Xuejuan Su

Rational Terrorists and Optimal Network Structure

After the events of 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism became more proactive in that the Patriot Act allowed the authorities far more freedom to directly attack terrorist network structures. We argue that rational terrorists will attempt to thwart such policies and restructure themselves to be less penetrable. We model the trade-off between security and intragroup communication faced by terrorists. The model is used to derive the anticipated changes in network structure and the consequent changes in the type, complexity, and success rate of potential terrorist attacks.

Endogenous determination of public budget allocation across education stages

This paper studies the endogenous determination of public budget allocation across hierarchical education stages. In less developed economies, the top class has dominant political power to implement its most preferred policy, which is characterized by exclusive participation and large schooling expenditure at higher education at the expense of basic education. In developed economies, the budget allocation is more balanced; under certain parameters, it leads to expanded participation of the middle class in higher education. The model offers an explanation to the observed cross-country policy difference, and is broadly consistent with historical evidence.

Education Curriculum and Student Achievement: Theory and Evidence

This paper proposes a theory of education curriculum and analyzes its distributional impact on student learning outcomes. Different curricula represent horizontal differentiation in the education technology, thus a curriculum change has distributional effects across students. We test the model using the quasi-natural experiment of the G8 reform in Germany. We find evidence of heterogeneous reform effects consistent with our theory. While the reform improves student test scores on average, such benefits are more pronounced for well-prepared students. In contrast, less-prepared students do not benefit from the reform.

The Impact of Schooling Intensity on Student Learning: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

This paper uses a quasi-natural policy experiment in Germany, the G8 reform, to examine the impact of schooling intensity on student learning. The G8 reform compresses secondary school for academic-track students from nine to eight years, while holding fixed the overall academic content and total instruction time required for graduation, resulting in a higher schooling intensity per grade. Using German extension of the Programme for International Student Assessment data, we find that this reform improves test scores on average, but the effect differs across subgroups of students. The reform effect is larger for girls than for boys, for students with German-born parents than for those with immigrant parents, and for students having more books at home. The heterogeneous reform effects cannot be explained by changes in observed channels. Instead, quantile regression results suggest that unobserved heterogeneity plays an important role: Whereas high-performing students significantly improve their test scores, the lowest-performing students hardly improve at all after the reform. We interpret the unobserved heterogeneity as reflecting students’ capability to cope with the increase in schooling intensity.