Protestantism and Education

During industrialization, Protestants were more literate than Catholics. This paper [April 2014] investigates whether this fact may be led back to the intrinsic motivation of Protestants to read the bible and to what extent other education motives might have been involved as well. We employ a historical data set from Switzerland which allows us to differentiate between different cognitive skills: reading, numeracy, essay writing, and Swiss history. We develop an estimation strategy to examine whether the impact of religious denomination was particularly large with respect to reading capabilities. We find support for this hypothesis. However, we also find evidence which is consistent with the view that Protestants' education motives went beyond acquiring reading skills. (JEL I20)

The paper (Economic Inquiry), is by Timo Boppart, Josef Falkinger, & Volker Grossmann. A draft (2010) is here.  
From the conclusions:

We have shown that, besides a positive Protestant reading bias, Protestants had developed higher cognitive skills in all education fields at the time of industrialization. This indicates that Protestants must have been more aware than Catholics that educational investment pays off economically, in addition to enabling them to read the bible. (p. 17).

One of the great transformations in several countries in Latin America in the second half of the 20th century is precisely the conversion of a large portion of the population to Protestantism (close or over 50% of the population in some cases). That is bringing substantial behavioural changes, which have large economic consequences. Some mega-churches in the region deliver a message that includes entrepreneurship and self-realisation. That is probably a way in which Protestantism and the Bourgeois Virtues overlap to promote economic prosperity. I believe that sound evidence is missing though. 

Cross-country differences in the quality of schooling

This paper constructs a cross-country measure of the quality of education using a novel approach based on international test scores data. The first main finding is that there are large differences in education quality – one year of schooling in the U.S. is equivalent to three or more years of schooling in a number of low-income countries. I incorporate the estimated series for schooling quality in an accounting framework calibrated using evidence on Mincerian returns. This leads to the second important finding, which is that the fraction of income differences explained by the model rises substantially when one includes education quality; the increase is around 22percentage points.

That is from this paper by Nicolai Kaarsen. A draft is here. The author adds:

Including the quality of human capital in a development accounting exercise increases the fraction of the variance of income explained by the model by around 0.25. The fraction of income differences explained by human capital alone is around 0.26, which is very close to the findings of Schoellman (2011), who uses immigrant data to estimate the quality of human capital. 

Employment Protection and Teacher Effort

From a paper by Brian A. Jacob Journal of Labor Economics Vol. 31, No. 4 (October 2013), pp. 727-761. The title is "The Effect of Employment Protection on Teacher Effort." 

In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers (those with fewer than 5 years of experience) for any reason and without the hearing process typical in many urban districts. Results suggest that the policy reduced annual teacher absences by roughly 10% and reduced the incidence of frequent absences by 25%. The majority of the effect was due to changes in the composition of teachers in the district, although there is evidence of modest incentive effects for young untenured teachers.

A draft (2012) is here.  
Some background

In the past, it has been extremely difficult for principals to dismiss teachers outside the auspices of a RIF. Like most other districts, the collective bargaining agreement in Chicago provides considerable protection for tenured teachers that make it very time-consuming and difficult for principals to dismiss these teachers for cause. Unlike many smaller, suburban districts in Illinois, however, the collective bargaining agreement in Chicago also made it very difficult for principals to dismiss non-tenured teachers. (Page 8 in the draft).

What makes teachers work more

. . . [L]evels of some non-pecuniary incentives—teachers being able to choose their teaching method and having a school PTA [Parent-Teacher Association] —increase the probability that teachers offer tutoring lessons by between 11 and 34 percent. Allowing teachers to develop their own teaching materials induces them to work approximately 3 hours more per week preparing for classes, presumably time spent developing the materials . . . (P.17).

That is from this paper by Hai-Anh Dang & Elizabeth King.

