Denominational Schools and Returns to Education - Gender Socialization in Multigrade Classrooms?

Ilka Gerhardts, Uwe Sunde and Larissa Zierow ()

VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Denominational schools are an important provider of education in many countries around the world. Due to their focus, these schools often operate with multigrade classes, in which more than one age cohort is taught in one classroom. Multigrade classes are a cost-effective way to provide education and play a crucial role in education policy in the context of demographic change. This paper presents estimates of the causal effect of attending denominational schools with multigrade classes on schooling and short-run labor market outcomes. The analysis combines administrative records of schools with comprehensive population census data, and exploits the abolition of denominational schools in the Saarland, a German state, in 1969, for identification of the effect. The findings document significantly detrimental effects on final grade attainment, labor market participation and socioeconomic mobility. Notably, the negative impact is most pronounced in the outcomes of girls. Disentangling the confounding role of variation between Catholic and Protestant schools suggests that this effect might be driven by socialization early in life.

JEL-codes: I21 I26 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/145762/1/VfS_2016_pid_6785.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:vfsc16:145762

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().