How important are omitted variables, censored scores and self-selection in analysing high-school academic achievement?

Guyonne Kalb and Sholeh Maani
Additional contact information
Sholeh Maani: University of Auckland

Australian Journal of Labour Economics (AJLE), 2011, vol. 14, issue 3, pages 307-332

Abstract: Using a rich longitudinal data set from birth, we explore three estimation issues related to academic performance analysis. Our paper primarily examines the effect of omitting childhood and teenage characteristics (childhood ability, parental resources at different times and peer effects), which are traditionally unavailable in data sets. Additionally, we explore the potential endogeneity of pre-exam school-leaving choices (self-selection) to academic performance; and we demonstrate the effect of accounting for censored academic performance measures. We find that omitting background characteristics results in overestimation of coefficients on other characteristics (the effect of current income is overestimated by 0.21 standard deviations of the average academic performance and the effect of ethnicity by 1.38 standard deviations). This then affects the policy implications drawn: for the group who did not take the exam, the predicted performance goes from a fail to a C (or pass). We also find that accounting for censored academic performance measures affects the estimation results, but allowing for selection correction does not.

Keywords: Labor Force and Employment; Size; and Structure Human Capital; Skills Occupational Choice Labor Productivity Fertility Child Care Demographic Economics Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J24 J13 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ozl:journl:v:14:y:2011:i:3:p:307-332

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Australian Journal of Labour Economics (AJLE) from The Centre for Labour Market Research (CLMR), Curtin Business School
Series data maintained by Boyd Hunter ().