Luis Alejandro Lopez-Agudo

University of Malaga | UMA ·  Department of Statistics and Econometrics

Grade retention is at the core of the education debate in Spain, to the extent that its impact on students' competences has not been assessed beyond correlation. Because of that, in the present study, we analyse the influence of grade retention on students' competences, using more than 146,000 students from 6 PISA cycles (2003–2018) and an instrume...

Parents have the option of enrolling their children in the first stage of early childhood education (from 0 to 3 years of age). However, not all parents decide to do so, waiting until the second stage of early childhood education to enrol them in the education system (from 3 to 5 years of age), or even until compulsory education when their children...

Many research works have claimed the relevance that students’ maturity may have in their academic achievement, but in spite of this importance, this maturity concept is not so easy to delimit and measure. Because of that, the current work proposes to measure students’ maturity by three different proxies: the ages when children begin to read and wri...

The present research analyses the impact that the time spent on the Internet by primary school (3rd and 6th grade) students may have on their academic progression in terms of test scores. In order to go beyond a correlational analysis, we have applied a time fixed-effects estimation using a recent longitudinal database of 15,974 students from the S...

Purpose This research work investigates the influence of children’s weight status on well-being and school context in a sample of Spanish adolescences. Methods The Spanish records from the 2013–14 Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children Survey are used, which gathers 9,565 adolescences aged 11, 13 and 15. Studies do not usually address the endoge...

A sizeable literature – spanning education, sociology and economics – has investigated the issue of parental school preferences and school choice. A notable gap in the existing evidence base is an exploration of how such preferences differ between mothers and fathers. We present new cross-national findings on this matter, drawing on survey data col...

High suicide rates are a major issue in Spain, to the extent that they are the main non-natural cause of death in this country. The present study analyses the relationship between Internet searches and actual suicide rates in Spain. For this purpose, we employ data from actual suicide rates and Google® searches for Spain, differencing by the means...

There is a wide debate on the convenience of grade retention for students’ future cognitive development. Nevertheless, due to the endogenous characteristics of grade retention to explain students’ academic performance, most of the literature fails in capturing its actual influence. In the present research, we intend to get as close as possible to t...

Numerous authors have reported a positive relationship between preschool enrolment and academic performance in later years, even helping to reduce the academic gap existing between students from different socio-economic backgrounds. In this context, this paper goes further by analysing the impact that early childhood education (from 3 to 6 years) h...

International large-scale assessments have gained much attention since the beginning of the twenty-first century, influencing education legislation in many countries. This includes Spain, where they have been used by successive governments to justify education policy change. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the PISA 2018 reading scores for t...

Most education systems have set a minimum age until which students must stay at school. In the case of Spain, students can drop out the same day they reach that age, even without finishing that academic year. In the present research work, we intend to analyse the influence of early dropout on later life outcomes for the Spanish population, i.e. lit...

We live in a society in which knowing how to manage money is a necessity, since it is required in our everyday life. In this context, financial literacy is a competence which people should develop in order to improve their money-related decisions. In order to analyse the contribution of financial education to this competence, we go beyond the previ...

Most Spanish parents enrol their children in preschool education (ages 3–5) as a way of preparing them for compulsory education. However, not all parents decide to enrol their children in kindergarten (ages 0 to 2). In this context, the aim of the present study is to analyse the influence of kindergarten attendance on students’ academic performance...

This study uses longitudinal census data to explore the correlates of school satisfaction among parents of 3rd and 6th grade students from the Canary Islands, a large administrative region in Spain. We use logistic regression to model parental dissatisfaction with their children’s school and teachers. Our results illustrate how parents value academ...

This paper studies how COVID-19 lockdown restrictions encouraged and allowed people to form habits of increased mobile phone usage in Spain, even after the most restrictive measures were lifted. We have used data from the mobile network of a national telecommunications operator to study the influence of 15 different mobility restrictions on citizen...

In recent years, many studies have referred to the interdependence between cognitive (hard-skills) and students’ academic performance. However, despite their relevance, soft-skills have not received the same treatment and have not been analysed as extensively, particularly from a gender perspective. Therefore, and bearing in mind that analysing fro...

Financial literacy is a competence that extends to many aspects of everyday life. The Great Recession has recently highlighted its relevance and the importance of financial literacy training in the school curricula. The authors use PISA 2015 data to investigate the link between financial education and young people’s financial literacy across 15 cou...

