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The present thesis presents three essays on the economics of education, dealing with both the importance of peer and socio-emotional skills on students’ outcomes. The first essay investigates peer effects on students’ aspirations towards going to college. Aspiration is a fundamental determinant of one’s effort and investments. Due to its consequences for individuals’ future outcomes, understanding the process of aspirations formation helps to inform public policies. This work asks whether peers play a role in such a process. I use novel data on Brazilian students’ network, matched with administrative data, and investigate whether students’ college aspiration spills over to their friends. The employed methodology acknowledges that social cliques are formed endogenously and addresses this challenge by modeling friendship formation based on homophily in predetermined characteristics and on students’ as good-as-random chances of interaction. Using the predicted adjacency matrix, I explore network structures and use friends of friends’ characteristics as instruments for friends’ aspiration. The results show evidence of positive, significant, and quite large peer effects on aspiration, which are driven mostly by boys, and/or students with less educated fathers. Peers’ aspirations also influence students’ likelihood of finishing high school. Compliance with social norms seems to play a role in explaining the impact. The second essay, co-authored with Dr. Jane Cooley Fruehwirth, investigates parental peer effects. Better-educated parents bestow significant advantages on their children in life; we explore whether this advantage multiplies, spilling over to classmates. Using a nationally representative sample of US kindergarteners, we find significant effects of the parental education of classmates on math and reading, but not on socio-emotional skills. The effects are economically meaningful: reassigning classrooms so that all students have the same parental education composition would narrow the achievement gap between children of parents who are high-school-educated (or less) and those who are university-educated by 9 to 13 percent. These spillovers are not explained by rich, beginning of the schoolyear, measures of cognitive and socio-emotional skills, nor by race or socioeconomic status. Interestingly, not all spillovers from parental education are positive. In reading, we find that university-educated parents who are not working full-time create some negative spillovers for the classroom, which appear to come from their children’s relatively advanced reading skills. Finally, the third essay, co-authored with Dr. Fernando Botelho, Dr. Marcos A. Rangel and Dr. Ricardo A. Madeira, investigates students’ socio-emotional traits and how they are associated with students’ outcomes. Several studies have shown that socio-emotional traits are highly associated with educational and labor market outcomes. However, investigations about such an association are still scarce in developing countries. The present study brings the results of an extensive survey conducted in low-performing public schools in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which measured students' personality traits. We find that our measures of socio-emotional skills are positively associated with school attendance, students' performance in both blind exams and under teachers' evaluation, and school progress and enrollment. Socio-emotional skills also explain a large portion of racial and gender gaps in students' outcomes. Educational policies that decrease gaps in socio-emotional skills might, therefore, reduce racial and gender disparities in school performance and dropout in Brazil.

Essays in the Economics of Education: The Role of Peers and Socio-Emotional Skills

GAGETE MIRANDA, JESSICA
2021

Abstract

The present thesis presents three essays on the economics of education, dealing with both the importance of peer and socio-emotional skills on students’ outcomes. The first essay investigates peer effects on students’ aspirations towards going to college. Aspiration is a fundamental determinant of one’s effort and investments. Due to its consequences for individuals’ future outcomes, understanding the process of aspirations formation helps to inform public policies. This work asks whether peers play a role in such a process. I use novel data on Brazilian students’ network, matched with administrative data, and investigate whether students’ college aspiration spills over to their friends. The employed methodology acknowledges that social cliques are formed endogenously and addresses this challenge by modeling friendship formation based on homophily in predetermined characteristics and on students’ as good-as-random chances of interaction. Using the predicted adjacency matrix, I explore network structures and use friends of friends’ characteristics as instruments for friends’ aspiration. The results show evidence of positive, significant, and quite large peer effects on aspiration, which are driven mostly by boys, and/or students with less educated fathers. Peers’ aspirations also influence students’ likelihood of finishing high school. Compliance with social norms seems to play a role in explaining the impact. The second essay, co-authored with Dr. Jane Cooley Fruehwirth, investigates parental peer effects. Better-educated parents bestow significant advantages on their children in life; we explore whether this advantage multiplies, spilling over to classmates. Using a nationally representative sample of US kindergarteners, we find significant effects of the parental education of classmates on math and reading, but not on socio-emotional skills. The effects are economically meaningful: reassigning classrooms so that all students have the same parental education composition would narrow the achievement gap between children of parents who are high-school-educated (or less) and those who are university-educated by 9 to 13 percent. These spillovers are not explained by rich, beginning of the schoolyear, measures of cognitive and socio-emotional skills, nor by race or socioeconomic status. Interestingly, not all spillovers from parental education are positive. In reading, we find that university-educated parents who are not working full-time create some negative spillovers for the classroom, which appear to come from their children’s relatively advanced reading skills. Finally, the third essay, co-authored with Dr. Fernando Botelho, Dr. Marcos A. Rangel and Dr. Ricardo A. Madeira, investigates students’ socio-emotional traits and how they are associated with students’ outcomes. Several studies have shown that socio-emotional traits are highly associated with educational and labor market outcomes. However, investigations about such an association are still scarce in developing countries. The present study brings the results of an extensive survey conducted in low-performing public schools in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which measured students' personality traits. We find that our measures of socio-emotional skills are positively associated with school attendance, students' performance in both blind exams and under teachers' evaluation, and school progress and enrollment. Socio-emotional skills also explain a large portion of racial and gender gaps in students' outcomes. Educational policies that decrease gaps in socio-emotional skills might, therefore, reduce racial and gender disparities in school performance and dropout in Brazil.
28-gen-2021
Inglese
31
2018/2019
PUBLIC POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION
Settore SECS-P/06 - Economia Applicata
PINOTTI, PAOLO
RANGEL, MARCOS
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11565/4035699
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