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During the global economic crisis, unemployment rates increased dramatically across Europe, especially among the least educated population groups. The picture in Spain in 2012, with unemployment rates running at over 20% and youth employment close to 45%, was discouraging. In face of this situation, the Spanish autonomous government of Extremadura launched a programme specifically aimed at motivating unemployed individualswithout a school degree to return to education and earn the compulsory secondary education diploma. This paper applies a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impact of this conditional cash transfer programme using administrative data. The results show that the programme did not increase the likelihood of earning the lower secondary education diploma. This finding is a caveat emptor for governments considering similar policies, and remarks again the importance of testing innovations before generalization., Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Depto. de Economía Aplicada, Pública y Política, Fac. de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, TRUE, pub more...

In France and Spain, children born in the same calendar year start school together, regardless of maturity differences due to their birth month. This paper analyses the educational impact of birth month on the probability of grade retention controlling by other covariates. Using the PISA 2009 database for both countries, wedo identify a great impact on grade retention since students born in the last months of the year are between 70% and 80% more likely to repeat a grade than children born in the first months of the same year. We conclude that policy interventions are required in those countries to ensure that individuals are not unfairly penalized by their birth month., Junta de Extremadura/FEDER, Depto. de Economía Aplicada, Pública y Política, Fac. de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, TRUE, pub more...

During the global economic crisis, unemployment rates increased dramatically across Europe, especially among the least educated population groups. The picture in Spain in 2012, with unemployment rates running at over 20% and youth employment close to 45%, was discouraging. In face of this situation, the Spanish autonomous government of Extremadura launched a programme specifically aimed at motivating unemployed individualswithout a school degree to return to education and earn the compulsory secondary education diploma. This paper applies a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impact of this conditional cash transfer programme using administrative data. The results show that the programme did not increase the likelihood of earning the lower secondary education diploma. This finding is a caveat emptor for governments considering similar policies, and remarks again the importance of testing innovations before generalization., Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Depto. de Economía Aplicada, Pública y Política, Fac. de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, TRUE, pub more...

This paper uses a fully nonparametric framework to assess the efficiency of primary schools using data about schools in 16 European countries participating in PIRLS 2011. This study represents an original enterprise since most of the empirical research in the field is restricted to evaluations at regional or national level and focused on secondary education. For our purpose, we adapt the metafrontier framework to compare and decompose the technical efficiency of primary schools operating in heterogeneous contexts, which in our case is represented by different educational systems or countries. Similarly, we use an extension of the conditional nonparametric robust approach to test the potential influence of a mixed set of environmental school factors and variables representing cultural values of each country. Our results indicate that the intergenerational transmission of non-cognitive skills such as responsibility or perseverance are significantly related to school efficiency, whereas most school factors do not seem to have a significant influence on school performance., Junta de Extremadura/Fundación Ramón Areces, Depto. de Economía Aplicada, Pública y Política, Fac. de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, TRUE, pub more...

Since the late 1990s, Spain has played host to a sizeable flow of immigrants who have been absorbed into the compulsory stage of the education system. In this article, our aim is to assess the impact of that exogenous increase in the number of immigrant students from 2003 to 2009 on grade retention using Spanish data from PISA 2003 and 2009. For this purpose, we use the difference-in-differences method as a dose treatment capable of detecting whether the immigrant concentratio has had a significant effect on student performance. Our results evidenced that their arrival does not on average decrease school promotion rates with respect to 2003 and is even beneficial to native students. However, although the concentration of immigrant students at the same school does have a negative impact on immigrant students generating more grade retention, native students are unaffected until concentrations of immigrant students is above 15%., Junta de Extremadura, Depto. de Economía Aplicada, Pública y Política, Fac. de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, TRUE, pub more...

In France and Spain, children born in the same calendar year start school together, regardless of maturity differences due to their birth month. This paper analyses the educational impact of birth month on the probability of grade retention controlling by other covariates. Using the PISA 2009 database for both countries, wedo identify a great impact on grade retention since students born in the last months of the year are between 70% and 80% more likely to repeat a grade than children born in the first months of the same year. We conclude that policy interventions are required in those countries to ensure that individuals are not unfairly penalized by their birth month., Junta de Extremadura/FEDER, Depto. de Economía Aplicada, Pública y Política, Fac. de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, TRUE, pub more...