afro-Caribbean parents have significantly lower levels of cognitive achievement in both mathematics and language in primary school. Our analysis also reveals that the negative impact from being born to South Asian parents decreases during primary school, while the negative effect from being born to Afro-Caribbean parents remains approximately stable. Hence, our evidence shows that even as long ago as the late 1970s, while most ethnic minority groups had lower academic achievement in primary school, some groups of ethnic minority pupils, namely those from South Asia, were showing signs of ‘catch-up’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present a theory explaining the impact of ability tracking on academic performance based on grading policies. Our model distinguishes between initial ability, which is mainly determined by parental background, and eagerness to learn. We show that achievements of low ability students may be higher in a comprehensive school system, even if there are neither synergy effects nor interdependent preferences among classmates. This arises because the comprehensive school sets a compromise standard which exceeds the standard from the low ability track. Moreover, if students with lower initial ability have a higher eagerness to learn, merging classes will increase the average performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study measures students' unintentional procrastination, as captured by 'the number of days delayed,' or 'delay.' 'Delay' is the difference between the day that a student indicated that he or she would work on a homework assignment, and the day that he or she actually worked on that assignment as recorded by Blackboard. Regression results demonstrate that 'delay' is negatively associated with homework score, grade in principles of micro-and-macroeconomics, as well as cumulative GPA. Furthermore, starting homework later than one's plan matters more than starting homework late per se. Finally, students do not update their priors about their own behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose the use of methods based on the Shapley value to assess the fact that private returns to lower levels of educational attainment should be credited with part of the returns from higher attainment levels, since achieving primary education is a necessary condition to enter secondary and tertiary educational levels. We apply the proposed adjustment to a global dataset of private returns to different educational attainment levels and find that the corrected returns to education imply a large shift of returns from tertiary to primary schooling in countries at all income levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although previous research has shown that homework improves students' academic achievement, the majority of these studies use data on students' homework time from retrospective questionnaires, which may be less accurate than time-diary data. We use data from the combined Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition to Adulthood Survey (TA) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore the effects of time spent on homework while attending high school on two measures of academic achievement: high school grade point averages and college attendance by age 20. We find that homework time has positive effects on academic achievement for boys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which increasing students' ability to choose between schools can impact their educational outcomes continues to generate significant research interest. I take advantage of the unique context in the province of Ontario, where two publicly funded school systems operate in parallel. I find a small positive impact of school choice on student applications to university. However, most of the impact is in terms of ‘cross-effects’; the most robust finding is that the more Catholic high schools accessible from a neighbourhood, the better the public high schools perform. This is suggestive that one mechanism through which choice affects school outcomes is through competition between public and Catholic school boards. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We analyze class-size effects on academic achievement in secondary school in Denmark exploiting an institutional setting where pupils cannot predict class size prior to enrollment, and where post-enrollment responses aimed at affecting realized class size are unlikely. We identify class-size effects combining a regression discontinuity design with control for lagged achievement and school fixed effects. Using administrative registry data, we find statistically significant negative effects of class size on academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using richly detailed data on fourth‐ and fifth‐grade students in the North Carolina public school system, I find evidence that students are assigned to classrooms in a non‐random manner based on observable characteristics for a substantial portion of classrooms. Moreover, I find that this non‐random assignment is statistically related to class size for a number of student characteristics and that failure to control for classroom composition can severely bias traditionally estimated class size effects. Teacher‐fixed effects and classroom composition controls appear to be effective at addressing selection related to classroom composition. I find heterogeneity in class size effects by student characteristics – students who struggle in school appear to benefit more from class size reductions than students in the top of the achievement distribution. I find that smaller classes have smaller achievement gaps on average and that class size reductions may be relatively more effective at closing achievement gaps than raising average achievement; however, class size effects on both average achievement and achievement gaps are small. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine the impact of sibling size on children's education. The theoretical framework shows an opposite relationship between the number of children within family and their school performance. Empirical works diverge between those corroborating this theory and those leading to ambiguous results such a positive correlation or the absence of any correlation. An econometric study based on national survey data, 'Efforts of Education of families in France (1991-1992)', reveals that this relation is much more complex. On the one hand, this correlation can be positive, negative, or absent according to the various modalities taken into account. On the other hand, we will show the influence of other factors that exert a stronger effect on the educational achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study a set of programs implemented in Philadelphia high schools that focus on boosting high school graduation, and especially college attendance, using data from the Philadelphia Educational Longitudinal Study (PELS). We examine the effects of these programs on a set of schooling-related outcomes during and after high school. The PELS data-set contains an unusually large amount of information on individuals prior to program placement. We use this information, in the context of both linear models and propensity score-matching estimators, to attempt to correct for selective participation in these programs. We find evidence of positive effects of these programs on high school graduation and on both academic and non-academic awards in high school, and similar negative effects on dropping out of high school. The results also suggest positive effects on attitudes and expectations about college attendance, and on college attendance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much attention has focused recently on using student test scores to evaluate public schools. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 requires states to test students and evaluate each school's progress toward having all students meet or exceed state standards. Under the law, however, schools only need to test 95% of their students. When some students do not take the test, variability arises in a school's evaluation as the score of each student who did not take the test remains unknown. Using a statewide assessment administered to 11th graders in Illinois, we investigate this source of variation. In our data, 8% of students do not take the test. By applying a bounding technique to the unknown scores of the non‐test‐takers, we show that classifying schools as failing or passing against some fixed threshold frequently can be misleading. We also provide evidence that some schools may be strategically selecting some students to not take the test and, by so doing, increasing the school's test scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]