Olmo Silva

Why So Many Local Entrepreneurs

We document that the fraction of entrepreneurs working in the region where they were born is significantly higher than the corresponding fraction for dependent workers. This is more pronounced in more developed regions and positively related to the degree of local financial development. Firms created by locals are bigger, operate with more capital-intensive technologies, and obtain greater financing per unit of capital invested, than firms created by nonlocals. This suggests that there are so many local entrepreneurs because locals can better exploit the financial opportunities available in the region where they were born. This helps to explain how local financial development causes persistent disparities in entrepreneurial activity, technology, and income.

Choice, Competition and Pupil Achievement

Choice and competition in education have recently found growing support from both policy-makers and academics. Yet evidence on the actual benefits of market-orientated reforms is at best mixed. Moreover, although the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear, in existing work there is rarely an attempt to distinguish between the two concepts. In this paper, we study whether pupils in Primary schools in England with a wider range of school choices achieve better academic outcomes than those whose choice is more limited; and whether Primary schools facing more competition perform better than those in a more monopolistic situation. In simple least squares regression models we find little evidence of a link between choice and achievement, but uncover a small positive association between competition and school performance. Yet this could be related to endogenous school location or pupil sorting. In fact, an instrumental variable strategy based on discontinuities generated by admissions district boundaries suggests that the performance gains from greater school competition are limited. Only when we restrict our attention to Voluntary Aided schools, which have more freedom in managing their governance and admission practices, do we find some evidence of a positive causal link between competition and pupil achievement.

New Technology in Schools: Is there a Payoff?

Despite its high relevance to current policy debates, estimating the causal effect of Information Communication Technology (ICT) investment on educational standards remains fraught with difficulties. In this paper, we exploit a change in the rules governing ICT funding across different school districts of England to devise an instrumental variable strategy to identify the causal impact of ICT expenditure on pupil outcomes. The approach identifies the effect of being a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’ in the new system of ICT funding allocation to schools. Our findings suggest a positive impact on primary school performance in English and Science, though not for Mathematics. We reconcile our positive results with others in the literature by arguing that it is the joint effect of large increases in ICT funding coupled with a fertile background for making an efficient use of it that led to positive effects of ICT expenditure on educational performance in English primary schools.

The Good, the Bad, and the Average: Evidence on Ability Peer Effects in Schools

We study ability peer effects in English secondary schools using data on four cohorts of students taking age-14 national tests and measuring peers’ ability by prior achievements at age 11. Our identification is based on within-pupil regressions exploiting variation in achievements across three compulsory subjects tested at age 14 and age 11. Using this novel strategy, we find significant and sizable negative effects arising from bad peers at the bottom of the ability distribution but little evidence that average peer quality and good peers matter. However, these results are heterogeneous, with girls benefiting from academically bright peers and boys not.

Faith Primary Schools: Better Schools or Better Pupils?

We estimate the causal effect of attending a state Faith school on primary education achievement in England using administrative student-level data and implementing various strategies to control for students’ selection into Faith schooling. Our regressions control for fixed effects in prior achievement and residential postcode to compare pupils who are close residential neighbors and have identical observable ability. We also use information on future school choices to control for preferences for Faith schooling. Results show that pupils progress faster in Faith primary schools, but all of this advantage is explained by sorting into Faith schools according to preexisting characteristics and preferences.

Targeting Non-Cognitive Skills to Improve Cognitive Outcomes: Evidence from a Remedial Education Intervention

We study an education intervention targeting underachieving pupils’ noncognitive skills with the aim of improving attendance and cognitive outcomes. We evaluate the policy effect on test scores in national exams at age 16 exploiting repeated observations to control for unobservables. We find little evidence of improved cognitive outcomes. We further examine the policy impact on students’ absences. Lacking repeated observations on this outcome, we simulate the effect of unobservables on attendance. While the intervention had beneficial effects on school presence, these did not translate to improved cognitive outcomes. Conversely, the policy generated positive spillover effects on nontreated students’ test scores.

Urban density and pupil attainment

We explore the association between urban density and pupil attainment using three cohorts of pupils in schooling in England. Although--as widely recognised--attainment in dense urban places is low on average, this is not because urban environments disadvantage pupils, but because the most disadvantaged pupils with low average attainments attend the most urbanised schools. To control for this, we exploit changes in urban density faced by pupils during compulsory transition from Primary to Secondary school, and measure educational progress at the end of the Secondary phase, relative to attainment at the end of Primary schooling. Our results suggest that there are small but significant benefits from education in schools in more densely urbanised settings. We detect this density advantage even amongst pupils moving relatively short distances between Primary and Secondary schools within urban areas, so we cannot attribute it to broad urbanisation effects experienced by pupils making rural-urban school moves. A more likely explanation lies in greater school choice and competition between closely co-located educational providers.

Competition and accessibility in school markets: empirical analysis using boundary discontinuities

Advocates of market-based reforms in the public sector argue that competition between providers drives up performance. But in the context of schooling, the concern is that any improvements in efficiency may come at the cost of increased stratification of schools along lines of pupil ability and attainments. In this chapter, we discuss our empirical work on competition and parental choice in English primary schools and present a methodology for identifying competition effects that exploits discontinuities in market access close to education district boundaries.