@article{f903bcd8111a45919022986ab5108342,
title = "Measuring educational inequality of opportunity: pupil's effort matters",
abstract = "The distinction between effort and other factors, such as family background, matters for correcting policies and normative reasons when we appeal to inequality of opportunity. We take advantage of a purposefully designed survey on secondary schools in rural Bangladesh to offer a comprehensive view of the importance of overall effort when measuring inequalities of opportunity in education. The analysis comprises decomposition exercises of the predicted variance of student performance in mathematics and English by source (effort, circumstances, etc.) and subgroup (within- and between-schools) based on parametric estimates of educational production functions. Pupils{\textquoteright} effort, preferences, and talents contribute between 31\% and 40\% of the total predicted variances in performance scores. The contribution of overall effort falls by 10\% when the correlation between effort and circumstances is taken into account. These findings are robust to the choice of estimation strategy (i.e. combined within- and between-schools variation models versus multilevel random-effect models). All in all, these results advocate that social determinism in education can be mitigated by individual effort at school.",
keywords = "Education, Effort, Inequality of opportunity, School, Variance decomposition",
author = "Asadullah, \{M. Niaz\} and Alain Trannoy and Sandy Tubeuf and Gaston Yalonetzky",
note = "Funding Information: The QSSMEB survey was funded by the World Bank. We thank support from the LABEX AMSE. Alain Trannoy thanks the support of the research project IMCHILD funded by the European Union and the French National Research Agency Grants ANR-17-EURE-0020. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 36th meeting of the ECINEQ with the support of Health Chair-a joint initiative by PSL, Universit{\'e} Paris-Dauphine, ENSAE, MGEN and ISTYA under the aegis of the Fondation du Risque (FDR). Funding Information: We are grateful to Paul Hufe, the editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on an earlier version of this work. This research work was presented and received comments from colleagues at the HEAL seminar series (University of Lancaster), the 6th and 7th meetings of the ECINEQ respectively in Luxembourg and New York City, the 14th LAGV workshop in Aix-en-Provence, the PEGNet 2017 conference in Zurich, the 13th International Conference of the WEAI in Santiago, the School of Economics at Nagoya University (Japan), the Applied Economics workshop at the Institute for Economics Studies at Keio University (Japan), the Health Economics seminars at Tinbergen Institute at Erasmus University, and Health Economics seminars at the University of Manchester. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020 The Authors",
year = "2021",
month = feb,
doi = "10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105262",
language = "English",
volume = "138",
journal = "World Development",
issn = "0305-750X",
publisher = "Elsevier",
}
