CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Molnár, Tímea Laura |
|---|---|
| Title | The effect of time spent in kindergarten on student achievement |
| Summary | I address the causal effect of time spent in kindergarten on student achievement. I present a theoretical model of the parental decision of how many years the child should spend in kindergarten. I derive the probability limit of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and the Instrumental Variable (IV) estimators. Using Hungarian data from 2008 for 6th graders, I estimate OLS and IV estimations. I use scarcity of kindergarten teachers in the municipality the child lived at her age of 4 as the instrument. The OLS results show that an additional year spent in kindergarten increases student achievement by 6% standard deviation in mathematics and reading (controlling for social, compositional and spatial characteristics of the family and the school-starting age of the child). The IV results show that, keeping the same controls fixed, an additional year spent in kindergarten increases student achievement by 18.4% standard deviation in mathematics and 21.5% standard deviation in reading. If appropriate assumptions are satisfied then the OLS and IV estimates are lower and upper bounds of the population effect, respectively. The effects are systematically stronger for disadvantaged children. My results suggest that less privileged families are more constrained in case of scarcity of kindergarten service provision, which raises inequality concerns. |
| Supervisor | Kezdi Gabor |
| Department | Economics MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/molnar_timea_02.pdf |
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