In spring 2020, governments around the globe shut down schools to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. We argue that low-achieving students may be particularly affected by the lack of ...educator support during school closures. We collect detailed time-use information on students before and during the school closures in a survey of 1099 parents in Germany. We find that while students on average reduced their daily learning time of 7.4 h by about half, the reduction was significantly larger for low-achievers (4.1 h) than for high-achievers (3.7 h). Low-achievers disproportionately replaced learning time with detrimental activities such as TV or computer games rather than with activities more conducive to child development. The learning gap was not compensated by parents or schools who provided less support for low-achieving students.
Do better schools lead to more growth? Hanushek, Eric Alan; Woessmann, Ludger
Journal of economic growth,
12/2012, Letnik:
17, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We develop a new metric for the distribution of educational achievement across countries that can further track the cognitive skill distribution within countries and over time. Cross-country growth ...regressions generate a close relationship between educational achievement and GDP growth that is remarkably stable across extensive sensitivity analyses of specification, time period, and country samples. In a series of now-common microeconometric approaches for addressing causality, we narrow the range of plausible interpretations of this strong cognitive skills-growth relationship. These alternative estimation approaches, including instrumental variables, difference-in-differences among immigrants on the U.S. labor market, and longitudinal analysis of changes in cognitive skills and in growth rates, leave the stylized fact of a strong impact of cognitive skills unchanged. Moreover, the results indicate that school policy can be an important instrument to spur growth. The shares of basic literates and high performers have independent relationships with growth, the latter being larger in poorer countries.
The knowledge capital of nations Hanushek, Eric Alan; Woessmann, Ludger
2015, 20150424, 20150410, 2015-05-26, 2015-04-24
eBook, Book
In this book the authors make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country ...acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but the authors argue that message has become distorted, with politicians and researchers concentrating not on valued skills but on proxies for them. The common focus is on school attainment, although time in school provides a very misleading picture of how skills enter into development. The authors contend that the cognitive skills of the population-which they term the "knowledge capital" of a nation-are essential to long-run prosperity. The authors subject their hypotheses about the relationship between cognitive skills (as consistently measured by international student assessments) and economic growth to a series of tests, including alternate specifications, different subsets of countries, and econometric analysis of causal interpretations. They find that their main results are remarkably robust, and equally applicable to developing and developed countries. They demonstrate, for example, that the "Latin American growth puzzle" and the "East Asian miracle" can be explained by these regions' knowledge capital. Turning to the policy implications of their argument, they call for an education system that develops effective accountability, promotes choice and competition, and provides direct rewards for good performance. (Orig.).
We estimate the effect of broadband infrastructure, which enables high-speed internet, on economic growth in the panel of OECD countries in 1996-2007. Our instrumental variable model derives its ...non-linear first stage from a logistic diffusion model where pre-existing voice telephony and cable TV networks predict maximum broadband penetration. We find that a 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration raised annual per capita growth by 0.9-1.5 percentage points. Results are robust to country and year fixed effects and controlling for linear second-stage effects of our instruments. We verify that our instruments predict broadband penetration but not diffusion of contemporaneous technologies like mobile telephony and computers.
Policy proposals promoting vocational education focus on the school-to-work transition. But with technological change, gains in youth employment may be offset by less adaptability and diminished ...employment later in life. To test for this tradeoff, we employ a difference-in-differences approach that compares employment rates across different ages for people with general and vocational education. Using microdata for 11 countries from IALS, we find strong and robust support for such a tradeoff, especially in countries emphasizing apprenticeship programs. German Microcensus data and Austrian administrative data confirm the results for within-occupational-group analysis and for exogenous variation from plant closures, respectively.
The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This ...paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of school quality and quantity. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population—rather than mere school attainment—are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. New empirical results show the importance of both minimal and high level skills, the complementarity of skills and the quality of economic institutions, and the robustness of the relationship between skills and growth. International comparisons incorporating expanded data on cognitive skills reveal much larger skill deficits in developing countries than generally derived from just school enrollment and attainment. The magnitude of change needed makes clear that closing the economic gap with developed countries will require major structural changes in schooling institutions.
Does school autonomy make sense everywhere? Hanushek, Eric A; Link, Susanne; Woessmann, Ludger
Journal of development economics,
09/2013, Letnik:
104, Številka:
104
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Decentralization of decision-making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is ...inconclusive. The authors suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed systems but detrimental in low-performing systems. They construct a panel dataset from the four waves of international PISA tests spanning 2000-2009, comprising over one million students in 42 countries. Relying on panel estimation with country fixed effects, the authors estimate the effect of school autonomy from within-country changes in the average share of schools with autonomy over key elements of school operations. The results suggest that autonomy affects student achievement negatively in developing and low-performing countries, but positively in developed and high-performing countries. These estimates are unaffected by a wide variety of robustness and specification tests, providing confidence in the need for nuanced application of reform ideas. (DIPF/Orig.).
Does the Internet undermine social capital, such as real-world inter-personal relations and civic engagement? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we ...investigate how broadband Internet affects social capital. A first identification strategy uses first-differencing to account for unobserved time-invariant individual heterogeneity. A second identification strategy exploits a quasi-experiment in East Germany created by a mistaken technology choice of the state-owned telecommunication provider in the 1990s that hindered broadband Internet roll-out for many households. We find no evidence of negative effects of the Internet on several aspects of social capital. In fact, the effect on a composite social capital index is significantly positive.
•We merge unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data.•We exploit a technological mistake by the state-owned telecommunication provider.•This technological mistake hindered households from having Broadband Internet access.•We find no evidence that Broadband Internet access at home reduces social capital.•Rather, we find significant positive effects for a combined social capital index.
PDF
