How Equal Are Educational Opportunities? Family Background and Student Achievement in Europe and the United States

Ludger Woessmann

No 1284, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: This paper estimates the effects of family-background characteristics on student performance in the US and 17 Western European school systems. Family background has strong effects both in Europe and the United States, remarkably similar in size. France and Flemish Belgium achieve the most equitable performance for students from different family backgrounds, and Britain and Germany the least. Equality of opportunities is unrelated to countries’ mean performance. Quantile regressions show little variation in family-background effects across the ability distribution in most countries.

Keywords: intergenerational mobility; equity-efficiency tradeoff; TIMSS; family background; student performance; equality of opportunity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I21 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2004-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eec, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (72)

Published - published in: Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft, 2008, 78 (1), 45-70

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp1284.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How Equal Are Educational Opportunities? Family Background and Student Achievement in Europe and the United States (2004)
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:iza:izadps:dp1284

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().