Browsing by Author "Beuermann, Diether W."

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    Does education prevent job loss during downturns? Evidence from exogenous school assignments and COVID-19 in Barbados
    (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022-02) Beuermann, Diether W.; Bottan, Nicolas L.; Hoffmann, Bridget; Jackson, C. Kirabo; Cossio, Diego A. Vera
    Canonical human capital theories posit that education, by enhancing worker skills, reduces the likelihood that a worker will be laid-off during times of economic change. Yet, this has not been demonstrated causally. We link administrative education records from 1987 through 2002 to nationally representative surveys conducted before and after COVID-19 onset in Barbados to explore the causal impact of improved education on job loss during this period. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, we show that females (but not males) who score just above the admission threshold for more selective secondary schools attain more years of education than those that scored just below (essentially holding initial ability fixed). We then find that these same females are much less likely to have lost a job after the onset of COVID-19. We show that these effects are not driven by labor supply decisions, fertility or access to child care, or selection into more resilient sectors and occupations. Because employers observe incumbent worker productivity, these patterns are inconsistent with pure education signaling, and suggest that education enhances worker skill.
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    What is a good school, and can parents tell? Evidence on the multidimensionality of school output
    (2019-10-18) Beuermann, Diether W.; Jackson, C. Kirabo; Navarro-Sola, Laia; Pardo, Francisco
    Is a school’s impact on high-stakes test scores a good measure of its overall impact on students? Do parents value school impacts on tests, longer-run outcomes, or both? To answer the first question, we exploit quasi-random school assignments and data from Trinidad and Tobago. We construct exogenous instruments for each individual school and estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several short-and longer-run outcomes. Schools’impacts on high-stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on low-stakes tests, dropout, crime, teen motherhood, and formal labor market participation. To answer the second question, we link estimated school impacts to parents’ ranked lists of schools. We propose a modified mulitnomial logit model that allows one to infer preferences for school attributes even in some settings where choices are strategic. Parents of higher-achieving students value schools that improve high-stakes test scores conditional on average outcomes, proximity, and even peer quality. Parents also value schools that reduce crime and increase formal labor market participation. Most parents’ preferences for school impacts on labor-market and crime outcomes are, as strong, or stronger than those for test scores. These results provide a potential explanation for recent findings that parent preferences are not strongly related to test-score impacts. They also suggest that evaluations based solely on test scores may be very misleading about the welfare effects of school choice. (JELI20,J0)