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We analyze how school vouchers affect post-secondary attainment by exploiting the universal voucher program implemented in Chile in 1981. The program allowed students to choose which primary and secondary schools to attend. The government covered tuition independently of whether the chosen school was private or public. We find that vouchers increased the probability of attending PSE by 2-4 percentage points and the probability of PSE graduation by 1-3 percentage points. Students from low socio economic backgrounds benefited the most. Further, we study whether the impacts of vouchers depend on when school choice becomes available in a student’s educational path. We find that the impacts of vouchers on PSE outcomes are maximized if vouchers are introduced before students start middle school.

The collapse of communism led to highly skewed sex-ratios in Albania, which had a long patriarchal tradition before the advent of communism. While the use of sex-selective abortions in the region is well-known, little is known about other forms taken by revealed son preference, such as differential stopping behavior and birth spacing. Using data from the Demographic Health Surveys in 2008-2009 and 2017-2018, we find evidence of a higher proportion of boys being born at the last parity, indicating that parents practice differential stopping behaviour. Using Cox Proportional Hazard model and logit; we also show that in son-less households parents shorten the birth intervals significantly, endangering mothers' and children's health. We conclude that differential stopping behaviour and short birth spacing are prevalent in all regions and across the socio-economic spectrum.

This paper investigates the impact of the minimum wage on individuals' schooling decisions and the type of human capital acquired by students. Using Canadian longitudinal data, we explore 136 minimum wage amendments across provincial jurisdictions, and find three novel results. First, the minimum wage affects both the quantity and the type of human capital acquired by individuals. High minimum wages stimulate the accumulation of occupation-specific human capital at community colleges but discourage enrollment in academic programs offered by universities. Quantitatively, a 10% increase in the minimum wage increases community-college enrollment by 6% and reduces university enrollment by 5%. Second, high minimum wages strengthen the link between parental background and children educational attainment, worsening the university participation gap between individuals with high and low parental education. Finally, minimum wages also affect whether students dropout of post-secondary education or return to school later in life as mature students.

In this paper I present a selective survey of the empirical literature on wage premium to university selectivity focusing mainly on the context of the country under analysis and the identification strategies employed. I then estimate the wage premium to university selectivity using Canadian data and two popular methods to correct for non-random selection in universities of different quality: matching methods and instrumental variables (IV). I estimate a wage premium of 7% using the matching estimator, and a premium of 14.8% using the IV estimator for alumni of selective Canadian universities 4–6 years after graduation. My findings are in line with the literature on countries with a moderately differentiated higher education system that has low variation in tuition fees and is well supported by public funds.

I conduct a large-scale analysis on how students revise their educational expectations and change their post-secondary education (PSE) pathways. I find evidence that an important determinant is exposure to unexpected information on the quality of match between their ability and academic difficulty of the program. This relationship is non-linear, and responsive only to unexpected information that signals a mismatch. In Canada about 25% of freshman experience a PSE path disruption, which entails a public and private cost. The findings suggest that policy measures targeting to improve the quality of match through student consultation could be employed to reduce this inefficiency.

We build a multidimensional value added model to analyze jointly the test scores on several outcomes. Using a unique Colombian data set on higher education within a seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE) framework we estimate school outcome specific value added indicators. These are used to measure the relative contribution of the school on a certain outcome, which may serve as an internal accountability measure. Apart from the evident estimation efficiency gains, a joint value added analysis is preferable to the unidimensional one. First, unless modeled in a multidimensional framework, the comparison of value added estimates for different outcomes within a school is not well defined; our model circumvents this issue. Second, even in the case of a separate major field of study analysis there still exists unobserved heterogeneity due to institutional diversity. This makes it more compelling to employ a rich set of outcomes in computing value added indicators. In the end, we aggregate the outcome-specific value added estimates to produce a composite value added index that reflects the combined value added contribution of all the subjects for each school.

It is evident that a strong positive correlation persists between the educational attainment of parents and that of their children in many, if not most, populations. This relationship may form an important part of the phenomenon of low social mobility as well as inefficiently low investment in human capital by youth who have parents with relatively low educational attainment. Is it a genetic inter-generational transmission of innate ability from parents to their children (i.e. nature) or is it the environment that the better educated parents provide for their children (i.e. nurture) that explains this positive relationship? Understanding the relative contributions of nature versus nurture is critical to the development of any social policy designed to increase social and economic mobility between generations. Separating the so-called nature and nurture effects of this relationship is a difficult task. We use the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery as a natural experiment to address the nature-nurture question. Attending university in order to avoid the draft created a cohort which included individuals who would not normally have attended post-secondary educational institutions. Comparing the educational attainment of children of this cohort to that of cohorts who attended university in “normal times” creates a natural experiment to test the relative importance of the nature or nurture explanations. Our findings provide evidence in support of the nurture argument.

This thesis brings to the forefront of the existing literature the importance of analyzing transitional dynamics among different levels of schooling and to the labor market. I perform empirical analyses using confidential longitudinal survey data from Statistics Canada; employing program evaluation techniques, and regression modelling. The first chapter is joint work with Louis Christofides, Michael Hoy and Thanasis Stengos. We explore the forces that shape the development of aspirations and the achievement of grades during high school and the role that these aspirations, grades, and other variables play in educational outcomes such as going to university and graduating. We find that parental expectations and peer effects have a significant impact on educational outcomes through grades, aspirations, and their interconnectedness. Apart from this indirect path, parents and peers also influence educational outcomes directly. Policy measures that operate on parental influences may modify educational outcomes in desired directions. The second chapter estimates the wage returns to university quality. I distinguish between two distinct measures of university quality. The first is a survey-based university reputation ranking, and the second is a new ranking, which I construct from several university characteristics in order to objectively reflect the university quality. The findings indicate that the wage returns of having a Bachelor’s degree from a highly ranked university are 10.3% for women, and 13.4% for men. The returns are higher when comparing the wages in the top and bottom tails of the ranking distribution and gender differences are identified. The third chapter is a large-scale study on how students form and revise expectations. This affects their decision to drop out and/or change field of study once they have accessed post-secondary education. I find evidence that students change expectations and educational pathways as they are exposed to unexpected new information. This informs them about the quality of match between their own ability and the program that they are enrolled. Using non-parametric methods I show that this relationship is not linear.

We explore the forces that shape the development of aspirations and the achievement of grades during high school and the role that these aspirations, grades, and other variables play in educational outcomes such as going to university and graduating. We find that parental expectations and peer effects have a significant impact on educational outcomes through grades, aspirations, and their interconnectedness, an issue explained in the context of a rich, longitudinal data set. Apart from this indirect path, parents and peers also influence educational outcomes directly. Policy measures that operate on parental influences may modify educational outcomes in desired directions.