Academic self-concept, gender and single-sex schooling

This paper assesses gender differences in academic self-concept for a cohort of children born in 1958 (the National Child Development Study). We address the question of whether attending single-sex or co-educational schools affected students’ perceptions of their own academic abilities (academic self-concept). Academic selfconcept was found to be highly gendered, even controlling for prior test scores. Boys had higher self-concepts in maths and science, and girls in English. Single-sex schooling reduced the gender gap in self-concept, while selective schooling was linked to lower academic self-concept overall

Children’s health opportunities and project evaluation: Mexico’s Oportunidades program

We propose a methodology to evaluate social projects from an (equality of) opportunity perspective by looking at their effect on (parts of) the distribution of outcomes conditional on morally irrelevant characteristics, taken here to be parental education level and indigenous background. The methodology is applied to evaluate the effects on children’s health outcomes of Mexico’s Oportunidades program, one of the world’s largest conditional cash transfer programs for poor households. The evidence shows that the gains in health opportunities for children from indigenous background are substantial and situated in crucial parts of the distribution, while the gains for children from nonindigenous backgrounds are more limited.project evaluation, opportunities, oportunidades program.