Happy #InternationalWomensDay! (News and Research 329)
The rate of return to women’s education exceeds that of males by two percentage points. The gap has increased. Education is an excellent investment for women and girls, and a development priority.
Human Capital and Climate Change:
Human Capital and Climate Change | NBER Working Paper 31000 | Addressing climate change requires individual behavior change and voter support for pro-climate policies, yet surprisingly little is known about how to achieve these outcomes. In this paper, we estimate causal effects of additional education on pro-climate outcomes using new compulsory schooling law data across 16 European countries. We analyze effects on pro-climate beliefs, behaviors, policy preferences, and novel data on voting for green parties – a particularly consequential outcome to combat climate change. Results show a year of education increases pro-climate beliefs, behaviors, most policy preferences, and green voting, with voting gains equivalent to a substantial 35% increase.
Other research related to education and climate:
Reversing environmental deterioration: the role of human capital in developing countries
Compulsory schooling reforms, education and mortality in twentieth century Europe
Environment, Health, and Human Capital
Does education increase pro-environmental behavior? Evidence from Europe
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A year as the wartime CEO of a Ukrainian nonprofit | Oksana Matiiash: “In October 2020, I finished my Masters’s at Oxford and returned to Ukraine to relaunch an organization whose mission I sincerely believed in. I knew it wouldn’t be a smooth ride since the organization was fragile and had scarce funding to stay afloat. Little did I know back then that relaunching Teach For Ukraine would be just a soft start to my most challenging but also the most rewarding leadership experience.”
Exacerbated Inequalities: the Learning Loss from COVID-19 in Italy | Italy was one of the first countries to close schools in March 2020 and students were offered exclusively remote instruction until the end of the school year (around 14 weeks). Average learning loss of 0.14 SD in math and 0.05 SD in reading for 8th grade students in 2021 compared to 8th grade students in 2019. Inequalities in learning appear to be exacerbated after the pandemic: learning losses are 0.21 SD in math and 0.10 SD in reading for students in the bottom quintile of SES, while students in the top quintile had a much smaller learning loss (0.05 SD) in math and actually improved their scores in reading by 0.04 SD. Learning gaps do not vary systematically by gender. For immigrant students the learning loss in math is substantially larger than for native students. The average size of the learning loss that we estimate is comparable to the average reported by Patrinos et al. (2022) in a recent review of the literature.
What is the cost of educating refugee children? A well-funded, effective education system for all | The benefits of educating children are clear and well documented. Refugee children are particularly vulnerable; according to recent research, not only does access to education for refugee children reduce poverty and increase chances for children, it can also increase social cohesion between host communities and refugees.
What works to support inclusion: Four key findings from country case studies | New research synthesizes evidence on what works to support education for forcibly displaced people and to include them in national education systems. The global learning poverty crisis affects refugee and internally displaced children as well as their host communities. New research shows ways to help address this crisis.
Dire Straits-Education Reforms: Ideology, Vested Interests and Evidence | Responding to an ‘educational emergency’ generated largely by the difficulties of implementing education reforms, this book compares education policies around the world in order to understand what works where. To address the key question of why education reforms are so difficult, the authors take into account a broad range of relevant factors, such as governance, ideology, and stakeholder conflicts of interest, and their interactions with one another.
Cycling for Education? Heterogeneous Preferences for Academic Tracks at Secondary School | Using a unique data set from the Netherlands, a discrete choice demand model is estimated under congestion effects to recover preferences for secondary school tracks between parents with different socioeconomic status (SES) but equally proficient children. Highly educated parents are willing to let their offspring commute longer distances to attend tracks that grant direct admission to university. Valuation heterogeneity for such options explains more than half of the observed enrollment gap between students from different SES divides. These results suggest that low-SES children sort into academic tracks with lower economic prospects, even in schooling systems with negligible choice restrictions.
Tajikistan’s Education Outcomes to Improve with Support from a New World Bank Project | The $50 million grant will invest in system improvements for better teaching and learning outcomes, modernize schools and enhance capacity to carry our learning assessments. The World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors approved today $50 million in grant financing from the International Development Association (IDA) for the Learning Environment – Foundation of Quality Education in Tajikistan Project, aimed at enhancing the quality of teaching and learning in Tajikistan’s secondary education.
Education, economics and public policy 