Essays on Economics of Education and the Labor Market

This doctoral dissertation consists of an introductory chapter and four independent essays on economics of education and labor economics. The first chapter provides a brief introduction and summarizes the essays.

In the first essay, together with Andrés Barrios-Fernández, we study the role of teachers’ allocation and quality in shaping the gender gaps we observe in test scores and postsecondary educational trajectories. Using rich administrative data from Chile, we estimate Teacher Value Added (TVA) on test scores and educational attainment and find that gaps in gender-specific teaching effectiveness are especially pronounced in mathematics. Eliminating within-teacher differences in math test score TVA would reduce the gender gap in math performance by 67%. We explore what could be behind these gaps in gender-specific TVA and find no significant differences in what makes teachers effective for male and female students. However, we find significant associations between teachers' characteristics and practices and their effectiveness. Examples of observed features that affect TVA include the teacher's gender and their performance on the college admission exam, whether they pay attention to low-performing students, and having a good relationship with students. Finally, we also show that math teachers tend to be biased in favor of male students and that teachers with smaller gender biases are more effective for both male and female students.

The second essay, joint with Roope Uusitalo, studies how the transition from on-site to on-line teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic affected the performance of students in the university entrance examination in Finland, the matriculation exams. To identify the effects, we leverage the regional variation in the length of the school closure period across Finnish municipalities in a difference-in-difference design. Our results suggest that students who studied on-line for longer periods performed equally well in the matriculation exam at the end of upper-secondary education as those who experienced shorter school closures. Moreover, we show that inequalities across Finnish students from different socioeconomic backgrounds did not exacerbate during this period.

In the third essay I study the effects of apprenticeship contracts on the labor market trajectories of young workers in Spain. I exploit a reform aimed at promoting apprenticeship contracts by temporarily removing external certification requirements and raising the age eligibility threshold from 25 to 30 years. I show that after the reform, there was an increase in the use of apprenticeship contracts. However, employment did not expand. The increase in apprenticeship contracts was crowded out by a decline in other types of contracts in the economy. Moreover, I show that workers who turned between 25 to 30 when the reform was passed and became apprentices experienced an average wage decrease of about 28% in the short run and 11% in the long run, compared to similar workers who did not take an apprenticeship. Finally, I analyze a subsidy aimed at converting apprenticeship contracts into open-ended contracts. I find that, while the take-up rate is relatively low, the subsidy had a positive effect on the labor market attachment of the recipients.

In the fourth essay, together with Ferran Elias, we study the interaction between minimum wages and collective bargaining, focusing on two minimum wage hikes of 6.9% and 21.5% that happened in Spain in 2017 and 2019 respectively. Leveraging geographical-sector variation in the bite of the minimum wage, we find wage spillovers until 80th percentile of the wage distribution and positive but insignificant effects on employment. Using newly digitized data on collective agreements, we show that wage spillovers are driven by agreements with wage levels below the new minimum wage. The evidence suggests that collective bargaining systems with extended coverage help transmit minimum wage changes further up the wage distribution.

Contact Marc Riudavets Barcons

Email: marc.riudavetsbarcons@helsinki.fi
Home page: https://sites.google.com/view/marcriudavetsbarcons/home

Bluesky: @riudavetsmarc.bsky.social