Leaving teaching in the French-Speaking Community of Belgium: a duration analysis

This paper aims at a better understanding of the factors influencing the decision of young graduates who entered teaching to stay in that profession. The field of research covers secondary education teachers in the French-Speaking Community of Belgium. The data analysed comes from an administrative database containing historical records of 50,000 individuals who started teaching between 1973 and 1996. The analysis is carried out assuming a proportional hazard model and using the discrete- time method initiated by Prentice and Gloecker (1978). One of the main results is that the risk of exit is dramatically more important during the first periods of employment. That this risk tends also to increase over time suggesting that drop-out among young recruits is higher now than it was in the past. Location and labour market conditions seem to be of little impact. The risk of exit is the same in rural and urban areas and across provinces wherein unemployment rates vary dramatically. Finally, the significant deterioration of pay conditions (in relative terms) since the mid-80's has had no significant impact on the risk of exit. Of greater importance are supply-side (organisational) elements like the level of centralisation of recruitment decisions or the level of asymmetry between tenure and non-tenure personnel regarding job protection, access to full-time positionsubliminal extant Smith economagic gmm

Free Higher Education - Regressive Transfer or Implicit Loan ?

Should access to higher education remain ‘free’ ? Theoretical answers to this question are at least twofold. First, public higher education is said to be regressive as a priviliged minority profits from extra human capital, and all the private benefits it generates, while the general public foots the bill. A frequent reply is that higher education students enjoying ‘free’ access are implicitly borrowing public money that they pay back when entering the labour market, via progressive income taxes. Using a simple lifecycle framework this paper produces realistic estimates of how much graduates are likely to ‘reimburse” society via income tax. Using Belgian data on higher education public expenditure and income taxes paid by both graduates and non-graduates over their lifetime, we show that the implicit reimbursement rate ranges from 37% to 95%. It is much higher for bachelors than master graduates, and for malesHigher Education Finance; Regressive Transfers; Implicit Loans

Private, Private Government-Dependent and Public schools. An International Effectiveness Analysis

This paper aims at estimating the effect on achievement of various types of schools: private, private but government-dependent and public ones. It is based on the analysis of Reading test scores of 15-year-old students surveyed in 2002 across OECD and non-OECD countries. The estimation of the effect of private vs. public school attendance may be biased by the existence of confounding factors. An obvious start is to use standard (OLS) regression models to isolate the effect of private/public status from the other determinants of achievement like family resources or socio-economic background. But regression estimates are highly dependent on the validity of the linearity assumption. Hence, the rational for using non-parametric propensity score matching. The main result is that private government-dependent schools can have a significant positive effect on 15 year-olds' academic achievement. Regarding private independent schools, the conclusion is rather the opposite. Our results also support the view that, in most cases, expanding the size of the more effective sector would improve average achievement.education economics, human capital, resource allocation, school choice, multiple treatments evaluation, propensity score

Leaving teaching in the French-Speaking Community of Belgium: a duration analysis

This paper aims at a better understanding of the factors influencing the decision of young graduates who entered teaching to stay in that profession. The field of research covers secondary education teachers in the French-Speaking Community of Belgium. The data analysed comes from an administrative database containing historical records of 50,000 individuals who started teaching between 1973 and 1996. The analysis is carried out assuming a proportional hazard model and using the discrete- time method initiated by Prentice and Gloecker (1978). One of the main results is that the risk of exit is dramatically more important during the first periods of employment. That this risk tends also to increase over time suggesting that drop-out among young recruits is higher now than it was in the past. Location and labour market conditions seem to be of little impact. The risk of exit is the same in rural and urban areas and across provinces wherein unemployment rates vary dramatically. Finally, the significant deterioration of pay conditions (in relative terms) since the mid-80's has had no significant impact on the risk of exit. Of greater importance are supply-side (organisational) elements like the level of centralisation of recruitment decisions or the level of asymmetry between tenure and non-tenure personnel regarding job protection, access to full-time positionLeaving Teaching, Duration Analysis, Analysis of Education

Family Income and Tertiary Education Attendance across the EU: An empirical assessment using sibling data

There is plenty of evidence across the EU to suggest that young people from poorer backgrounds are less likely to attend tertiary education than their better-off peers. This correlation is often used to justify monetary transfers to families with students. It is not clear, however, that these differences in attendance are caused by income itself rather than by parental ability, motivation, education, and other aspects of the young person's experience which differ between families, but are not a direct result of income. Controlling for observable family characteristics is a useful first step. But further developments are needed as families potentially differ in unobservable ways that are correlated with both income and attendance. In this paper we use families with several children to correct for unobserved time-invariant family fixed effects. Our results suggest the absence of parental income effects in Belgium and Germany, small positive effects in Poland, medium-size positive effect in the UK, and sizeable positive effects in Hungary.Tertiary education attendance, parental income, liquidity constraints

Private, Private Government-Dependent and Public Schools. An International Effectiveness Analysis

