Estimations of educational production functions: A case of six-year secondary schools in Japan (in Japanese)

This paper attempts to estimate educational production function and examine how school inputs affect educational attainment at the secondary education level in Japan, focusing on six-year secondary schools in Tokyo and Osaka metropolitan areas. We confirm the following three facts. First, students' prior attainment, which is gauged by the standardized test score (hensachi), is the key determinant of school performance in the admissions of graduates to universities in both two metropolitan areas. Second, after controlling for students' prior attainment and various school characteristics, total class hours are the only school factor that significantly and uniformly affects school performance. Third, comparing regression results among three school groups of different average abilities of students reveals that the size and the significance of the impacts of school inputs vary substantially across school groups. Our analysis is limited to six-year secondary schools, but the variables of school quality and characteristics are commonly observed from other types of school as well. Hence, our estimation results are at least to some extent relevant when discussing education of high and junior-high schools as a whole. Most of all, our estimation results suggest that we should not be too optimistic about the result of any effort to enforce educational attainment and also that we need more qualified data to precisely assess the efficacy of education policy