GINI DP 3: New Dataset of Educational Inequality

This paper describes a new dataset collecting measures of educational level and inequality for 31 countries over several birth cohorts. Drawing on four representative international datasets (ESS, EIJSILC, IALS and ISSP), we collect measures of individual educational attainment and aggregate them to generate synthetic indices of education level and dispersion by countries and birth cohorts. The paper provides a detailed description of the procedures and methodologies adopted to build the new dataset, analyses the validity and consistency of the measures across surveys and discusses the relevance of these data for future research. The .csv, .dta, .xml dataset is readily available to GINI members (see website data portal); other scholars may put in a request to the authors YEL Classification: I21, D30, Y1

The Determinants of Non-Cognitive and Cognitive Schooling Outcomes. Report to the Department of Children, Schools and Families

The Centre for the Economics of Education was asked to investigate the factors that influence a range of children's academic and non-academic outcomes, including their enjoyment of school, whether they take unauthorised absence from school and whether they feel they are bullied. The study also investigated whether schools can influence these non-academic outcomes. The study makes use of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, which is a survey of young people in secondary school that collects information on bullying, truancy and many other factors in each child's life. The data is linked to information on each child's academic achievement, enabling this study to investigate the inter-relationship between a pupil's academic performance and non academic outcomes. Pupils who enjoy school more at age 14 have, perhaps unsurprisingly, higher academic achievement by age 16. Equally, children who have higher achievement at age 11 go on to enjoy school more at age 16 though this is a not a strong relationship. In other words enjoyment of school and academic achievement are clearly linked. Pupils who were bullied or who took unauthorised absence at age 14 had significantly lower educational achievement at GCSE. Pupils who experienced bullying at age 14 were also much more likely to experience bullying at age 16. Therefore early negative outcomes, such as being bullied, suggest the child is at risk of having later negative experiences at age 16. Conversely, pupils who participate in positive extra-curricular activities, such as clubs, were also found to have better academic achievement later in their schooling. High achievers at school, i.e. pupils who do well academically at age 14, were also no more likely to be bullied at age 16 than other children. The report also investigated the impact of schools on some of these non-academic outcomes between 14-16 and found little evidence that schools currently have different impacts on pupil's enjoyment of school, nor whether they take unauthorised absence, nor their likelihood of being bullied. In other words, which school a pupil attends is likely to have small or no effect on their wider well-being. This does not mean that schools do not have the potential to impact on these factors but rather that currently there are not large differences across schools in these outcomes once socio-economic factors have been taken into account. The report concludes that non-academic factors, such as a pupil's enjoyment of school, are inextricably linked to pupils' academic achievement. We need to be aware of these relationships when considering policies to improve pupil achievement. The report also provides some useful risk indicators of future low pupil academic achievement. For example, some factors, such as being bullied or taking unauthorised absence, predict low future academic achievement. Again this can be used by schools and policy-makers to identify pupils at risk of low attainment. This research report was written before the new UK Government took office on 11 May 2010. As a result the content may not reflect current Government policy. This research will be of use to officials and ministers in helping to shape the future direction of policy and Departmental strategy.education, bullying

The Relative Importance of Local Labour Market Conditions and Pupil Attainment on Post-Compulsory Schooling Decisions

This paper assesses the relative importance of local labour market conditions and pupil educational attainment as primary determinants of the post-compulsory schooling decision. Using a nested logit model we formally incorporate the structured and sequential decision process pupils engage with. Our findings show that, on average, the key drivers of the schooling decision are pupil educational attainment and parental aspirations rather than local labour market conditions. However, there is some evidence that higher local unemployment rates encourage males to invest in education, and that interactions with educational attainment suggest local labour market conditions impact heterogeneously across the pupil population.post-compulsory education, local labour markets, parental aspirations, educational attainment, nested logit

Institutional Reforms and Educational Attainment in Europe: A Long Run Perspective

In this paper we analyse the effects of changes in the institutional design of the educational system on school attainment. In particular, we test whether alternative reforms have increased the average educational attainment of the population and whether various deciles of the education distribution have been differentially affected. We constructed a dataset of relevant reforms occurred at the national level over the last century, and match individual information to the most likely set-up faced when individual educational choices were undertaken. Thus our identification strategy relies on temporal and geographical variations in the institutional arrangements, controlling for time/country fixed effects, as well as for confounding factors. We also explore who are the individual most likely affected by the reforms. We also group different reforms in order to ascertain the prevailing attitudes of policy makers, showing that reforms can belong to either "inclusive" or "selective" in their nature. Finally we correlate these attitudes to political coalitions prevailing in parliament, finding support to the idea that left wing parties support reforms that are inclusive in nature, while right wing parties prefer selective ones.education, institutions, reform, family background

