Economics - Theses
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ItemEssays on Economics of Education and Gender( 2021)This thesis investigates the determinants of inequality in human capital and education, with a particular focus on gender. In particular, in the first essay, I investigate the effectiveness of standardized assessments as tools to measure human capital. Standardized assessments are widely used to determine educational and economic opportunities. These standardized assessments exclusively, or in large part, use multiple-choice questions. In this paper, I show that female students receive lower marks when randomly assigned to exams with a larger proportion of multiple-choice questions. Specifically, a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of multiple-choice questions widens the gender difference in mathematics performance by 0.026 standard deviations in favor of men, an effect that represents about 50% of the overall gender gap. Moreover, a higher proportion of multiple-choice questions has negative spillovers to other openended questions on the same exam. Female students exert less effort than males on tests that contain a larger proportion of multiple-choice questions. In the second essay, we exploit the random assignment of students to classrooms to investigate why females, compared with males, are both more likely to have strong STEM-related performance and less likely to enter a STEM field later on. We identify the impact of comparative advantage in STEM relative to non-STEM subjects on STEM specialization decisions. We approximate comparative STEM advantage using the within-classroom ranking of the ratio of early-high school performance in STEM over non-STEM subjects. We find that females who are assigned to classroom peers among which they have a higher comparative STEM advantage are more likely to choose a STEM school track and apply for a STEM degree. Comparative STEM advantage appears to be irrelevant for males. Our results suggest that comparative STEM advantage explains at least 12% of the under-representation of qualified females in the earliest instance of STEM specialization. The final essay investigates whether class attendance should be compulsory for higher-performing students, and whether autonomy could improve student outcomes. In particular, we estimate the effect of relaxed attendance requirements on short- and longer-term school outcomes. We exploit an institutional setting with high demand for autonomy and random peer group formation. Identification comes from a natural experiment that allowed high-achieving students to miss 30 percent more class hours without penalty. Using a triple-difference approach, we find that allowing higherachieving students to skip class more often improves their performance in high-stake subjects, especially in STEM, and increases their university admission score.