Essays in economics of education and training

This thesis collects four studies on the economics of education and training. The first study examines the impact on school attendance of the provision of free school uniforms to children in poor urban areas in Ecuador. Consistent with a sunk-cost effect, it finds that free school uniforms increase absenteeism from school. The second study analyzes the effects of training vouchers for low-skilled workers on their training participation, types of training, earnings and labor market mobility. Vouchers lead to more training but come with a high deadweight loss. Vouchers also seem to shift participation from more specific to more general forms of training. The third study uses data from four waves of PISA to inquire the factors that explain the substantial decline between 2003 and 2012 in math scores of 15 years-old students in the Netherlands. The key finding is that despite substantial changes in the characteristics of students and schools, most of the decline should be attributed to changes in the coefficients from a regression of math scores on characteristics. The last study reports the results from an evaluation of a pilot program in which context learning for the teaching of mathematics is replaced by a new curriculum that emphasizes concepts and mathematical thinking. It turns out that girls tend to shy away from (advanced) math when the new curriculum is offered, but that girls do not perform worse relative to boys when exposed to the new curriculum.