Spatial divisions of poverty and wealth: does segregation affect educational achievement?

The Influence of Educational Segregation on Educational Achievement

The paper investigates the impact of homogeneous vs. heterogeneous grouping of students with respect to their social origin on the differences in educational achievement. There are two competing hypotheses in this respect: heterogeneous grouping increases students’ educational outcomes, or homogeneous grouping is the proper solution for improving students’ achievement. Further hypotheses refer ...

Wealth, Poverty, and Happiness

Methods for evaluating educational programs: does Writing Center participation affect student achievement?

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the introduction of a Writing Center at a university, which aims at improving students' scientific writing abilities. In order to deal with the presumed limited utility of student feedback surveys for evaluating the effectiveness of educational programs, we use students' actual learning outcomes as our quality measure. Based on this objective measure, d...

How Does Peer Pressure Affect Educational Investments?

When effort is observable to peers, students may try to avoid social penalties by conforming to prevailing norms. To test this hypothesis, we first consider a natural experiment that introduced a performance leaderboard into computer-based high school courses. The result was a 24 percent performance decline. The decline appears to be driven by a desire to avoid the leaderboard; top performing s...

Does Family Structure Affect Children’s Educational Outcomes?

In this paper we examine the effect of family structure on children’s educational outcomes by exploiting the sibling structure in the NLSY and NLSY-Child to control for unobserved heterogeneity across families and individuals. We also compare outcomes for children within the same family—stepchildren with their half-siblings in the same blended family who are the biological children of both pare...