Institutional Effects in a Simple Model of Educational Production

This paper presents a model of educational production that tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government chooses educational spending to maximize its net benefits. In the jointly determined equilibrium, schooling quality is shown to depend on several institutionally determined parameters. The impact on student performance of institutions such as central examinations, centralization versus school autonomy, teachers\u27 influence, parental influence, and competition from private schools is analyzed. Furthermore, the model can rationalize why positive resource effects may be lacking in educational production

Raising academic standards and vocational concentrators: Are they better off or worse off?

In this paper we measure the impacts of tougher graduation requirements on course-taking patterns, college attendance and completion, and post-high school labor market outcomes for vocational concentrators and non-concentrators. Our main goal was to assess whether vocational education students were specifically affected (positively or negatively) by the policies' heavy emphasis on the academic part of the high school curriculum. Our results show how requiring higher number of academic credits to graduate and introducing a Minimum Competency Examination help high school graduates to be more successful in the labor market, but reduce their chances of obtaining a college degree. Vocational concentrators are better off in Minimum Competency Examination states. The positive signal they send to employers reinforces the occupational skills that vocational concentrators possess.Graduation requirements, education standards, minimum competency examinations, exit examinations, vocational education, curriculum effects on labor market outcomes,

Central exit examinations increase performance... but take the fun out of mathematics

State-mandated exams, Student achievement, Teacher quality, I28, H42, D02,

What accounts for international differences in student performance? A re-examination using PISA data

Education production function, PISA, International variation in student performance, Institutional effects in schooling, I28, J24, H52, L33,