Immigrating to Opportunity: Estimating the Effect of School Quality Using a Natural Experiment on Ethiopians in Israel

Eric Gould, Victor Lavy and M. Daniele Paserman

No 4052, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

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: School quality; Natural experiment; Peer effects; Dropout rates; Immigrant absorption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
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Journal Article: Immigrating to Opportunity: Estimating the Effect of School Quality Using a Natural Experiment on Ethiopians in Israel (2004)
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