Essays on private tutoring and single-sex schooling

This dissertation consists of three essays in economics of education on private tutoring and single-sex schooling. In Chapter 1, I study the effect of private tutoring on academic achievement and educational inequality in Korea. Korea has the largest system of private tutoring in the world, and maintains an outstanding performance on international academic tests, such as the PISA. Korea's school system is characterized by limited school choice and low variation in quality and curricula across schools, which provides incentives for households to employ private tutoring as an additional educational investment. Prompted by concerns about unequal access to private tutoring and resulting educational inequality, the government has enacted various forms of regulation in the tutoring market. This paper seeks to quantify the effect of private tutoring on academic outcomes and to evaluate the impacts of a range of government policies. It develops and estimates a dynamic discrete choice model of private tutoring and self-study decisions using panel data from the 2005-2011 waves of the Korean Education Longitudinal Study. The data follow 7th graders annually until one year after their high school graduation and contain detailed information on private tutoring use and test scores. Simulations based on the estimated model show that prohibiting private tutoring reduces the achievement gap between higher and lower income households by 57 percent, but at the cost of decreasing average test scores by 0.47 standard deviations. Providing a 50 percent price subsidy for private tutoring to low income households increases average test scores for all students by 0.18 standard deviations and narrows the income achievement gap by 47 percent at the cost of increased government spending. A voucher system funded by tax on private tutoring narrows the income achievement gap by 31 percent, but at the cost of decreasing average test scores by 0.07 standard deviations.;In Chapter 2, I analyze the effects of private tutoring on academic outcomes and how participation in private tutoring affects students' motivation for and attitude toward formal education. For this purpose I use alternative estimation methods to take into account endogeneity problems arising from unobserved heterogeneity and the selection processes by which the students became involved in private tutoring. I confirm that there are substantial access gaps on private tutoring based on socioeconomic status. I find that private tutoring has a positive impact on cognitive achievement across all school levels and that the effects are stronger in the early stages of academic life. However, the effectiveness of private tutoring compared to that of self-study decreases as schooling stage progresses. I find a negative influence of private tutoring on the way of learning and creativity among high school students, and also find that students value the private education sector more highly than mainstream education in terms of quality and effectiveness. In this study, I use the first two waves of the Seoul Educational Longitudinal Study (SELS), which provide abundant information about the use of private tutoring and achievement test scores in mathematics and English.;In Chapter 3, together with Hyunjoon Park and Jere R. Behrman, we examine whether one particular institution - single-sex schools - may enhance female - or male - students' STEM careers. Despite women's significant improvement in educational attainment, underrepresentation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) college majors persists in most countries. Exploiting the unique setting in Korea where assignment to all-girls, all-boys or coeducational high schools is random, we move beyond associations to assess causal effects of single-sex schools. We use administrative data on national college entrance mathematics examination scores and a longitudinal survey of high school seniors that provide various STEM outcomes (mathematics and science interest and self-efficacy, expectations of a four-year college attendance and a STEM college major during the high school senior year, and actual attendance at a four-year college and choice of a STEM major two years after high school). We find significantly positive effects of all-boys schools consistently across different STEM outcomes, whereas the positive effect of all-girls schools is only found for mathematics scores.