The Effect of Private Tutoring Expenditures on Academic Performance: Evidence from a Nonparametric Bounding Method

The causal relationship between educational investments and student outcomes continues to attract attention. The majority of studies have examined the effectiveness of public school expenditures or private school attendance on student outcomes. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the effectiveness of an unexplored dimension of educational inputs—private tutoring expenditures of South Korean parents. In the face of difficulties in causal estimation, the paper employs a nonparametric bounding method that is recently gaining popularity. With the method we show that the true effect of private tutoring remains at most modest. The tightest bounds suggest that a 10 percent increase in expenditure raises a student's test score by 0.764 percent at the largest. Such a modest effect remains similar across male and female students, and across students of different ability levels.Private Tutoring, Test Scores, Nonparametric Bounds, South Korea

Does Money Matter? The Effect of Private Educational Expenditures on Academic Performance

The causal relationship between educational investments and student outcomes continues to attract attention. The majority of studies have examined the effectiveness of public school expenditures on student outcomes. This paper attempts to shed light on the impacts of educational inputs by examining a private educational investment-private tutoring that is widely employed by South Korean parents as a supplement to public school education. To deal with the endogeneity of private tutoring expenditures, the paper relies on instrumental variables (IV) methods, exploiting a student's birth order as a source of identification. Based on the IV methods, the paper shows that a 10 percent increase in expenditure leads to a 0.56 percentile point improvement in test score. Such an estimated effect is modest and comparable to the effect of public school expenditures on earnings estimated by previous studies.Education, Private Tutoring, Test Scores, Birth Order, South Korea

University Prestige and Choice of Major Field: Evidence from South Korea

Unlike previous studies on major choice of university students, this study considers a university's prestige in their choice of a major field. This study sets up an estimation model for a joint decision about where to go to university (prestigious or non-prestigious) and what major field to concentrate. The empirical model is applied to the major-choice patterns of 4-year university students in South Korea between 1981 and 2001. The study finds that a university's prestige has a significant impact on their choice of a major field of university study. When the major-choice patterns are associated with measures of future labor-market outcomes, the probability of large-firm employment (rather than the stream of future earnings) after graduation is found to play a more important role in the decisions of a major field in South KoreaUniversity Prestige, Major Choice, South Korea, Labor-Market Outcomes

Union Wage Effect: New Evidence From Matched Employer-Employee Data

This paper estimates a union wage effect, using matched employer- employee data and estimation models that control an association between a worker's union status and an employer's characteristics. Failure to control this association may cause previous studies' estimates of the union wage effect to be biased. As long as a worker is more likely to become a union worker in a firm that offers her a higher potential for better pay, the union status is (positively) associated with employer characteristics. The empirical finding of this paper verifies this possibility. Estimates of the union wage effect are shown to be upward-biased in the estimation models without control of the employer characteristics. The estimated union wage effect of this study (in an approximate range of 0.2"3.2 percent) is less than a quarter of cross-sectional estimates, and half of individual panel estimates with unobservable person effects.Union, Wage, Endogeneity, Person Effect, Firm Effect

Educational Implications of School Systems at Different Stages of Schooling

In educating students national public school systems use different methods of grouping students by ability across schools. We consider four different school systems of student allocation at different stages of schooling and their educational implications. Our two-period model suggests that both the frequency and sequence of ability grouping play an important role in producing educational implications. As different households prefer different combinations of school systems, the overall performance of a school system is determined by how households are distributed over income and a child's ability and the voting of households.Education, Comprehensive and Selective School Systems