Suchergebnisse

Contents: Introduction, by John Vaizey; The economics of education in the U.S.S.R., by Stanislav Strumilin; Social returns to education, by Mary Jean Bowman; The concept of human capital, by M. Debeauvais; Teaching methods and their costs, by Charles Benson; Education and economic development, by W. Arthur Lewis; Administration and the economics of education, by Howard Hayden; Economic and social aspects of the planning of education, by H. M. Phillips; Unesco economic analysis unit.

Defence date: 12 February 2021 ; Examining board: Professor Andrea Ichino (European University Insitute); Professor Sule Alan (European University Insitute); Professor Manuel Bagues (University of Warwick); Professor Caterina Calsamiglia (Institute of Political Economy and Governance) ; This thesis consists of three independent essays in economics of education. In the first chapter, I investigate the connection between cultural identities and parental schooling decisions. By leveraging the case of the Basque Country (Spain), this essay studies how parents trade off academic quality for being educated in the regional language. Using a discrete choice structural model, I show that households display strong preferences for the Basque-monolingual model. Results indicate a willingness to forego a substantial amount of mean academic performance to evade the Spanish and the bilingual models. By means of regression analysis, I find a strong association between nationalistic voting and educational language choices. This suggests that schooling decisions are significantly shaped by parents' affiliation to the regional culture. In the second chapter, I test whether the cultural assimilation efforts of immigrant families mitigate discriminatory attitudes of schools. To this end, I sent fictitious visit requests to more than 2,500 schools located in the Community of Madrid (Spain). I find that Romanian families who gave a Spanish name to their child are 50% less discriminated than those who selected a Romanian name. Emails from families whose members have Romanian names are 12% less likely to receive a response than those from native Spanish-name families. The results show a consistent response pattern across school characteristics. The third chapter, co-authored with Lucas Gortazar and Ainhoa Vega-Bayo, studies the presence of systematic differences between teacher non-blind assessments and external quasiblindly graded standardized tests. We use a rich administrative database covering two cohorts from publicly-funded schools in the Basque Country. We find that systematic underassessment exists for boys, children with immigrant origin, and poorer students. The results indicate that stereotyping is a consistent mechanism through which our findings can be interpreted. ; -- Part. 1 Identity and school choice : parental preferences for language educational models -- Part. 2 Cultural assimilation and ethnic discrimination : an audit study with schools -- Part. 3 Comparing teacher and external assessments : are boys, immigrants, and poorer students undergraded? -- Part. 4 References --

This thesis wants to explore two different aspects of the Italian education system. The first two chapters are focused on the school starting age, the third one analyzes the introduction of the electronic logbook in Italian schools. In chapter 1 I use administrative data from INVALSI test in different grades to study the effects of early enrollment to the primary school, in other words, the effects on student achievement of being enrolled to the first grade at the age of 5 instead of 6. The number of early enrollers is much higher in the South Italy than in the North. To understand the reason of this difference is not the aim of this work. I found that there is strong selection in early enrollment, with early enrollers having higher ability on average. However, early enrollers are younger than regular enrollers at the moment of the test, and even if they are more skilled on average, the effect of age on scores remains significant. As a result, the North-South gap in Invalsi test scores is partially driven by the difference in average age at the moment of the test with students from the south younger than northerners. In chapter 2 I use survey data from a sample of parents in 5 primary schools located in Palermo, where the 50% of the students born between January and April are early enrollers. I found preliminary evidence of peer effects among parents at the moment of the choice for enrollment. In the last chapter I found that the introduction of the electronic logbook increased scores at the INVALSI tests for tenth graders but not for younger students. This could be due to the fact older students have more independence and the electronic logbook helps parents to monitor them.