Trade Openness and the Demand for Skills: Evidence from Turkish Microdata

In this paper we report evidence on the relationship between trade openness, technology adoption and relative demand for skilled labour in the Turkish manufacturing sector, using firm-level data over the period 1980-2001. In a dynamic panel data setting using a unique database of 17,462 firms, we estimate an augmented cost share equation whereby the wage bill share of skilled workers in a given firm is related to international exposure and technology adoption. Overall, results suggest that trade openness and technology play a key role in shifting the demand for labour towards more skilled workers within each firm. Technology-related variables (domestic R&D expenditures and technological transfer from abroad) are positive and significantly related to skill upgrading, as are the involvement of foreign capital in a firm's ownership and the propensity to export. Moreover, firms belonging to those sectors that most raised their imported inputs also experienced a higher increase in the labour cost share of skilled workers. This finding is consistent with the idea that imports by a middle-income country imply a transfer of new technologies that are more skill-intensive than those previously in use in domestic markets. This idea is reinforced by the finding that only imported inputs from industrialised countries − where the potential for innovation diffusion comes from - enter the estimated regression significantly.globalisation, skills, skill-biased technological change, technology transfer, GMM-SYS

Post-16 Educational Choices and Institutional Value Added at Key Stage 5

Childcare costs are often viewed as one of the biggest barriers to work, particularly among lone parents on low incomes. Children in England are eligible to attend free part-time nursery classes (equivalent to pre-kindergarten) from the academic term after they turn 3, and are typically eligible to start free full-time public education on 1 September after they turn four. These rules mean that children born one day apart may start nursery classes up to four months apart, and may start school up to one year apart. We exploit these discontinuities to investigate the impact of a youngest child being eligible for part-time nursery education and full-time primary education on welfare receipt and employment patterns amongst lone parents receiving welfare. In contrast to previous studies, we are able to estimate the precise timing (relative to the date on which part-time or full-time education begins) of any impact on labour supply, by using rich administrative data. Amongst those receiving welfare when their youngest child is aged approximately three and a half, we find a small but significant effect of free full-time public education on both employment and welfare receipt (of around 2 percentage points, or 10-15 per cent), which peaks eight to nine months after the child becomes eligible (aged approximately 4 years and 9 months). We find weaker evidence of an even smaller effect of eligibility for part-time nursery education. This suggests that the expansion of public education programmes to younger disadvantaged children may only encourage a small number of low income lone parents to return to work (although, of course, this is not the primary aim of such programmes).labour supply, school entry, regression discontinuity, lone parents, welfare receipt

Why do children become disengaged from school?

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Parents Basic Skills and Childrens Cognitive Outcomes

The main aim of this paper is to assess how parents' literacy and numeracy affect the cognitive skill of their children. The data used are from the British Cohort Survey (BCS) which provides in 2004 basic skill assessments for all cohort members and cognitive tests for their children. We find strong evidence that parents with higher basic skills have children who perform better in cognitive achievement tests. This result is robust to the inclusion of a wide range of factors, including family characteristics (socio-professional status, qualifications and income levels of the parents), family structure (number of siblings, lone parenthood), child characteristics (gender, age, whether first born, number of siblings) and even parents' own early cognitive ability as measured at age 5. We estimate a model where cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes of the children are simultaneously determined by their parents' basic skills and other characteristics (using a SURE approach). We find that parents' basic skills explain only their children's cognitive skills, and not their non-cognitive outcomes. We suggest this provides some support for the proposition that parents' basic skills are having a genuinely causal impact on children's cognitive skills rather than simply being correlated with other unobserved parental characteristics that improve child achievement.Basic skills, Intergenerational transfer, Education

Globalization and income inequality

This paper discusses the distributive consequences of trade flows in developing countries (DCs). On the theoretical side, we argue that the interplays between international openness and technology adoption may constitute an important mechanism leading to a possible increase of income differentials in the liberalizing DCs, trough skill enhancing trade. We use a dynamic specification to estimate the impact of trade on within-country income inequality in a sample of 70 DCs over the 1980-1999 period. Our results suggest that total aggregate trade flows are weakly related with income inequality. However, once we disaggregate total trade flows according to their areas of origin/destination, we find that trade with high income countries worsen income distribution in DCs, both through imports and exports. This finding provides a preliminary support to the hypothesis that technological differentials between trading partners are important in shaping the distributive effects of trade openness. Moreover, after testing for the differential impact of trade in middle income DCs vs low income ones, we observe that the previous result only holds for middle income countries (MICs). We interpret this evidence by considering the greater potential for technological upgrading in MICs both in terms of their higher absorptive capacity and in terms of their superior ability in serving the differentiated and high-quality markets of the developed world