This paper aims at estimating the effect on achievement of various types of schools : private, private but government-dependent and public ones. It is based on the analysis of Reading test scores of 15-year-old students surveyed in 2002 across OECD and non-OECD countries. The estimation of the effect of private vs. public school attendance may be biased by the existence of confounding factors. An obvious start is to use standard (OLS) regression models to isolate the effect of private/public status from the other determinants of achievement like family resources or socio-economic backgroung. But regression estimates are highly dependent on the validity of the linearity assumption. Hence, the rational for using non-parametric propensity score matching. The main result is the private government-dependent schools can have a significant positive effect on 15 year-olds’ academic achievement. Regarding private independent schools, the conclusion is rather the opposite. Our results also support the view that, in most cases, expanding the size of the more effective sector would improve average achievement.educations economics; human capital; resource allocation; school choice; multiple treatments evaluation; propensity score

Cost Efficiency and Feasibility of Education Policy in the Presence of Local Social Externalities

This paper is a theoretical exercise aimed at developing an economic analysis of an education system in which the educational output - apart from each individual's propensity to invest in himself or the level of per-pupil spending - is heavily conditioned by the way non-monetary inputs (peer effects operating as local social spillovers) are allocated between schools. Our model actually stresses the influence peer effects can exert on the monetary cost of a policy aimed at equalizing achievement. Unequal allocation of these non-purchasable inputs will cause unequal monetary input requirements and under some realistic assumptions we show here that the best way to ensure cost efficiency is to achieve an equalitarian allocation of peer effects (perfect desegregation according to ability level). But the implementation of such a policy raises many difficulties. To get particular families to voluntarily send their offspring to desegregated schools might require some form of bribery.Education: Government Policy; Externalities; Cost-Benefit Analysis

Boosting the employment rate of older men and women

European countries need to expand employment among older individuals. Many papers have examined this issue from different angles. However, very few seem to have considered its gender dimension properly, despite evidence that lifting the overall senior employment rate requires significantly raising that of women older than 50. The key issue examined by this paper is whether employers are willing to employ more older workers, in particular older women. The answer depends to a large extent on the ratio of older individuals’ productivity to their cost to employers. To address this question we tap into a unique firm-level panel of Belgian data to produce robust evidence on the causal effect of age/gender on productivity and labour costs. We take advantage of the panel structure to identify age/gender-related differences from within-firm variation. Moreover, inspired by recent developments in the production function estimation literature, we address the problem of endogeneity of the age/gender mix, using a structural production function estimator (Olley & Pakes, 1996; Levinsohn & Petrin, 2003) alongside IV-GMM methods where lagged value of labour inputs are used as instruments. Our results indicate a small negative impact of larger shares of older men on the productivity-labour cost ratio. An increment of 10%-points of in their share causes a 0.17 to 0.69%-point contraction. However, the main result is that the equivalent handicap with older women is larger, ranging from 1.3 to 2.0%-points. This is not good news for older women’s employability. And the vast services industry does not seem to offer working conditions that mitigate older women’s disadvantage, on the contrary.Ageing, Labour Productivity, Panel Data Analysis

Grade retention and educational attainment. Exploiting the 2001 Reform by the French-Speaking Community of Belgium and Synthetic Control Methods

This paper evaluates the effects of grade retention on attainment by exploiting a reform introduced in 2001 in the French-Speaking Community of Belgium whereby the possibility of grade retention in grade 7 was reintroduced. It uses the Synthetic Control Method to identify the best possible pre-treatment control. Data come from three waves of the PISA study (corresponding to periods before and after the reform) that contains test scores of representative samples of 15 year-olds. These are used essentially to answer two questions. First, has the 2001 grade repetition reform at least succeeded at filtering out weaker pupils, pupils who would presumably be disadvantaged by being promoted directly to higher grades. This is a minimum condition for grade retention to be justifiable. Second, do these “treated” students achieve better/worse when they repeat (and attend a lower grade) than when they are “socially promoted”. (and attend the age 15 reference grade 10)? We find significant evidence of positive screening but we fail to demonstrate that those filtered out perform differently under the “grade repetition”.regime than under the “social promotion”regime.Grade retention, educational attainment, synthetic control method

Refinancing Europe’s Higher Education through Deferred and Income-Contingent Fees: An empirical assessment using Belgian, German and UK data

The arguments for refinancing the European Union's (EU) higher education via higher tuition fees largely rest on preserving the profitability of the educational investment and offering deferred and income-contingent payments. Using income survey datasets on Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) we first estimate how graduates' private return on educational investment is likely to be affected by higher private contributions. We then evaluate the effect of income-contingent and deferred payment mechanisms on lifetime net income and its capacity to account for graduates' ability to pay, considering numerous ways of financing the cost of introducing income-contingency. Our analysis reveals that increasing individuals' contributions to higher education costs, through income-contingent and deferred instruments, does not significantly affect the private rate of return of heterogeneous graduates, allows for payments to be indexed to ability to pay, and can be implemented in ways that minimize the risk of adverse selection. These findings prove robust to significant variations between countries' unharmonised higher education institutional structures.Higher Education Finance, income-contingent loans, risk pooling and risk shifting