Weili Ding

Queen's University | QueensU · Department of Economics

In this paper, we analyze recently collected data that conducts a unique assessment of high school student performance for over two thousand students from five Chinese provinces. Across three domains of scientific intelligence tested, we document heterogeneous gender gaps in academic performance. These differences generally arise due to differentia...

In this paper, motivated by aspects of preregistration plans we discuss issues that we believe have important implications for how experiments are designed. To make possible valid inferences about the effects of a treatment in question, we first illustrate how economic theories can help allocate subjects across treatments in a manner that boosts st...

Employers in Canada’s information and communication technology (ICT) sector often claim that they face a shortage of technical talent. This shortage may arise in part from a sharp decline in undergraduate engineering and computing enrolment and graduation rates in Canada beginning in 2002. Even with a recent reversal in enrolment trends, the number...

The idea that genetic differences may explain a multitude of individual-level outcomes studied by economists is far from controversial. Since more datasets now contain measures of genetic variation, it is reasonable to postulate that incorporating genomic data in economic analyses will become more common. However, there remains much debate among ac...

Unobserved ability heterogeneity has long been postulated to play a key role in human capital development. Traditional strategies to estimate education production functions do not allow for varying role or development of unobserved ability as a child ages. Such restrictions are highly inconsistent with a growing body of scientific evidence; moreove...

Proponents of class size reductions (CSRs) draw heavily on the results from Project Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio to support their initiatives. Adding to the political appeal of these initiative are reports that minority and economically disadvantaged students received the largest benefits from smaller classes. We extend this research in two di...

This paper examines the impact of an observable "shock", the birth of a son, on household finance and investment in rural China. We propose a mechanism that endogenously generates heterogeneity in the levels of financial activities and investments on the basis of a child's gender, assuming parents do not possess discriminatory taste against a daugh...

This paper introduces an empirical strategy to estimate dynamic treatment effects in randomized trials that provide treatment in multiple stages and in which various noncompliance problems arise, such as attrition and selective transitions between treatment and control groups. Our approach is applied to the highly influential four-year randomized c...

This paper examines the influence of health conditions on academic performance during adolescence. To account for the endogeneity of health outcomes and their interactions with risky behaviors we exploit natural variation within a set of genetic markers across individuals. We present evidence that specific genetic markers have good statistical prop...

Children in households reporting the receipt of free or reduced price school meals through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) are more likely to have negative health outcomes than eligible nonparticipants. Assessing the causal effects of the program is made difficult, however, by the presence of endogenous selection into the program and syste...

Lacking guidance of general equilibrium (GE) theories in public economics and the corresponding proper mechanisms, China has not surprisingly witnessed an inequality in educational expenditures across regions as well as insufficiency of funds for education in poor areas. It is wrongly thought that what happens is due to the decentralized financing...

Peer effects have figured prominently in debates on school vouchers, desegregation, ability tracking, and antipoverty programs. Compelling evidence of their existence remains scarce for plaguing endogeneity issues such as selection bias and the reflection problem. This paper is among the first to firmly establish the link between peer performance a...

This paper examines the influence of health conditions on academic performance during adolescence. To account for the endogeneity of health outcomes and their interactions with risky behaviors we exploit natural variation within a set of genetic markers across individuals. We present strong evidence that these genetic markers serve as valid instrum...

In this paper we review the available summary measures for the magnitude of socio-economic inequalities in health. Measures which have been used differ in a number of important respects, including (1) the measurement of "relative" or "absolute" differences; (2) the measurement of an "effect" of lower socio-economic status, or of the "total impact"...

Class size proponents draw heavily on the results from Project STAR to support their initiatives. Adding to the political appeal of these initiative are reports that minority and economic disadvantaged students receive the largest benefits. To explore and truly understand the heterogeneous impacts of class size and student achievement requires more...

This paper considers the analysis of data from randomized trials which offer a sequence of interventions and suffer from a variety of problems in implementation. In experiments that provide treatment in multiple periods (T>1), subjects have up to 2^{T}-1 counterfactual outcomes to be estimated to determine the full sequence of causal effects from t...

Abstract Over the last thirty years, education reform has been a constant topic of debate for both policy makers and social scientists. Recent reform proposals have suggested policies to be built on what students actually accomplish and reward instructors who,induce good performance by students. In this paper we demonstrate that incentive contracts...

Over the last thirty years, education reform has been a active topic of debate among policy makers and social scientists. The majority of proposals for reform have been based on a combination of regulations and fixed definitions of school - the resources, organization and structure of schools and classrooms. However, recently increased attention ha...

In the economics of education literature different empirical approaches are undertaken to estimate education production function parameters. We introduce a new strategy that does not require proxies for unobserved ability and can accommodate heterogeneous impacts from time-varying unobservables that affect outcomes differently for different individ...

Abstract The in‡uential class size reduction,experiment,Project STAR randomly,assigned students to classrooms,in successive grades. The experiment,su¤ered from a variety of implementation problems,rendering traditional evaluation methods,unable to recover the full set of causal e¤ects. We consider sequential di¤erence in di¤erence estimation of edu...

In this study, we first document that the magnitude of the estimated treatment effect in Project STAR is substantially larger in schools where fewer students were assigned to small classes. The differences in student performance across schools can-not be explained by failure in randomization, other observed school level character-istics or differen...