Educational Opportunities and the Role of Institutions

Educational opportunities determine the intergenerational mobility of human capital and are affected by institutional features of schooling systems. The aim of this paper is twofold. It intends to show how strongly student performance depends on student background at two important stages in a student?s life as well as to explain cross-country differences in educational opportunities by schooling institutions. A difference-in-differences estimation approach is applied to control for country-specific effects. The results imply that educational opportunities decrease with student age in most countries. However, the attitude of parents seems to become more important while the impact of social origin decreases. A greater differentiation of the schooling system as indicated by streaming and private schools is associated with a greater effect of social background while more instruction time limits the impact of social origin on student performance. Higher school autonomy increases the impact of parental influence. --Equality of educational opportunity,student performance,institutions,PISA,PIRLS

Poor Background or Low Returns? Why Immigrant Students in Germany Perform so Poorly in PISA

Student performance of Germans and immigrants differed greatly in the 2000 PISA study. This paper analyses why the two groups of students performed so differently by estimating educational production functions, using an extension study with imputed data. The difference in the test scores is assigned to different effects, using a Juhn-Murphy-Pierce decomposition method. The analysis shows that German students have on average more favorable characteristics and experience slightly higher returns to these characteristics in terms of test scores than immigrant students. The later enrolment of immigrant students and preferences of parents as reflected by the number of books and language spoken at home are more important than parents? education or the family setting for explaining the test score gap. Overall, the variation in test scores can be explained better by the observable characteristics for immigrant than for German students. --Educational production,PISA-E,decomposition,immigration

Educational Opportunities and the Role of Institutions

Educational opportunities determine the intergenerational mobility of human capital and are affected by institutional features of schooling systems. The aim of this paper is twofold. It intends to show how strongly student performance depends on student background at two important stages in a student's life as well as to explain cross-country differences in educational opportunities by schooling institutions. A difference-in-differences estimation approach is applied to control for country-specific effects. The results imply that educational opportunities decrease with student age in most countries. However, the attitude of parents seems to become more important while the impact of social origin decreases. A greater differentiation of the schooling system as indicated by streaming and private schools is associated with a greater effect of social background while more instruction time limits the impact of social origin on student performance. Higher school autonomy increases the impact of parental influence

Poor Background or Low Returns? : Why Immigrant Students in Germany Perform so Poorly in PISA

Student performance of Germans and immigrants differed greatly in the 2000 PISA study. This paper analyses why the two groups of students performed so differently by estimating educational production functions, using an extension study with imputed data. The difference in the test scores is assigned to different effects, using a Juhn-Murphy-Pierce decomposition method. The analysis shows that German students have on average more favorable characteristics and experience slightly higher returns to these characteristics in terms of test scores than immigrant students. The later enrolment of immigrant students and preferences of parents as reflected by the number of books and language spoken at home are more important than parents' education or the family setting for explaining the test score gap. Overall, the variation in test scores can be explained better by the observable characteristics for immigrant than for German students

PISA : What Makes the Difference?

The huge difference in the level and variance of student performance in the 2000 PISA study between Finland and Germany motivates this paper. It analyses why Finnish students performed so much better by estimating educational production functions for both countries. The difference in the reading proficiency scores is assigned to different effects, using Oaxaca-Blinder and Juhn-Murphy-Pierce decomposition techniques. The analysis shows that German students have on average a more favorable background except for the lowest deciles, but experience much lower returns to these background characteristics in terms of test scores than Finnish students. The results imply that early streaming in Germany penalizes students in lower school types and leads to a greaterinequality of educational achievement. It remains unclear, however, if this can be attributed to the effect of school types per se or student background and innate ability that determine the allocation process of students into school types. Overall, the variation in test scores can be explained much better by the observable characteristics in Germany than in Finland

Educational Opportunities and the Role of Institutions

Educational opportunities determine the intergenerational mobility of human capital and are affected by institutional features of schooling systems. The aim of this paper is twofold. It intends to show how strongly student performance depends on student background as well as to explain cross-country differences in educational opportunities by decisive features of educational systems. For the latter, a two-step approach is combined with a difference-in-differences estimation in order to control for country-specific effects. The results show that educational opportunities decrease with student age in most countries. However, the attitude of parents seems to become more important while social origin becomes less important. Institutions are linked to educational opportunities. It can be shown that the institutional features of the schooling system as indicated by streaming and private schools, instruction time and school autonomy are related to different dimensions of educational opportunities.education, training and the labour market;

Education and Wage Inequality in Germany: A Review of the Empirical Literature

This paper reviews the current state of knowledge on the link between education and wage inequality in Germany. The wage inequality is characterized by its stability, although a more detailed analysis reveals structural differences, especially between East and West Germany. Both the between and within educational levels wage inequality changed little over time, while there are some tendencies of a converging distribution of education. A need for further research is identified in the effects of education on wage inequality in separate cohorts as well as the direct links between the two distributions in Germany. --

Peer Effects in European Primary Schools: Evidence from PIRLS

We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable estimates of peer effects in standard OLS specifications. The size of the estimate is much reduced within schools. This could be explained either by selection into schools or by measurement error in the peer background variable. When we correct for measurement error we find within school estimates close to the original OLS estimates. Our results suggest that the peer effect is modestly large, measurement error is important in our survey data, and selection plays little role in biasing peer effects estimates. We find no significant evidence of non-linear peer effects. --

Pupil-teacher gender interaction effects on scholastic outcomes in England and the USA

The difference between girls and boys academic performance is a major issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Do boys and girls fair better with a teacher of their own gender? This paper investigates the presence of such ?pupil-teacher gender interactions? on scholastic performance. We use data from PIRLS and TIMSS on Reading, Science and Maths at grade 4 and grade 8 for England and the USA for data from 1995, 1999, 2001 and 2003. We find evidence of gender interaction effects in the form of both positive male interaction effects in Maths scores in the US and Science scores in England at grade 8. Further, using individual fixed effects, Gain score analysis of the difference between Maths and Science scores confirms the presence of Maths gender interaction effects in England (but not the USA) at grade 8 by 2003 when these effects were not present in 1995 or 1999. --

Aggregate Unemployment Decreases Individual Returns to Education

On the basis of a theoretical model, we argue that higher aggregate unemployment affects individual returns to education. We therefore include aggregate unemployment and an interaction term between unemployment and the individual education level in a standard Mincer equation. Our results show that an increase in regional unemployment by 1% decreases the returns to education by 0.005 percentage points. This implies that higher skilled employees are better sheltered from labour market changes with respect to their jobs but encounter larger wage changes than less skilled employees. Differences in regional unemployment can in addition almost fully explain the observed large differences in regional returns to education. We use representative individual data and regional panel variation in unemployment between different German regions and for different employee groups. We demonstrate that our results are robust with respect to aggregation bias, time lags and potential endogeneity of the unemployment variable. --returns to education,unemployment,regional variation