Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP4052
Authors: Eric D. Gould; Victor Lavy; Daniele Paserman
Abstract: In May 1991, 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel in an overnight airlift and sorted in a haphazard and essentially random fashion to absorption centres across the country. This quasi-random assignment produced a natural experiment whereby the initial schooling environment of Ethiopian children can be considered exogenous to their family background and parental decisions. We examine the extent to which the initial elementary school environment affected the high school outcomes of Ethiopian children, using administrative panel data on the educational career of each child in Israel through much of the 1990s. The results show that the early school environment has an important effect on high school dropout and repetition rates and on end-of-high-school matriculation exams. The results are robust to controlling for observable characteristics of the community, suggesting that characteristics of the elementary school itself, such as the quality of instruction and peer effects, are important for high school success.
Keywords: dropout rates; immigrant absorption; natural experiment; peer effects; school quality
JEL Codes: I20; J24
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Elementary school environment quality (measured by pre-immigration math scores) (I24) | High school dropout rates (I21) |
| Elementary school environment quality (measured by pre-immigration math scores) (I24) | High school matriculation exam passing rates (I21) |
| High verbal scores in elementary schools (I21) | High school outcomes (I21) |