Essays in economics of education

Abstract

This thesis consists of three independent essays in economics of education. In the first chapter, I investigate the connection between cultural identities and parental schooling decisions. By leveraging the case of the Basque Country (Spain), this essay studies how parents trade off academic quality for being educated in the regional language. Using a discrete choice structural model, I show that households display strong preferences for the Basque-monolingual model. Results indicate a willingness to forego a substantial amount of mean academic performance to evade the Spanish and the bilingual models. By means of regression analysis, I find a strong association between nationalistic voting and educational language choices. This suggests that schooling decisions are significantly shaped by parents’ affiliation to the regional culture. In the second chapter, I test whether the cultural assimilation efforts of immigrant families mitigate discriminatory attitudes of schools. To this end, I sent fictitious visit requests to more than 2,500 schools located in the Community of Madrid (Spain). I find that Romanian families who gave a Spanish name to their child are 50% less discriminated than those who selected a Romanian name. Emails from families whose members have Romanian names are 12% less likely to receive a response than those from native Spanish-name families. The results show a consistent response pattern across school characteristics. The third chapter, co-authored with Lucas Gortazar and Ainhoa Vega-Bayo, studies the presence of systematic differences between teacher non-blind assessments and external quasiblindly graded standardized tests. We use a rich administrative database covering two cohorts from publicly-funded schools in the Basque Country. We find that systematic underassessment exists for boys, children with immigrant origin, and poorer students. The results indicate that stereotyping is a consistent mechanism through which our findings can be interpreted.