CEPAL Review no. 124

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Estimation of factors conditioning the acquisition of academic skills in Latin America in the presence of endogeneity Geovanny Castro Aristizabal, Gregorio Giménez, Domingo Pérez Ximénez-de-Embún 1 Abstract This article identifies the main determinants of skill acquisition in Latin America. Not having repeated a grade, sex, the number of books in the home and the mother’s education are defined as individual and family characteristics. In the case of school characteristics, the results are more heterogeneous between countries. The key factors seem to be attending a private school, the number of students per classroom, the quality of the educational materials available, and larger school size and autonomy. The characteristics of the schools explain most of the variability of the results, followed by family characteristics and then individual ones. School-based factors play a particularly crucial role in Argentina, Brazil and Costa Rica; family characteristics are very important in Chile, Colombia and Peru; and individual ones are important in Colombia and Mexico. Keywords JEL classification Authors Capacity-building, academic achievement, education, educational quality, evaluation, educational indicators, educational research, Latin America C29, I21, I24, I28, I29 Geovanny Castro Aristizabal is a professor and research fellow in the Department of Economics at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Cali (Colombia). Email: gcastro@ javerianacali.edu.co. Gregorio Giménez is a professor and research fellow in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). Email: gregim@unizar.es. Domingo Pérez Ximénez-de-Embún is a professor and research fellow in the Department of Economic Analysis at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). Email: dpxe@unizar.es. 1 The authors are grateful for financial assistance received from Santander Bank, the University of Zaragoza and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Cali (Colombia). They also appreciate the comments made by Macarena Iranzo and anonymous referees, which helped improve the final version of the article. Any remaining errors are the authors’ exclusive responsibility.
34 CEPAL Review N° 124 • April 2018 I. Introduction The Latin American countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 have accepted the challenge of improving educational quality. Public expenditure per student has been increased, and laws have been amended to guarantee the right to education for the least privileged population groups. Although not all countries have progressed at the same pace, they have generally improved and expanded education supply by building schools and creating new teaching posts. This has led to an increase in the average number of years’ schooling and better results achieved on the various international tests in which they have participated (CIPPEC, 2011). A comparison of the results of the Second and Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Studies (SERCE 2006 and TERCE 2013, respectively) generally reveals a significant increase in scores obtained by 3rd and 6th grade students in the three subject areas evaluated, especially mathematics (Rivas, 2015). 2 Nonetheless, at the secondary school level, the performance of the Latin American region still lags behind global standards. In terms of the three skills evaluated, the eight Latin American countries that took part in the 2012 PISA obtained results that ranked them among the last 20 of the 65 participants. 3 Although there are many empirical studies on the economics of education generally, which shed light on the factors that condition school performance or skill acquisition, there are few focused on Latin America. These research projects are based on estimating an education production function (EPF) through a variety of methodologies. In particular, the use of multilevel techniques (or hierarchical models) has gained increasingly broad acceptance as one of the best ways of studying and analysing educational data. This is because the characteristics of the student and the school (the inputs into EPF) are nested through their school performance; in other words, they are hierarchically structured (Gaviria and Castro, 2005). Nonetheless, these hierarchical models assume the absence of correlation between the independent variables and the model’s errors. Yet not all of the EPF inputs are statistically exogenous (zero correlation with the error term), since the model omits variables that cannot be measured directly. For this reason, they may be correlated with the error and cause an endogeneity problem (Hanushek and Woessmann, 2011). In the presence of this problem, multilevel techniques yield inconsistent and biased coefficients, which is why the literature suggests using instrumental variables (Greene, 2012). Nonetheless, this method has seldom been used in the economics of education (see Hanushek and Woessmann, 2011) and never to analyse school performance in Latin America. In view of the above, this article aims to identify the factors that are decisive for acquiring skills in Latin America, by analysing data from countries participating in the 2012 PISA in the three subject areas evaluated. The education production function is also estimated using the generalized method of moments (GMM), firstly because a problem of endogeneity has been detected and secondly because aggregation at the country level is not possible owing to the lack of regional relative weights in the selected sample. The article is structured as follows. Following this introduction, section II reviews the literature on factors determining the acquisition of skills in developing countries. A methodological section III describes the model used and its variables, along with the econometric techniques applied to analyse 2 The scores represent evaluations made by the Latin American Laboratory for the Evaluation of Educational Quality (LLECE) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for Latin American countries, with the aim of measuring the learning outcomes of the region’s students in reading, mathematics and science. 3 The following Latin American countries participated: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. Estimation of factors conditioning the acquisition of academic skills in Latin America in the presence of endogeneity
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EDITORIAL BOARD Osvaldo Sunkel Chai
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