Family and School Influences in the Determination of Child Outcomes: Evidence from Two Sources of Variation
Family and School Influences in the Determination of Child Outcomes: Evidence from Two Sources of Variation
by Cristian Pop-Eleches and Miguel Urquiola
In analyses of human capital, a classic issue concerns to what extent children's outcomes are influenced by their school vs. their home environment. On the one hand, it may be that outcomes are fully determined at home, and that "good" schools are little more than clubs for "good" children. On the other, schools may really produce value added, for example, by providing students with good teachers or peers. Additionally, assuming parents do think schools have an effect, a recurring question concerns whether they view school quality and their own effort as substitutes—parents whose children are admitted into a good school may react to this by increasing or reducing their own effort.
Solid evidence on these issues has been difficult to produce, mainly because children are not randomly allocated to schools, let alone to family environments. This study would address this challenge by analyzing a setting that provides two independent sources of arguably exogenous variation in the school and home environments that children experience. Specifically, it would study Romanian children born between 1989 and 1990, a group which faced two analytically useful circumstances. First, these students transitioned into secondary education at a time when children were allocated to high schools via a centralized system under which admissions substantially depended on performance in a national (middle school to high school) transition exam. This yields situations in which students with very similar transition scores end up in schools of substantially different quality. Second, the births of these cohorts chronologically contain the lifting of Romania's stringent ban on abortion and birth control. Following this change, birth rates decreased abruptly by 30 percent, implying that prior to it, about one third of children were unwanted and therefore born into adverse family environments.
This study uses these two sources of variation to implement a regression discontinuity and a simple difference estimation strategy. These two strategies are being applied to data from (existing) administrative sources and a survey, addressing the following questions: 1) Does attending a more selective school affect students' cognitive and behavioral outcomes? 2) What are some of the mechanisms that mediate such effects? 3) How does "unwantedness" at birth affect children's educational and behavioral outcomes? 4) What are the mechanisms behind these effects? 5) How do family environment (due to being an unwanted/wanted child) and school environment (due to attending more/less selective school) interact to shape children's outcomes?
This project's findings on how family and school shape child outcomes will be policy relevant in both developing and developed countries. The findings would be disseminated via Economics and Education journals and seminars, as well as through direct contacts with agencies like the World Bank and multiple ministries of education.
Additionally, our data, which we plan to make public after our initial analysis, will be useful to the broader research community. In particular, its mix of cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes will allow for meaningful cross-disciplinary work covering education, economics and sociology. Finally, the creation of a baseline survey sample with detailed geographic information will allow to track and study students' longer term socioeconomic outcomes.