Grade retention has been the focus of the education debate in Spain for decades. On average, more than 30% of students have repeated at least one grade before they finish (or dropout from) their compulsory studies. The present research provides new evidence on this issue by investigating the influence of Spain’s school entry age upon students’ grad...

As children spend more and more time on electronic devices and social networks, there is a growing concern about the influence that these activities may have on their development and social well-being. In this context, the present research is aimed at analysing the influence that Internet use may have on 6 th grade primary school students’ academic...

This study investigated language-related predictors of satisfaction with a partial English Medium Instruction (EMI) programme in teacher education at a Spanish university. More specifically, it explored the impact on programme satisfaction of students' perceptions of language improvement, of opportunities to use English, of lecturers' English profi...

Class size has been and continues to be a focus of the Spanish education debate. Most of the literature points towards the negative influence that overcrowded classes may have on students’ academic performance, which has increased the belief that a reduced class size may be better for students’ learning. However, the endogeneity that class size pre...

There is a common belief that the more the time students spend in the classroom the more they learn; a conception which has been supported by considerable empirical research. However, most of these studies are correlational, which does not provide solid support for their conclusions. In this research work we intend to go a step further in the analy...

In this paper we investigate the link between the language in which pupils take the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test and the scores they achieve in this assessment, focusing upon the case of Wales. Using five rounds of PISA data and an instrumental variable approach, we show how pupils who took the test in Welsh score arou...

Young people are increasingly spending more time connected to the Internet. However, it is not clear how this tool associates with students’ academic achievement. In this research, the association between the use of the Internet and different measures of academic performance is explored, in order to define the profile of those students who attain a...

This research analyses the socioeconomic and cultural segregation of students across school catchment areas using census data for the students in their second year of secondary education in Andalusia (the most populated region in Spain). The main methodology used is the Mutual Information Index, which satisfies all the desirable properties for meas...

Despite the relevance of noncognitive skills (i.e. soft skills) for individual development and for certain forms of employment, they tend to be overlooked in studies centred on educational performance. This study brings an additional contribution to the growing interest on these skills by exploring their main determinants and by providing an additi...

Both students and parents have expectations about students’ academic future. The present study analyses the influence of both sets of expectations when students are at age 15-16 on the level of education achieved by students when they are 23-24 years old. For this purpose, a structural equation model is estimated by three-stage least squares, using...

We explore the relationship between overweight and adolescents’ academic performance and other non-academic outputs, such as life satisfaction and health status, body image, friendships, sense of belonging to school, being bullied and attitudes towards bullying. For this purpose, we employ data on 15-year-old students from PISA 2018 for nine countr...

The education laws of each country establish starting cutoff dates for compulsory education which could, potentially, affect students’ academic achievement. Specifically, they could be detrimental for those students whose birthday is just before the school entry cutoff, as they will be the youngest in their classroom, while it could boost the acade...

In the field of Economics of Education the “resilience” term is used to designate those students from low socio-economic backgrounds who can overcome their initial situation and obtain high academic results. However, the opposite kind of student profile has been a less explored field, i.e., high socio-economic status students who perform poorly and...

The appraisal of job satisfaction and life satisfaction has been the focus of attention of work-family research. Despite being frequently regarded as a non-work variable, life satisfaction plays an important role in organizational behaviour and human resource management. Previous research has ascertained that workers’ life satisfaction is inherentl...

The present study analyses the influence of taking the PISA test in a language different from the one spoken at home on 15-year-old Spanish students’ academic performance. In particular, this could be the case of immigrant students and of students living in regions where a co-official language exists alongside the Spanish language. In the analysis...

Recent gender literature has highlighted that boys and girls devote their out-of-school time in dissimilar ways, which may differentially influence their academic achievement. Furthermore, this literature indicates that these gender differences may be rooted in society’s gender stereotypes when using this time. To analyse this issue we employ longi...

Little is known about the causal impact of teacher knowledge on student performance. In this research paper we intend to approach the potential causal effect (i.e. going beyond correlation) of sixth grade teachers’ knowledge on their students’ academic achievement for three Sub‐Saharan African countries. To achieve this, we have used the heterogene...

In Spain, each student class is assigned a tutor teacher who is also responsible for individually following their tutoring students’ performance, guiding them in personal issues and regularly meeting their families. Although tutors may suppose an important support for students during their school life, their close personal relationship may also inf...

TV and video games have been popularly considered as harmful for students’ academic performance, to the extent that they are usually related to a sedentary way of living. However, although there is a great amount of empirical research on this issue, most of the evidence is based on purely correlational analyses. The current research intends to go f...

