Abstract: This paper evaluates the long-term effects of class size in primary school. We use rich administrative data from Sweden and exploit variation in class size created by a maximum class size rule. Smaller classes in the last three years of primary school (age 10 to 13) are not only beneficial for cognitive test scores at age 13 but also for non-cognitive scores at that age, for cognitive test scores at ages 16 and 18, and for completed education and wages at age 27 to 42. The estimated effect on wages is much larger than any indirect (imputed) estimate of the wage effect, and is large enough to pass a cost-benefit test. Download this paper.
Abstract: Recent studies for primary and secondary education find positive effects of the share of girls in the classroom on achievement of boys and girls. This study examines whether these results can be extrapolated to post-secondary education. We conduct an experiment in which the shares of girls in workgroups for first year students in economics and business are manipulated and students are randomly assigned to these groups. Boys tend to postpone, but not abandon, their dropout decision when surrounded by more girls and perform worse on courses with high math content. There is also a modest reduction in absenteeism early in the year. Overall, however, we fail to find substantial gender peer effects on achievement. This in spite of the fact that according to students' perceptions, both their own, and their peers’ behavior are influenced by the share of girls. Download this paper.
Abstract: Using a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate the impact of Ramadan on educational outcomes of Muslim students living in a non-Muslim country. For identification we exploit the fact that the number of Ramadan weeks during the course that we study, varies from year to year, ranging from zero to four. Our main finding is that Ramadan observance has a negative impact on performance; one additional Ramadan week lowers the final grade of Muslim students by almost ten percent of a standard deviation. Download this paper.
Abstract: Using a discontinuity in the funding scheme, we evaluate the impact of two different early childhood interventions (home visits and child care centers) on children and mothers from poor families in Ecuador. We find that home visits are beneficial for children's cognitive outcomes and health and for mothers' psychological well-being but reduce mothers' labor force participation. Child care centers, on the other hand, turn out to have no, or even a negative, impact on children's cognitive outcomes, harm their health and the psychological well-being of their mothers but raise mothers' labor force participation and family income. Our results are consistent with a framework in which child outcomes are determined by the quantity and quality of the time inputs of the mother and of the early childhood intervention, and in which mother's psychological well-being depends on her working hours and on child outcomes. Download this paper.
Abstract: This paper reports about a field experiment conducted to estimate the impact of the share of women in business teams on their performance. Teams consisting of undergraduate students in business studies start up a venture as part of their curriculum. We manipulated the gender composition of teams and assigned students, conditional on their gender, randomly to teams. We find that teams with an equal gender mix perform better than male-dominated and female-dominated teams in terms of sales, profits and earnings per share. We explore various mechanisms and find that mutual monitoring is more intense in mixed teams than in homogeneous teams. This partially explains the better results of mixed teams. Download this paper.
Abstract: For a given size of an educational market, more school choice and competition in the form of more suppliers, means that suppliers will on average serve fewer pupils. This implies a trade-off between scale and competition which has been largely ignored in the economics of education literature. We study this trade-off using a large school consolidation reform in the Netherlands that decreased the supply of schools by on average 15 percent, but where the reduction in the supply of schools varied considerably across municipalities. We find that reducing the number of schools by 10 percent increases pupils’ achievement by about 3 percent of a standard deviation. We present evidence that in our setting scale effects dominate the effects of choice and competition. More generally, our results illustrate that ignoring scale effects can lead to substantial bias in general equilibrium estimates of choice and competition. Download this paper.
Abstract: In 2007 the government of Ecuador launched a microcredit program for enterprises run by poor households. The program was targeted to households at the bottom two quintiles in the wealth distribution. This paper uses data collected prior to the start of the program to examine whether the government’s targeting strategy reaches all households that are constrained in their access to loans of the type provided by the program. We find that the program excludes households in the third quintile of the wealth distribution that are equally credit constrained and have very similar demands for credit as households served by the program. Download this paper.
Abstract: To raise school attendance, many programs in developing countries eliminate or reduce private contributions to education. This paper documents an unintended negative effect of such programs. Using data from a randomized experiment that provides free uniforms to primary school children in Ecuador, we find that the intervention has a significantly negative impact on attendance. An explanation is that parents who pay for their children's uniforms (the control group) feel more committed to the school than parents who got the uniforms for free (the treated) and therefore encourage their children to attend school. Consistent with this sunk cost effect, we find that the impact is largest shortly after the purchase of the uniform, and during the exam period when more is at stake. Download this paper.
Abstract: In this paper we investigate how heterogeneous agents choose among tournaments with different prizes. We show that if the number of agents is sufficiently small, multiple equilibria can arise. Depending on how the prize money is split over the tournaments, these may include, for example, a perfect-sorting equilibrium in which high-ability agents compete in the high-prize tournament, while low-ability agents compete for the low prize. However, there are also equilibria in which agents follow a mixed strategy and there can be reverse sorting, i.e. low-ability agents are in the tournament with the high prize, while high-ability agents are in the low-prize tournament. We show that total effort always decreases compared to a single tournament. However, splitting the tournament may increase the effort of low-ability agents. Download this paper.
Abstract: This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression discontinuity design for families around the second quintile of this index, which is the program’s eligibility threshold. This allows us to compare results from two different credible identification methods, and to investigate whether the impact varies with families’ poverty level. Around the first quintile of the poverty index the impact is positive while it is equal to zero around the second quintile. This suggests that for the poorest families the program lifts a credit constraint while this is not the case for families close to the eligibility threshold. Download this paper.
Abstract: This paper estimates the effects of attending medical school on health behavior and health status exploiting that admission to medical school in the Netherlands is determined by a lottery. Because lottery losers are permitted to re-apply, we use the result of the first lottery in which someone participates as instrumental variable. Our results show that health education reduces alcohol intake and being underweight, and seems to reduce smoking. It has, however, no impact on being overweight or obese, or on subjective health status. The effect on the frequency of physical exercise is even negative. This mixed evidence makes it unlikely that the content of education programs explains the education gradient for health. Health education has a large impact on the probability of being registered for donations of organs, suggesting that information provision is a possible channel to raise the supply of organs. Download this paper.
Abstract: To stimulate investment in training by individuals, the Dutch tax system allows a deduction of direct training expenditures from taxable income. This paper investigates to what extent the resulting cost reduction encourages training investments. Two different identification strategies are used. The first strategy uses the progressive structure of the income tax scheme and compares groups with taxable income just above or just below kinks. The second strategy takes advantage of the 2001 tax reform, which implied substantial changes in marginal tax rates. These strategies exploit different sources of exogenous variation and are based on different identifying assumptions. Nevertheless, the results point in the same direction: tax incentives increase training participation. Download this paper.