 The distributional effects of early school stratification - non-parametric evidence from GermanyMarcus Roller and Daniel Steinberg European Economic Review, 2020, vol. 125, issue C Abstract: Whether early school stratification is conducive or detrimental to scholastic performance has been subject to controversial debates in educational policy and science across many countries. We exploit a reform in Lower Saxony, Germany, where performance based tracking was preponed from grade 7 to grade 5 in 2004, i.e. with the completion of primary school. In particular, we measure the long-run effects of this reform on PISA achievement test scores based on a difference-in-differences setup. In order to disentangle average from distributional achievement effects, we complementarily rely on a changes-in-changes framework. Our results indicate that preponed school tracking increases test scores in the upper tail of the skill distribution and lowers test scores in the lower tail of the skill distribution, compensating each other on average.11This study does not represent a comprehensive evaluation of the exploited reform in Lower Saxony in 2004. We are grateful for the data provided by the Research Data Center (FDZ) at the Institute for Educational Quality Improvement (IQB) associated with the Humboldt University of Berlin. Marcus Roller acknowledges financial support by the WWZ Förderverein. We are grateful for valuable inputs from Blaise Melly and two anonymous referees. In addition, we thank the participants of the EEA Annual Congress 2017, the SSES Annual Congress 2017, the Spring Meeting of Young Economists 2018 and seminar participants at the Universities of Basel and Tübingen. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Keywords: Analysis of education; Education and inequality; Tracking; Government policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:125:y:2020:i:c:s0014292120300544 DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2020.103422 Access Statistics for this article European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.