Event Details

The Seminar is hosted by the Economics Department

Anwen Zhang will present a seminar on "Better Buildings, Better Scores? The Short-Run Effect of a Large School Construction Programme"

Abstract: School capital investment is costly, yet causal evidence on the effect of school capital investment on education outcomes in the existing literature is scarce. This paper provides new evidence on this by studying the short-run effect of a large school construction programme in England. Taking advantage of the phasing design that the whole programme is delivered in a sequence of waves, I apply difference-in-differences techniques to elicit the causal effect of school capital investment on student academic achievement. The overall effect is small and statistically insignificant, and the student composition in these schools does not change. However, there are sizable test score gains for disadvantaged students and academy schools. These gains at the low end of the distribution suggest capital investment can boost academic performance up to a certain point.