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.
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Item Parental divorce and children’s outcomes : some evidence from Ireland(Università della Calabria, 2024-03-27) Spanò, Idola Francesca; Piluso, Fabio; Scoppa, VincenzoIn this thesis, we examine the situation in Ireland and explore the impact of parental divorce on children using data from the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) study, the national longitudinal study of children and young people. The thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, we assess the impact of parental divorce on children’s socioemotional problems using the emotional subscale from the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) (A. Goodman and R. Goodman 2009; R. Goodman, 1997), as well as their physical and dental health through measures of child's overweight risk, physical activity, and dental visit frequency. Employing initially a Difference-in-Differences approach and including later household's fixed effect to control for the unobserved source of heterogeneity, our results show that children who experience parental divorce between the ages of 9 and 13 do not appear to be affected by it. However, when parental divorce occurs during the adolescent's age of 13 and 17, it leads to adverse effects on all the outcomes under consideration. In the second chapter, we investigate the impact of variations in the family structure due to parental divorce on child’s later educational outcomes measured at the age of 20. The novelty of this chapter lies in the implementation of a recently developed double-machine learning estimator, which facilitates a "data-driven" selection of variables. Basically, we compare the results obtained from estimations based on a traditional "ad-hoc" variable selection procedure with those obtained from the machine learning technique. Our findings indicate that experiencing a change in family structure between the ages of 9 and 13 has an adverse effect on educational achievements when the adolescents reach the age of 20. Undergoing such a transition before the age of 9 or between the ages of 13 and 17 does not exert any influence on their educational outcomes. In the third chapter, we study the impact of a change in the family structure, specifically the transition from a two-parent to a one-parent configuration, on the externalizing and internalizing problems experienced by children. Additionally, we assess how the quality of the parent-child relationship is affected by this change. We identify a transition that takes place when children are aged 3-5 and measure its effects both at the age of 5 and 9 respectively. Implementing a Kernel Propensity Score Matching and a Difference-in-Differences approaches, our findings show that children who experience family structure between 3-5 years old have worse internalizing and externalizing problems and the parent-child relationship deteriorates. These effects do not disappear when the child is 9 years old.Item Three empirical essays on the Economics of Primary Education(Università della Calabria, 2024-03-27) Ciccarelli, Carmela; Piluso, Fabio; Rose, GiuseppeThe 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.Item On effects of non-cognitive skills, social isolation, and bullying on school performance(Università della Calabria, 2022-12-05) Skatova, Ekaterina; Rubino, Franco Ernesto; De Paola, MariaThe thesis aims to explore the impact of non-cognitive skills, social isolation among classmates, and bullying on educational outcomes, with a focus on Italian school setting. For this purpose, census data from INVALSI – the Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of the Educational System – on a whole population of Italian primary school children attending the 5th grade in the school year 2013/14 are used. The thesis is organized as follows. In Chapter 1, we investigate whether students’ non-cognitive skills affect their educational outcomes. For these students we estimate how standardized test scores in literacy and numeracy obtained in the 8th and 10th grades are affected by their academic motivation, regulatory self-efficacy, and social isolation as measured when attending primary school, controlling for their ex-ante cognitive abilities as proxied by standardized test scores achieved in the 5th grade.