More educated leaders lead to more educated citizens

This paper looks at the contribution of political leaders to enhance citizens' education and investigate how the educational attainment of the population is affected while a leader with higher education remains in office. For this purpose, we consider educational transitions of political leaders in office and find that the educational attainment of population increases when a more educated leader remains in office. Furthermore, we also observe that the educational attainment of the population is negatively impacted when a country transitions from an educated leader to a less educated one. This result may help to explain the previous finding that more educated political leaders favor economic growth. That is from this paper by Luis Diaz-Serrano & Jessica Pérez. HT: Eugene Beaulieu

The Rebirth of Education

Wikimedia Commons

Lant Pritchett argues for more autonomy, freedom, and descentralization in education systems in developing countries. He descrives possible models:

• Community-controlled schools, in which groups of parents, affiliated with the most local level of government, are free to open their own schools (subject to some requirements) and attract students to the school. 
• Private providers, both for profit and nonprofit, to provide schooling, with some formula for how resources mobilized from the public sector might follow the student.
• Schools under small governmental jurisdictions that would not quite allow school-by-school autonomy but something very close to it (an approach that is not the typical “decentralization”). 
• Charter systems in which schools are permitted and regulated by the government but allowed much greater autonomy.

I could not agree more. Some of those models, such as community-controlled schools, have been implemented to some degree in countries like Guatemala, for example. Unfortunately they have been reversed, mainly because of the political cycle. What makes those programs sustainable and resilient across time is as important as what makes them implemented in the first place.    

HT: Michael Clemens. 

Education, Language and Identity

The process of individual identity formation is still an enigma, as is the capacity of public bodies to intervene in it. In 1983, the Catalan education system became bilingual, and Catalan, along with Spanish, was taught in schools. Using survey data from Catalonia we show that respondents who have been exposed for a longer time period to teaching in Catalan have stronger Catalan feelings. The effect also appears to be present among individuals whose parents do not have Catalan origins; in addition the reform affects political preferences and attitudes towards the organisation of the State.

From a paper by Irma Clots-Figueras & Paolo Masella. A draft is here. 

Bridging Education Gender Gaps in Developing Countries: The Role of Female Teachers

An interesting study by Karthik Muralidharan and Ketki Sheth 

Recruiting female teachers is frequently suggested as a policy option for improving girls' education outcomes in developing countries, but there is surprisingly little evidence on the effectiveness of such a policy. We study gender gaps in learning outcomes, and the effectiveness of female teachers in reducing these gaps using a large, representative, annual panel data set on learning outcomes in rural public schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. We report six main results in this paper. (1) We find a small but significant negative trend in girls' test scores in both math (0.02␣/year) and language (0.01␣/year) as they progress through the public primary school system; (2) Using five years of panel data, school-grade and student gender by grade fixed effects, we find that both male and female teachers are more effective at teaching students of their own gender; (3) However, female teachers are more effective overall, resulting in girls' test scores improving by an additional 0.036␣ in years when they are taught by a female teacher, with no adverse effects on boys when they are taught by female teachers; (4) The overall gains from having a female teacher are mainly attributable to their greater effectiveness at improving math test scores than male teachers (especially for girls); (5) We find no effect of having a same-gender teacher on student attendance, suggesting that the mechanism for the impact on learning outcomes is not on the extensive margin of increased school participation, but on the intensive margin of more effective classroom interactions; (6) Finally, the increasing probability of having a male teacher in higher grades can account for around 10-20% of the negative trend we find in girls' test scores as they move to higher grades.

Educational Attainment in the World

The paper by Barro and Lee has been around for some time, and it was recently published here. Returns to an additional year of schooling are the lowest in Latin America and Africa. 

Abstract: Our panel data set on educational attainment has been updated for 146 countries from 1950 to 2010. The data are disaggregated by sex and by 5-year age intervals. We have improved the accuracy of estimation by using information from consistent census data, disaggregated by age group, along with new estimates of mortality rates and completion rates by age and education level. We compare the estimates with our previous ones (Barro and Lee, 2001) and alternative measures (Cohen and Soto, 2007). Our estimates of educational attainment provide a reasonable proxy for the stock of human capital for a broad group of countries and should be useful for a variety of empirical work.

More info is here.  

The Impact of Parental Death on Child Well-Being: Evidence from the Indian Ocean Tsunami

. . . [I]n specifications using this smaller set of communities, over the longer term, older males who lost both parents have completed 1.9 fewer years of schooling (s.e.=0.5) since the tsunami and those who lost their fathers have completed 1.5 fewer years of schooling (s.e.=0.7) after the tsunami. . . Older females who lost both parents are 58 percentage points more likely to be married (s.e.=8) . . . P. 21. 

