This repository contains my replication of results from Pop-Eleches, Cristian, and Miguel Urquiola (2013). "Going to a Better School: Effects and Behavioral Responses." American Economic Review, 103 (4): 1289-1324. The original paper, including the data sets, and the codes by the authors can be accessed here.
Pop-Eleches et al. (2013) examines the effect of going to a better school on student outcomes and on behavioral responses that amplify or reduce the quality of educational quality. They apply regression discontinuity design to the Romanian secondary school system, producing two findings. First, students who gain access to higher achievement schools perform better in a graduation test. Secondly, the opportunity to attend quality-wise better schools result in significant behavioral responses, particularly: (i) Teachers sort in a manner consistent with a preference for higher achieving students, (ii) Children who get into better schools realize they are relatively weaker and feel marginalized; (iii) Parents reduce their effort when their children attend a better school.
In this project, I replicate the results from Pop-Eleches et al. (2013) and look into the causal relationship between attending a higher-ranked school and student outcomes, and
behavioral responses it triggers.
The replication is conducted using Python, I have stored my functions that generate tables and figures in seperate files, which you can access here,and here,
- Pop-Eleches, Cristian, and Miguel Urquiola. 2013. "Going to a Better School: Effects and Behavioral Responses." American Economic Review, 103 (4): 1289-1324.
