CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Bukowski, Pawel |
|---|---|
| Title | Essays on the Economics of Education |
| Summary | This thesis consists of one co-authored and two single-authored chapters, which investigate the modern and historical determinants of student performance and educational inequalities. The first chapter (and the Job Market Paper) examines the effect on current student performance of the 19th century Partitions of Poland among Austria, Prussia and Russia. Despite the modern similarities of the three regions, using a regression discontinuity design I show that student test scores are 0.61 standard deviation higher on the Austrian side of the former Austrian-Russian border. On the other hand, I do not find evidence for differences on the Prussian-Russian border. Using a theoretical model and indirect evidence I argue that the Partitions have persisted through their impact on social norms toward local schools. Nevertheless, the persistent effect of Austria is puzzling given the historical similarities of the Austrian and Prussian educational systems. I argue that the differential legacy of Austria and Prussia originates from the Austrian Empire’s policy to promote Polish identity in schools and the Prussian Empire’s efforts to Germanize the Poles through education. The second chapter is co-authored with Martyna Kobus. It studies the effect of threat of school competition on performance of public schools. We provide the evidence for the negative effect of the competition on students’ test scores in public schools. We use the introduction of the amendment facilitating the creation of autonomous schools in Poland in 2009 as a breakthrough date in DiD estimation. The specifics of the Polish reform provide for a credible proxy for the threat of competition, so we can take into account that the size of competition is endogenous to the market characteristics. For the total sample we find no effect, however, for more competitive urban educational markets, we report a drop in test scores in public schools following the introduction of the amendment. This negative effect is robust to the existence of some competition prior to the amendment and to the size of public schools. It does not result from the violation of the common trend assumption either. We focus on the short run in which there is only a limited set of actions available to schools’ principals. We exclude student sorting as a potential channel. The third chapter estimates the effect of school competition on sorting within a school (across classes). The identification strategy is based on a two-stage design of the Polish Comprehensive Education, which allows to isolate an exogenous change in student mobility. In addition, I use a novel measure of student socio-economic characteristics - Raven’s Progressive Matrix test score. The results show that school competition leads to a higher sorting of students within a school and between schools. I investigate two explanation of the effect on sorting within a school: the demand for peer quality and the demand for teachers. The data point to the importance of the former mechanism, i.e. the demand for high quality peers that motivates school principals to create high tracks within a school. |
| Supervisor | Kezdi, Gabor; Earle, John S. |
| Department | Economics PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/bukowski_pawel.pdf |
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