The paper by Ava Cas, Elizabeth Frankenberg, Wayan Suriastini, and Duncan Thomas.

What Drives Improvements in Cognitive Abilities

The results show that key drivers of global achievement are civil rights and economic freedom across all countries, and democracy and economic freedom in a subset of African and Latin American countries.

See the paper here.  

Counterintuitive results (education in Burkina Faso) [y última semana en Senegal]

Using data from BRIGHT, an integrated program that aims to improve school participation in rural communities in Burkina Faso, we investigate the impact of school subsidies and increased access to education on child work. Regression discontinuity estimates demonstrate that, while BRIGHT substantially improved school participation, it did not reduce – in fact may have increased – children’s participation in economic activities and household chores. . . If education programmes are implemented to achieve a combination of increased school participation and a reduction in child work they may either have to be combined with different interventions that effectively reduce child work or they may have to be tuned more carefully to the incentives and constraints the child labourer faces.

Source: a new paper by De Hoop and Rosati (May 2013). The tille is "Does Promoting School Attendance Reduce Child Labour? Evidence from Burkina Faso's Bright Project." 

[AM: Children involvement on economic activities or household chores is not necessary a bad thing.]

[Esta  es nuestra última semana en Senegal. Les dejo una gráfica de buenas noticias para este país - lo que se observa también en otros países de Africa]:

Senegal: Vegetable Exports, Female Employment, and School Enrollment

That is from a paper by Maertens & Verhofstadt titled "Horticultural exports, female wage employment and primary school enrolment: Theory and evidence from a natural quasi-experiment in Senegal" (2012). The authors conclude:

We found that through the creation of rural employment for women, the horticultural export sector in Senegal indirectly contributed to increasing primary school enrollment. P. 19-20.

HT: Mark Lee.

Randomized Trials: A tip of the Iceberg

The recent wave of randomized trials in development economics has provoked criticisms regarding external validity. We investigate two concerns—heterogeneity across beneficiaries and implementers—in a randomized trial of contract teachers in Kenyan schools. The intervention, previously shown to raise test scores in NGO-led trials in Western Kenya and parts of India, was replicated across all Kenyan provinces by an NGO and the government. Strong effects of short- term contracts produced in controlled experimental settings are lost in weak public institutions: NGO implementation produces a positive effect on test scores across diverse contexts, while government implementation yields zero effect. The data suggests that the stark contrast in success between the government and NGO arm can be traced back to implementation constraints and political economy forces put in motion as the program went to scale.

I believe the paper is already well known by development economists. 

One can see those results as worrisome because they tell us how difficult it is to scale up interventions to improve education (and effective policies in general) across different environments within one country, let along across countries, or even across continents. 

One can also see the findings of the paper as a signal of the humongous challenging work ahead for RCTs economists to find out next the numerous circumstances under which such and such intervention can be scalable, which might require running RCTs to find out about RCTs (as the paper shows). 

The findings of the paper are the tip of the iceberg. Many uncertainties lie beneath the surface, so to speak. 

It is a very creative paper. It is by Tessa Bold, Mwangi Kimenyi, Germano Mwabu, Alice Ng’ang’a, and Justin Sandefur (March 2013) and it is titled: "Scaling Up What Works: Experimental Evidence on External Validity in Kenyan Education."

The authors conclude:

In the terminology of Shadish, Campbell and Cook’s (2002) classic text on gen- eralizing experimental results, this is a question of ‘construct validity’ rather than external validity per se, i.e., of identifying the higher order construct represented by the experimental treatment. In most of the experimental evaluation literature in development economics, the treatment construct is defined to include only the school- or clinic-level intervention, abstracting from the institutional context of these interventions. Our findings suggest that the treatment in this case was not a “contract teacher”, but rather a multi-layered organizational structure including monitoring systems, payroll departments, long-run career incentives and political pressures.

Less homework and more play

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play.

More is here.  

Crime and education

This paper aims at disentangling the strong association between human capital and crime by investigating whether crime reduces investment in human capital or whether education reduces criminal activity. Heretofore, we exploit two aspects of the Australian survey data on education and crime we use. First, as the data are obtained from twins, we are able to control for many unobserved characteristics affecting both criminal behaviour and the schooling decisions. Second, as criminal behaviour is measured over different periods of time – prior to and after senior high school completion – we can address the causality between crime and education as well. As early criminal behaviour may affect human capital formation, and human capital may influence criminal behaviour in later stages of life, we follow a two step analysis.

