Birgitta Rabe

Education production in schools: complementarity and self-productivity

The child development literature has highlighted that children develop their skills across multiple stages of childhood, where skills acquired in early stages persist into later stages and generally increase the productivity of subsequent parental investments. A paper by Birgitta Rabe, joint with Cheti Nicoletti, shows that the patterns of complementarity observed for parental investments in the production of skills apply similarly to school investments in secondary school. Based on administrative pupil-level data for England they exploit anomalies in the school funding formula and idiosyncratic variation in past child cognitive skills for their analysis. They find that the return to school investments in secondary school increases with the skills obtained at the end of primary school. For policy makers in charge of allocating funds across the school stages, these results suggest adjusting the balance of funding between elementary and secondary education in favour of the earlier years.

While visiting CESifo, Birgitta Rabe will work on a review article on the interactions of inputs by families, schools and students in the production of schooling. She will present the paper “Private Response to Public Investment: the Impact of School Quality Information on Parental iInputs”, which uses unexpected news parents receive about the quality of their children’s school through school inspections to investigate behavioural responses.

Ms Rabe’s research interests lie in applied research in education, family and labour economics. She is particularly interested in early child development, education and schools. Her published work includes papers on the impact of free childcare on child outcomes, on the return to school expenditure and the determinants of migration and mobility. Currently she is working on a paper on the impact of Brexit on financial expectations as well as on topics around schools, eating and obesity.

Birgitta Rabe is Associate Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex. She is Co-Investigator of Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Survey and a member of the Centre of Micro-social Change at the University of Essex.