The Role of Teachers, Schools, and Culture in Education and Labor Market Outcomes

This thesis consists of four self-contained papers in the economics of education and labor economics.

In the first chapter, we study whether differences in teacher quality across countries are a contributor of international learning gaps. In particular, we study the effects of two dimensions of teacher quality, subject knowledge and didactic skills, on student learning in francophone Sub-Saharan Africa. Exploiting variation between subjects in a student fixed-effects model, we find that only teacher subject knowledge has a large positive effect on student achievement. Differences in teacher subject knowledge account for 37 percent of the variation in average student achievement across countries.

In the second chapter, we study the impact of autonomous schools on student achievement and school segregation. Employing a triple-differences design, we find that autonomous schools do not raise overall achievement, but increase learning gaps between groups. We also find that autonomous schools increase segregation by socioeconomic and immigrant status.

In the third chapter, I investigate whether occupational gender norms contribute to gendered occupational choice. I study whether second-generation immigrant men are less likely to work in an occupation that is perceived as female work in their country of origin. I find robust evidence that only men adhere to occupational gender norms: men are less likely to work in an occupation that is perceived as female work in their country of ancestry, while there is no such effect for women. The findings of this paper suggest that persistent social norms are a key factor behind the slow integration of men into female-dominated occupations.

In the fourth chapter, we show that culturally transmitted individualism is an important determinant of working from home (WFH). To this end, we compare immigrants and their descendants from different cultural backgrounds residing in the same location. We find that a 10-point increase in country-of-origin individualism increases the likelihood of WFH by 3.9 percentage points and WFH hours by 1.12 per week.