First, we address the effects of early criminal behaviour on educational attainment. The estimates suggest that early criminal behaviour is detrimental to investment in human capital. Within pairs of twins we find that early arrests (before the age of 18) reduce educational attainment with .7 to .9 years and lower the probability of completing senior high school with 20 to 23 percentage points. In addition, the timing of the early arrest matters, arrests at age 13, 14 or 15 are most detrimental for educational attainment. These estimates are found after controlling for conduct disorder and early school performance.

Second, we focus on the effect of human capital on crime. As early criminal activity might be an important confounder, we control for early arrests. The estimates suggest that human capital has a negative effect on crime. Completing senior high school reduces the probability of incarceration with 2 to 3 percentage points. We find similar but statistically insignificant effects on the probability of being arrested since the age of 18 and on the number of arrests. The size of these estimates might be downward biased because of measurement error in schooling. IV- estimates using a second independent measure of schooling suggest that the effect of human capital might be larger. Lochner and Moretti (2004) report IV-estimates of the effect of high school completion on imprisonment of 8 percentage points for blacks and 0.9 for whites.

When combining these findings, it seems that the causality between human capital and crime runs in both directions. Still, the impact of early criminal behaviour on human capital formation dominates the impact of human capital formation on future crime behaviour. Controlling for early arrests and early behaviour problems reduces the estimated effect of human capital on crime to less than one third of the previously estimated association. From this, we conclude that early criminal behaviour explains most of the association between human capital and crime.

The strong detrimental effects of early criminal behaviour become also transparent if we consider the estimated effects of early arrests on all three measures of crime. Early arrests increase the probability of incarceration with 20 percentage points and the probability of being arrested since the age of 18 with 10 percentage points. These effects are much larger than the estimated effects of human capital. For instance, the estimated effect of being arrested before the age of 18 on incarceration is almost ten times higher than the estimated effect of completing high school.

That is from the conclusions of the interesting paper "Why are criminals less educated than non-criminals? Evidence from a cohort of young Australian twins" by Webbink et al., forthcoming in The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization (2013). A draft (2008) is here.

The Value of College and High School Degrees

A high school degree confers not only higher expected lifetime earnings, but also reduced earnings volatility and lower risk of unemployment. College graduates on average have much higher expected lifetime earnings compared to high school graduates, but because they also face higher earnings volatility our results suggest the value of college degree declines with risk aversion. Accounting for progressive income taxation, unemployment insurance, and Social Security taxes and benefits further reduce the value of education. Overall, we conclude that the value of a college (high school) degree to be $300k to $500k ($200k to $250k), depending on the parametric assumption of risk aversion. While the returns to a college education remain high relative to the cost of a college education (both in terms of direct costs as well as foregone earnings while in school), the net gains are substantially below those commonly reported in the popular press.

That is from the new paper "Risk and Returns to Education" by Brown, Fang, & Gomes (November 2012). 

Graph of the night

The graph is for 16 Asian countries for 1960-2010. Each observation represents a ten year interval period for each country. The source is Prasartpornsirichoke, Takahashi, & Charoenporn (October 2012). 

Religious school choice (Ref. Rural Bangladesh)

Using a unique dataset on secondary school age children from rural Bangladesh, we find that madrasah enrolment falls as household income increases. At the same time, more religious households, and those that live further away from a non-religious school are more likely to send their children to madrasahs. However, in contrast to the theory, we find that Islamic school demand does not respond to the average quality of schools in the locality.

Source.
HT: Mark Lee

Education and Freedom of Choice

Using household data from Vietnam, we provide evidence on the effects of education on freedom of spouse choice. We use war disruptions and spatial indicators of schooling supply as instruments. The point estimates indicate that a year of additional schooling reduces the probability of an arranged marriage by about 14 percentage points for an individual with eight years of schooling. We also estimate bounds on the effect of education on arranged marriage when exclusion restrictions are violated locally (the lower bound is six to seven percentage points). The impact of education is strong for women, but significantly weaker for men.

Source. 
Add. A graph from the paper: