Where has all the bias gone? Detecting gender-bias in the household allocation of educational expenditure

The reliability of the household consumption based (Engel curve) methodology in detecting gender bias has been called into question because it has generally failed to confirm bias even where it exists. This paper seeks to find explanations for this failure by exploiting a dataset that has educational expenditure information at the individual level and also, by aggregation, at the household level. We find that in the basic education age groups, the discriminatory mechanism in education is via differential enrolment rates for boys and girls. Education expenditure conditional on enrolment is equal for boys and girls. The Engel curve method fails for two reasons. Firstly, it models a single equation for the two stage process. Second, even when we make individual and household level expenditure equations as similar as possible, the household level equation still fails to ‘pick up’ gender bias in about one third of the cases where the individual-level equation shows significant bias. The paper concludes that only individual based data can accurately capture the full extent of gender bias.

Health, Nutrition and Academic Achievement: New Evidence from India

Using new and unique panel data, we investigate the role of long-term health and childhood malnutrition in schooling outcomes for children in rural India, many of whom lack basic numeracy and literacy skills. Using data on students’ performance on mathematics and Hindi tests, we examine the role of the endogeneity of health caused by omitted variables bias and measurement error and correct for these problems using a household fixed effects estimator on a sub-sample of siblings observed in the data. We also present several extensions and robustness checks using instrumental variables and alternative estimators. We find evidence of a positive causal effect of long-term health measured as height-for-age z-score (HAZ) on test scores, and the results are consistent across several different specifications. The results imply that improving childhood nutrition will have benefits that extend beyond health into education.Health, Nutrition, Schooling, India

Where has all the bias gone? Detecting gender-bias in the household allocation of educational expenditure

The reliability of the household consumption based (Engel curve) methodology in detecting gender bias has been called into question because it has generally failed to confirm bias even where it exists. This paper seeks to find explanations for this failure by exploiting a dataset that has educational expenditure information at the individual level and also, by aggregation, at the household level. We find that in the basic education age groups, the discriminatory mechanism in education is via differential enrolment rates for boys and girls. Education expenditure conditional on enrolment is equal for boys and girls. The Engel curve method fails for two reasons. Firstly, it models a single equation for the two stage process. Second, even when we make individual and household level expenditure equations as similar as possible, the household level equation still fails to ‘pick up’ gender bias in about one third of the cases where the individual-level equation shows significant bias. The paper concludes that only individual based data can accurately capture the full extent of gender bias.

Tackling low educational achievement

This report examines the factors underlying low achievement in British education. It is important to find out why tens of thousands of young people leave school with no or very few qualifications. Low achievement at age 16 is associated with disadvantage and also a variety of outcomes by gender and ethnic group. Existing policies and practices within the educational system do not always help. Boys outnumber girls as low achievers by 20 per cent and white British boys comprise nearly half of all low achievers, while there are also achievement problems among some minority ethnic groups. The report addresses the ongoing debate about education policies in relation to reducing low achievement. The study uses the National Pupil Database and related data to examine four different measures of low achievement, and a profile of low achievement is offered. The report will be of interest to all those concerned with educational outcomes, including policymakers, education professionals, unions and the media

Are girls the fairer sex in India? Revisiting intra-household allocation of education expenditure

This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household allocation of education expenditure with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas. In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to enroll (incur any educational expenditure) and the decision of how much to spend on education, conditional on enrolling. Finally the paper also uses household fixed effects to examine whether any gender bias is a within-household phenomenon. The paper finds that the traditional Engel method often fails to pick up gender bias where it exists not only because of the aggregation of data at the household-level but also because of aggregation of the two decisions in which gender can have opposite signs. It is found that pro-male gender bias exists in the primary school age group for several states but that the incidence of gender bias increases with age – it is greater in the middle school age group (10-14 years) and greater still in the secondary school age group (15-19 years). However, gender discrimination in the secondary school age group 15-19 takes place mainly through the decision to enroll boys and not girls, and not through differential expenditure on girls and boys. The results also suggest that the extent of pro-male gender bias in educational expenditure is substantially greater in rural than in urban areas. Finally, our results suggest that an important mechanism through which households spend less on girls than boys is by sending sons to fee-charging private schools and daughters to the fee-free government-funded schools.Gender bias, educational expenditure, Engel curve, Hurdle model, India.

