Working Paper: NBER ID: w19851
Authors: Daron Acemoglu; David Laibson; John A. List
Abstract: Internet-based educational resources are proliferating rapidly. One concern associated with these (potentially transformative) technological changes is that they will be disequalizing - as many technologies of the last several decades have been - creating superstar teachers and a winner-take-all education system. These important concerns notwithstanding, we contend that a major impact of web-based educational technologies will be the democratization of education: educational resources will be more equally distributed, and lower-skilled teachers will benefit. At the root of our results is the observation that skilled lecturers can only exploit their comparative advantage if other teachers complement those lectures with face-to-face instruction. This complementarity will increase the quantity and quality of face-to-face teaching services, potentially increasing the marginal product and wages of lower-skill teachers.
Keywords: web-based education; democratization of education; educational inequality; superstar teachers
JEL Codes: A20; I20; I24; O33
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| web-based educational technologies (C91) | equal distribution of educational resources (I24) |
| web-based educational technologies (C91) | marginal product and wages of lower-skilled teachers (J31) |
| skilled lecturers + local teachers (A29) | marginal product and wages of lower-skilled teachers (J31) |
| web-based educational technologies (C91) | educational attainment of students (I21) |
| web-based educational technologies (C91) | narrowing of the human capital gap (J24) |
| web-based education (A22) | compresses human capital inequality (J24) |
| students from trailing islands (I23) | benefit from high-quality lectures and increased local instruction (A22) |
| complementarity effect (D10) | dominate crowdout effect for lower-skilled teachers (J45) |
| crowdout effect (D26) | dominate complementarity effect for higher-skilled teachers (D29) |