IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/22222.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Effect of Single-Sex Education on Test Scores, School Completion, Arrests, and Teen Motherhood: Evidence from School Transitions

Author

Listed:
  • C. Kirabo Jackson

Abstract

In 2010, the Ministry of Education in Trinidad and Tobago converted 20 low-performing secondary schools from coeducational to single-sex. I exploit these conversions to identify the causal effect of single-sex schooling holding other school inputs constant. After also accounting for student selection, single-sex cohorts at conversion schools score higher on national exams and are four percentage points more likely to complete secondary school. There are also important non-academic effects; all-boys cohorts have fewer arrests as teens, and all-girls cohorts have lower teen pregnancy rates. These benefits are achieved at zero financial cost. Survey evidence suggests that these single-sex effects reflect both direct gender peer effects due to interactions between classmates, and indirect effects generated through changes in teacher behavior.

Suggested Citation

  • C. Kirabo Jackson, 2016. "The Effect of Single-Sex Education on Test Scores, School Completion, Arrests, and Teen Motherhood: Evidence from School Transitions," NBER Working Papers 22222, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22222
    Note: CH DEV ED LS PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22222.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Anne Ardila Brenøe & Ulf Zölitz, 2020. "Exposure to More Female Peers Widens the Gender Gap in STEM Participation," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 38(4), pages 1009-1054.
    2. Kirabo Jackson & Alexey Makarin, 2018. "Can Online Off-the-Shelf Lessons Improve Student Outcomes? Evidence from a Field Experiment," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 10(3), pages 226-254, August.
    3. Michèle Müller-Itten & Aniko Öry, 2022. "Mentoring and the Dynamics of Affirmative Action," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 14(2), pages 402-444, May.
    4. Fruehwirth, Jane Cooley & Gagete-Miranda, Jessica, 2019. "Your peers’ parents: Spillovers from parental education," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H0 - Public Economics - - General
    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • J00 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22222. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.