Estimating effects of school quality using multiple proxies. By Nikolas Mittag, Pedro Bernala, Javaeria A. Qureshic in Labour Economics.

The recent literature on school quality has shown that the school a child attends has significant effects on achievement. However, the literature relating different school characteristics to student achievement has produced mixed results, particularly when using student-level data. Using data from the ECLS-K and a proxy variable model that addresses the problem of measuring school quality, we show that significant effects of teaching and resource quality can be detected from student-level data. We find a significant, positive relationship between school quality and student achievement if school characteristics such as class size and teachers' schooling are treated as noisy measures of school quality. However, this effect is not detected when using models which do not account for measurement error in school quality. Our results suggest that conventional approaches underestimate the effect of school quality by about 50%.

Field-of-study homogamy: Evidence from the EU: new research spin-off blog from Alena Bičáková and Štěpán Jurajda

Positive assortative matching between college graduates has been well documented in marriage markets. Using European survey data, this column explores whether graduates form couples within their field of study. A third of married or cohabiting graduate couples both studied within the same field. These results are driven in part by assortative matching, and there are notable differences across fields of study as well as across countries.

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Figure 1. The Gender Gap Index and FSH-potential utilisation rate (H/H(P))

 Note: The Gender Gap Index, generated by the World Economic Forum, reflects economic and political opportunities, education, and well-being for women. The highest possible GGI score is 1 (equality) and the lowest possible score is 0 (inequality).