Gender Gaps in Early Educational Achievement

This paper analyzes the source of the gender gap in third grade numeracy and reading. We adopt an Oaxaca-Blinder approach and decompose the gender gap in educational achievement into endowment and response components. Our estimation relies on unusually rich panel data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children in which information on child development reported by parents and teachers is linked to each child's results on a national, standardized achievement test. We find that girls in low- and middle-SES families have an advantage in reading, while boys in high-SES families have an advantage in numeracy. Girls score higher on their third grade reading tests in large part because they were more ready for school at age four and had better teacher-assessed literacy skills in kindergarten. Boys' advantage in numeracy occurs because they achieve higher numeracy test scores than girls with the same education-related characteristics.

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title: On the Origins of Gender Human Capital Gaps: Short and Long Term Consequences of Teachers’ Stereotypical Biases
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title: Early Schooling: The Handicap of Being Poor and Male
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title: Social and behavioral skills and the gender gap in early educational achievement.
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title: Noncognitive Skills and the Gender Disparities in Test Scores and Teacher Assessments: Evidence from Primary School
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title: Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets
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title: Leaving Boys Behind
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title: Geographic Variation in the Gender Differences in Test Scores
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title: Employers' discriminatory behavior and the estimation of wage discrimination
abstract: This paper considers the linkage of empirical estimates of wage discrimination between two groups, introduced by Oaxaca (1973), to a theoretical model of employers' discriminatory behavior. It is shown that, conditional on different assumptions about employers' discriminatory tastes, Oaxaca's estimators of wage discrimination can be derived. That the approach is more generally useful is demonstrated by deriving an alternative estimator of wage discrimination, based on the assumption that within each type of labor (e.g., unskilled, skilled) the utility function capturing employers' discriminatory tastes is homogeneous of degree zero with respect to labor inputs from each of the two groups. The estimators are compared empirically in an application to male-female wage differentials.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.

title: On Decomposing the Wage Gap: A Critical Comment on Blinder's Method
abstract: Many studies have found that the impact of schooling on earnings is greater for females than for males, despite the fact that females tend to earn less, both absolutely and controlling for personal characteristics. This study investigates possible ...

title: Identification in Detailed Wage Decompositions
abstract: The standard wage decomposition methodology produces arbitrary results when attempting to estimate the separate contributions of sets of dummy variables to the unexplained portion of the wage decomposition: the estimates are not invariant with respect to the choice of reference groups. However, the estimated separate contributions of sets of dummy variables to the explained portion and the overall decomposition are shown not to be dependent upon the choice of left-out reference groups. A similar identification problem applies to continuous variables, although this may not be as likely to cause problems in practice.

title: Birthweight and Academic Achievement in Childhood
abstract: Research has shown that birth weight has a lasting impact on later-life outcomes such as educational attainment and earnings. This paper examines the role of health at birth in determining academic achievement in childhood, which may provide the link between birth weight and adult outcomes. Using three waves of the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data over 1997-2007, we build on the literature by employing the fetal growth rate as a proxy for net nutritional intake in utero and propose a nested error-component two-stage least squares estimator that draws on internal instruments from alternative dimensions of the multilevel panel data set. In particular, this alternative estimator allows us to exploit the information on children with no siblings in the sample, which comprise over 40% of the observations in our sample, as well as to obtain coefficient estimates for the time-invariant variables such as race and maternal education. This would not be feasible with the usual mother fixed effects estimation. We obtain modest but significant effects of both birth weight and the fetal growth rate on math and reading scores, with the effects concentrated in the low birth weight range. Infant health measures appear to explain little of the well-documented racial disparity in test scores.