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Project

The Causal Effect of School Resources on Efficiency and Effectiveness. An Intertemporal Analysis in case of Imperfect Compliance

 Despite the significant spending on education, school systems operate in a context of scares resources, which urges policy interventions to be efficient. In the efficiency literature, schools are evaluated for their ability of transforming inputs (e.g., teaching hours) into outputs (e.g., school certificates). The overall objective of this research is to investigate the effect of increasing and reducing school resources on the efficiency and effectiveness. From a methodological perspective, we develop a toolbox to introduce a causal interpretation in efficiency estimation in the context of quasi-experiments, encompassing advanced econometric techniques in mathematical optimization models for efficiency. From an empirical perspective, we provide new evidence on the effect of changing school resources, exploiting unique administrative data containing information on pupils and schools exposed to an ‘equal educational opportunity’ program. The research has four specific objectives. First, it reviews the earlier literature that approaches the problem of ‘causality in efficiency’.  Second, we develop a tool to obtain reliable efficiency scores in the presence of imperfect compliance. Third, we develop an approach to exploit the time dimension of a policy to reinforce the causal interpretation between the policy itself and the efficiency scores. Finally, we will compare results from the efficiency framework with results from a purely econometric impact evaluation framework.
 

Date:20 Sep 2018 →  31 Oct 2023
Keywords:efficiency evaluation of schools, impact analysis, DEA
Disciplines:Health, education and welfare economics
Project type:PhD project