Akin to my teacher: Does caste, religious or gender distance between student and teacher matter? Some evidence from India

This paper uses a unique data set from 5028 primary school children in rural India to examine whether the demographic interactions between students and teachers influence student outcomes and whether social distance between student and teacher exacerbates gender, caste and religious gaps in children's achievement. One would expect this to be the case if discrimination and/or role model effects persist in the classroom. School and individual fixed effects methodology are used. In the pupil fixed effects model, across subject variation is used to test whether having a teacher whose gender, caste and religion are the same as that of the student improves student test scores. We find statistically significant positive effects of matching student and teacher characteristics. We find that a student's achievement in a subject in which the teacher shares the same gender, caste and religion as the child is, on average, nearly a quarter of a SD higher than the same child's achievement in a subject taught by a teacher who does not share the child's gender, caste or religion. Policy implications are considered.education, religion, gender

New Evidence on Class Size Effects : A Pupil Fixed Effects Approach

The impact of class size on student achievement remains a thorny question for educational decision makers. Meta-analyses of empirical studies emphasise the absence of class-size effects but detractors have argued against such pessimistic conclusions because many of the underlying studies have not paid attention to the endogeneity of class-size. This paper uses a stringent method to address the endogeneity problem using TIMSS data on 45 countries. We measure the class size effect by relating the difference in a student’s achievement across subjects to the difference in his/her class-size across subjects. This (subject-differenced) within-pupil achievement production function avoids the problem of the non-random matching of children to specific schools, and to classes within schools. The results show a statistically significant effect of class size for 16 countries but in only 10 of them is the effect negative, and the effect size is very small in most cases. Several robustness tests are carried out, including control for students’ subject-specific ability and subject-specific teacher characteristics, and correction for possible measurement error. Thus, our stringent approach to addressing the problem endogeneity confirms the findings of meta-analyses that find little support for class size effects. We find that class-size effects are smaller in resource-rich countries than in developing countries, supporting the idea that the adverse effect of larger classes increases with class-size. We also find that class size effects are smaller in regions with higher teacher quality.

Race and the Incidence of Unemployment in South Africa

South Africans unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, and it has important distributional implications. The paper examines the incidence of unemployment using two national household surveys for the mid-1990s. Both entry to unemployment and the duration of unemployment are examined. A probit model of the determinants of unemployment is estimated: it shows an important role for race, education, age, gender, home-ownership, location, and numerous other variables, all of which have plausible explanations. The large race gap in unemployment is explored further by means of a decomposition analysis akin to that normally used to analyse wage discrimination. There remains a substantial residual that cannot be explained by observed characteristics, and which might represent unobserved characteristics, such as quality of education, or discrimination. Implications for policy and for research are drawn.Unemployment, South Africa, racial discrimination

Well-being poverty versus income poverty and capabilities poverty?

The conventional approach of economists to the measurement of poverty in poor countries is to use measures of income or consumption. This has been challenged by those who favour broader criteria for poverty and its avoidance. These include the fulfilment of 'basic needs', the 'capabilities' to be and to do things of intrinsic worth, and safety from insecurity and vulnerability. This paper asks: to what extent are these different concepts measurable, to what extent are they competing and to what extent complementary, and is it possible for them to be accommodated within an encompassing framework? There are two remarkable gaps in the rapidly growing literature on subjective well-being. First, reflecting the availability of data, there is little research on poor countries. Second, within any country, there is little research on the relationship between well-being and the notion of poverty. This paper attempts to fill these gaps. Any attempt to define poverty involves a value judgement as to what constitutes a good quality of life or a bad one. We argue that an approach which examines the individuals own perception of well-being is less imperfect, or more quantifiable, or both, as a guide to forming that value judgement than are the other potential approaches. We develop a methodology for using subjective well-being as the criterion for poverty, and illustrate its use by reference to a South African data set containing much socio-economic information on the individual, the household and the community, as well as information on reported well- being. We conclude that it is possible to view subjective well-being as an encompassing concept, which permits us to quantify the relevance and importance of the other approaches and of their component variables. The estimated well-being functions for South Africa contain some variables corresponding to the income approach, some to the basic needs (or physical functioning)approach, some to the relative (or social functioning) approach, and some to the security approach. Thus, our methodology effectively provides weights of the relative importance of these various components of well-being poverty.

Are girls the fairer sex in India? Revisiting intra-household allocation of education expenditure

This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household allocation of education expenditure with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas. In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to enroll (incur any educational expenditure) and the decision of how much to spend on education, conditional on enrolling. Finally the paper also uses household fixed effects to examine whether any gender bias is a within-household phenomenon. The paper finds that the traditional Engel method often fails to pick up gender bias where it exists not only because of the aggregation of data at the household-level but also because of aggregation of the two decisions in which gender can have opposite signs. It is found that pro-male gender bias exists in the primary school age group for several states but that the incidence of gender bias increases with age – it is greater in the middle school age group (10-14 years) and greater still in the secondary school age group (15-19 years). However, gender discrimination in the secondary school age group 15-19 takes place mainly through the decision to enroll boys and not girls, and not through differential expenditure on girls and boys. The results also suggest that the extent of pro-male gender bias in educational expenditure is substantially greater in rural than in urban areas. Finally, our results suggest that an important mechanism through which households spend less on girls than boys is by sending sons to fee-charging private schools and daughters to the fee-free government-funded schools.Gender bias, educational expenditure, Engel curve, Hurdle model, India