No cohort left behind?

Philip Babcock, Kelly Bedard () and Jennifer Schulte

Journal of Urban Economics, 2012, vol. 71, issue 3, 347-354

Abstract: Much of the debate over the allocation of education resources focuses on the alleged benefits of smallness—of classroom or school—and is based on evidence from small-scale studies. This paper reframes the question in terms of cohort size. Using national data, we find that a 10% increase in kindergarten enrollment yields a 0.5% increase in cohort shrinkage across early grade transitions, which implies that larger cohorts feature higher rates of retention. Consistent with previous work on class and school size in more restricted settings, this cohort-tracking exercise provides robust evidence at the national level that smallness confers benefits.

Keywords: Education; Class size; School size; Human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C2 I2 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119011000933
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:juecon:v:71:y:2012:i:3:p:347-354

DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2011.12.006

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Urban Economics is currently edited by S.S. Rosenthal and W.C. Strange

More articles in Journal of Urban Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().