UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation contains three chapters in education and labor economics. In Chapter 1, I study whether relative age effects among fourth graders on math and science test scores exist in developing countries and investigate whether they are similar across all countries with different levels of development. Students with different birthdays who are subject to the same school-entry cutoff date have different ages at school entry. This difference in maturity may affect a child’s outcomes in school because we might expect that students who are more mature relative to their peers will perform better; a phenomenon called ‘relative age effects’. While the focus of previous studies has been limited to developed countries, this study aims to provide evidence of relative age effects in the context of developing countries. Using Trends in InternationalMathematics and Science Study data and assigned relative age as an instrumental variable that is formed exogenously by this cutoff, I find that positive relative age effects on test scores exist in developing countries, but they are smaller than those in developed countries. I also explore the educational factors correlated to the magnitude of relative age effects using cross-country data.

In Chapter 2, I examine the impact of the inflow of international students on the first-time, full-time enrollment of domestic minority students in US Higher Education using data from IPEDS. Since foreign enrollment is an endogenous variable, I employ the instrumental variables approach, using the institution’s historical share of international students and the year’s non-immigrant visa issuance. I find that there is no significant effect of the influx of international students on the new enrollment of domestic minorities as a whole. However, when I divide the institutions by the level of state funding per student, I find that an additional influx of international students increases domestic minority FTFT enrollment by 0.65. I suggest that this is because institutions with relatively little reliance on government funding are more sensitive to the financial resources that international students bring in terms of determining the supply and demand of domestic minority enrollment.

In Chapter 3–joint work with Kelly Bedard, we examine how the academic achievement gap between different genders and socioeconomic groups within OECD countries has evolved over the years. Using Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data for eighth graders from eighteen OECD countries from 1995 to 2019, we first confirm that trends in academic achievement have progressed towards gender equality, particularly in science. Conversely, we find widening socioeconomic gaps, with high socioeconomic status (SES) groups showing greater improvements than low SES groups in both math and science test scores. When we examine the interactions between gender and socioeconomic groups to identify patterns driving these trends, we find that the SES gaps worsened for both males and females, and gender gaps similarly improved for both high and low SES students in most countries. Some countries show patterns that the worsening SES gaps are driven more by boys, and the improving gender gaps are driven more by the low SES students.