Essays in economics of education

This thesis studies how the education system in place affects the human capital development of its students. Chapter 1 explores the role of schools, Chapter 2 studies the grading system, and Chapter 3 investigates the consequence of a specific regulation requiring that all students start primary education in the calendar year in which they turn 6. For the empirical analyses, I gathered and studied administrative data on attainment, test scores, socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the universe of Catalan students enrolled in primary and secondary education from 2009 to 2015. Chapter 1 focuses on public schools in Barcelona, while Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 exploit data for the entire region. The second and third chapters are coauthored with Caterina Calsamiglia. In Chapter 1, I study how the school environment affects students' cognitive skills and educational attainment. I estimate a dynamic structural model of cognitive skills accumulation and educational decisions of students enrolled in lower secondary education. Its key feature is that it allows me to separately identify the different channels through which schools affect student outcomes. I find large variation across schools both in their effect on cognitive skills development, and in their effects on students' educational choices above and beyond their level of cognitive skills. School environment is particularly relevant for choices of students with disadvantaged family background. Moreover their probabilities of graduating or enrolling in upper secondary education if they attend a given middle school have limited correlation with their expected performance in that school. Results suggest that evaluating and comparing schools using only nation-wide assessments may not favor disadvantaged students, who particularly benefit from schools which increase educational attainment, not only test scores. In Chapter 2, we study the differences between the evaluations assigned by teachers (GPA) and results in region-wide tests. We show that the GPA is strongly deflated in classes of above-average students. In other words, having better peers harms the evaluation obtained by a given student. Student access to education levels, tracks or majors is usually determined by their previous performance, measured either by internal exams, designed and graded by teachers in school, or external exams, designed and graded by central authorities. Our findings put forth a source of distortion that may arise in any system that uses internal grades to compare students across schools and classes. We also find suggestive evidence that school choice is impacted only the year when internal grades matter for future prospects. In Chapter 3, we study the effect of students' age at enrollment in primary school on their educational outcomes throughout primary and secondary education. Having a unique cut-off to determine when children can access school induces a large heterogeneity in maturity to coexist in a classroom. We show that relatively younger children do significantly worse both in tests administered at the school level and at the regional level, and they experience greater retention. These effects are homogeneous across socioeconomics and significant across the whole distribution of performance. Moreover younger children exhibit higher dropout rates and chose the academic track in secondary school less often.