Economics of Education

Catalog description

The course focuses on the educational decisions, including individual choices, institutional strategies and government policies. It is an elective course in economics and it is designed for junior and senior students. During the first part of the course we will go over the mathematical and empirical tools needed to understand and perform quantitative analysis on topics in the economics of education. Students should expect to work on optimization methods, regression analysis and causal inference analysis. We will use Stata (https://www.stata.com/) as statistical software. After we have built a solid foundation of knowledge, we will cover the first "real" topic of the economics of education: the return to schooling. During this phase of the course we seek to address two questions: what are the benefits that an individual acquires (i.e. in terms of earnings in the labor market or career opportunities) by attending more years of school and what are the benefits for society as a whole? While these questions seem to have a simple explanation, we will discover that they are actually quite challenging and require a more complex explanation. Once we have analyzed the benefits of schooling, we will study what motivates some students to further their education for more years, as opposed to others. In particular, we will focus on the differences in the quality of environments that children face throughout childhood (e.g.: family environment and school/classroom environment) and the consequences for observed inequities. Finally, in the remaining portion of the course we will study the evaluations of different policies that have been implemented in the past from previous governments, with the goal of gaining insight for possible future policy recommendations.