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Title: Three Essays on Children's Skill Acquisition and Academic Performance
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Bhattacharya, Samrat |
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Three Essays on Children's Skill Acquisition and Academic Performance Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 2008. Also: http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/Bhattacharya%20Samrat.pdf?acc_num=osu1221754167 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Behavioral Problems; Cognitive Ability; Educational Attainment; Family Structure; Grade Retention/Repeat Grade; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Propensity Scores; Skill Formation; Test Scores/Test theory/IRT Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. My dissertation consists of three essays on children's skill acquisition and academic achievement. In all the essays, I use data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the supplemental Child Survey (NLSY-CHILD). In the first essay, I ask whether family structure causally affects the cognitive test scores and behavioral problems of children. I use multiple observations on each child to estimate a first-difference model and net out the effect of child- and parent-specific time-invariant unobservable factors that are correlated with both the test scores and family structure. I find no improvement in mathematics and reading test scores when mother (re)marries. There is also no decrease in these test scores when a child moved from a two biological parent to a single mother household. However, the results for the behavioral problems suggest that there might be some benefit, in terms of lower behavioral problems, of having a father in the household. In the second essay, I analyze whether delaying entry into kindergarten by an academic year helps to improve the academic performance of the delayed entrants. Every year a large number of parents hold their children out of kindergarten for an academic year although they meet the state kindergarten entry cut-offs (popularly known as "red-shirting"). I use a propensity score matching estimation (PSM) technique to estimate the effect of delaying entry into kindergarten for the delayed entrants by comparing test scores of "matched" delayed and non-delayed entrants. I find that delaying entry into kindergarten has a small but statistically significant negative effect on the reading and mathematics test scores of delayed entrants. In the third essay, I ask whether repeating a grade improves the performance of repeaters in mathematics and reading tests. I use a variant of PSM, where PSM is combined with a difference-in-difference estimator, to estimate the effect of repeating a grade for the repeaters. I find that repeating a grade actually lowers the performance on reading and mathematics tests for the repeaters, compared with how they would have performed if they had not repeated a grade. |
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Bibliography Citation
Bhattacharya, Samrat. Three Essays on Children's Skill Acquisition and Academic Performance. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The Ohio State University, 2008.. |