Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza - Tesi di Dottorato

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://lisa.unical.it/handle/10955/26

Questa collezione raccoglie le Tesi di Dottorato afferenti al Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Statistiche e Finanziarie dell'Università della Calabria.

Browse

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Three empirical essays on the Economics of Primary Education
(Università della Calabria, 2024-03-27) Ciccarelli, Carmela; Piluso, Fabio; Rose, Giuseppe
The manuscript consists of three chapters, each of which contains an empirical analysis emphasising the importance of municipal investments in pre-school education on pupils' educational outcomes, the reopening of schools during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, finally, the role of student bullying on schooling results. The initial chapter stems from the need to understand how to strengthen the education system, which even before the Covid-19 pandemic had some weaknesses among Italian students. This could potentially be associated with the allocation of spending on pre-school education. The focus of the research is whether spending on pre-school education somehow increases student achievement. Using INVALSI data, public expenditure data and data on the registry of local administrators, we mitigate endogeneity issues by exploiting the presence of women in politics, probably the female gender tends to increase investment in pre-school education. The findings demonstrate that a substantial female presence exerts a positive influence on public expenditure for preschool education and interventions pertaining to children and kindergartens. Furthermore, public expenditure, instrumented by the alteration in the gender composition between 2013 and 2011, positively impacts the INVALSI outcomes. The focal point of the second chapter revolves around the resumption of educational institutions amidst the pandemic. The primary objective of this research endeavour was to ascertain whether schools, during a pandemic scenario akin to the recent one, serve as a medium for the transmission of infections. Consequently, it aimed to determine whether the reopening of schools in Italy contributed to the rise in infection rates. The data utilized in this study were obtained from the Higher Institute of Health on a daily basis, with the province serving as the unit of observation. The dependent variable was the daily infection rate per province, while the key variable under scrutiny was the reopening of schools, which could potentially be endogenous due to the regions' inclination to postpone school reopening in light of increased infection rates. The findings of this study demonstrate a statistically significant and positive correlation between the reopening of schools and the escalation of infection rates. Therefore, it is evident from the latest INVALSI 2023 report that the pandemic has further deteriorated students' academic performance. However, it is important to note that the issue at hand is deeply rooted in the structural aspects, as discussed in the concise overview of the first chapter. A potential contributing factor to the decline in student achievement is the existence of bullying, which is the focus of chapter three. Bullying often occurs within educational institutions, causing not only physical and psychological harm among the victims, but also hampers their academic performance. Consequently, this problem has drawn our attention to pre-adolescent students. We analyse the information provided by the INVALSI Institute on the performance in mathematics and Italian and the questionnaires from the fifth classes of the 2013-2014 school year. We relate the scores obtained in mathematics and Italian to the cases of bullying, identified through the distribution of the questionnaires to the students. Since young students are more likely to be teased by older peers, we exploit the threshold imposed by the law for early enrolment to have a tool to predict bullying and its impact on educational outcomes. The presence of early learners in a class increases the likelihood of bullying among students, which could lead to a worsening of academic performance. The results show that the occurrence of bullying in a mixed class of precocious and regular pupils leads to a worsening of academic performance in Italian and mathematics among fifth grade students.