This paper explores the trade-offs between four different aspects of European workers’ life satisfaction (satisfaction with education, the present work, family life and social life), to reach balanced optimal levels across these features. This analysis was performed separately for different profiles of workers, i.e. full-time and part-time workers...

It is well known that young people from more advantaged socio‐economic backgrounds have, on average, higher levels of academic achievement than their disadvantaged peers. Yet rather less is known about how the relative socio‐economic position of students might be related to their academic progression at school. This is the issue considered in this...

Apart from disease, suicide has been the first cause of death in Spain since it overcame the victims of traffic accidents in the year 2007. Nevertheless, in spite of the high number of people affected by it every year, it is an almost silenced issue in this country. In the present research work we make use of Internet suicide-related search terms a...

It has long been thought that encouraging children to read is likely to be beneficial for the development of their literacy skills. However, a lot less attention has been paid to the issue of whether what students read matters for their academic progress. This paper therefore considers the association between the frequency young people read five di...

The association between time devoted to homework and children's academic achievement has long been an issue of great debate. A small number of mainly correlational studies have been conducted into this issue in a primary school setting, but have produced somewhat mixed results. In this paper we contribute to this literature by investigating the rel...

This research checks if the amount of weekly instruction time received by 15 year-old Spanish students actually affects their academic achievement and if this effect differs by Autonomous Community. The employed student fixed effects between-subjects let us isolate this effect of instruction time from other covariates. Results show that there is no...

Homework has traditionally been considered positive for students’ academic achievement, to the extent that it makes children more responsible while learning. Nevertheless, making students do a large amount of homework has been one of the most criticised practices in recent years. Parental associations have long held the view that Spanish elementary...

There is a common belief in Spain that a large amount of classroom time is supposed to be an indicator of better academic achievement, due to children’s prolonged exposure to the teaching-learning process. Nevertheless, international evidence does not seem to support this concept, as the amount of weekly instruction hours that children receive in S...

The need for greater concern about job quality/satisfaction seems clear, due to its potential link with workers’ productivity, to the extent it affects employees’ quitting behavior, absenteeism, turnover, and firms’ productivity. In order to guide managers and policy makers when making decisions related to future hiring of human resources, a multio...

International large-scale assessments such as PISA are increasingly being used to benchmark the academic performance of young people across the world. Yet many of the technicalities underpinning these datasets are misunderstood by applied researchers, who sometimes fail to take their complex sample and test designs into account. The aim of this pap...

Recent empirical literature has highlighted that adolescents show gender differences in academic performance. The present study intends to disentangle the contribution of some less well-known factors to that gender difference in the fourth year of secondary education. To this aim, we use recent methodological advances in decomposition techniques. W...

The training of effective teachers has been one of the main aims of educational systems, in so far as it could be an important tool to improve the education performance of children and, consequently, contribute to their career progression and foster social mobility towards a more meritocratic society. The present study intends to identify these tea...

Parents and their children’s expectations on educational achievement have been highlighted in the literature as proper proxy indicators for students’ forthcoming performance. In this research we intend to measure the effect of these indicators accounting for the existence of endogeneity—due to their reciprocal relationship—and also their correlatio...

Recent empirical literature has highlighted that boys and girls show differences in academic performance. The present study intends to disentangle the contribution of some –less wellknown– factors to that gender gap between boys’ and girls’ achievement in the fourth level of secondary education. To this aim we use recent methodological advances in...

We investigate the potential balance between some teacher characteristics, particularly teachers’ satisfaction and different measures of pupils’ performance (average students’ test scores and percentage of students achieving basic standards of learning in mathematics), in order to optimize the outputs of the Spanish education system. Our contributi...

The implementation of computer-based assessment (CBA) in PISA and the OECD’s intention of relying only on this from 2015 suggests the need to evaluate to what extent it provides us with the same information as traditional paper and pencil assessment (PPA) conducted until 2012. Our results show that there is a significant gap between PPA and CBA for...

In this paper, we concentrate on reference point based methods in multiobjective programming to demonstrate, as main contribution, that the solution to a multiobjective optimization problem stays unchanged if the reference point is changed to any point on a set defined by means of the original reference point, the nondominated objective solution an...

This paper sheds new light on the relationship between inputs and outputs in the framework of the educational production function. In particular, it is geared at gaining a better understanding of which factors may be affected in order to achieve an optimal educational output level. With this objective in mind, we analyze teacher-based assessments (...