IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/zewdip/2908.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Poor Background or Low Returns? Why Immigrant Students in Germany Perform so Poorly in PISA

Author

Listed:
  • Ammermüller, Andreas

Abstract

Student performance of Germans and immigrants differed greatly in the 2000 PISA study. This paper analyses why the two groups of students performed so differently by estimating educational production functions, using an extension study with imputed data. The difference in the test scores is assigned to different effects, using a Juhn-Murphy-Pierce decomposition method. The analysis shows that German students have on average more favorable characteristics and experience slightly higher returns to these characteristics in terms of test scores than immigrant students. The later enrolment of immigrant students and preferences of parents as reflected by the number of books and language spoken at home are more important than parents? education or the family setting for explaining the test score gap. Overall, the variation in test scores can be explained better by the observable characteristics for immigrant than for German students.

Suggested Citation

  • Ammermüller, Andreas, 2005. "Poor Background or Low Returns? Why Immigrant Students in Germany Perform so Poorly in PISA," ZEW Discussion Papers 05-18, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:2908
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/24111/1/dp0518.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ammermuller, Andreas & Heijke, Hans & Wo[ss]mann, Ludger, 2005. "Schooling quality in Eastern Europe: Educational production during transition," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 24(5), pages 579-599, October.
    2. Ira N. Gang & Klaus F. Zimmermann, 2000. "Is Child like Parent? Educational Attainment and Ethnic Origin," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 35(3), pages 550-569.
    3. Lauer, Charlotte, 2000. "Gender wage gap in West Germany: how far do gender differences in human capital matter?," ZEW Discussion Papers 00-07, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    4. Ammermüller, Andreas, 2004. "PISA: What Makes the Difference? Explaining the Gap in PISA Test Scores Between Finland and Germany," ZEW Discussion Papers 04-04, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    5. Blau, Francine D & Kahn, Lawrence M, 1992. "The Gender Earnings Gap: Learning from International Comparisons," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(2), pages 533-538, May.
    6. Petra E. Todd & Kenneth I. Wolpin, 2003. "On The Specification and Estimation of The Production Function for Cognitive Achievement," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 113(485), pages 3-33, February.
    7. Hanushek, Eric A. & Luque, Javier A., 2003. "Efficiency and equity in schools around the world," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 22(5), pages 481-502, October.
    8. Juhn, Chinhui & Murphy, Kevin M & Pierce, Brooks, 1993. "Wage Inequality and the Rise in Returns to Skill," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 101(3), pages 410-442, June.
    9. Frick, Joachim R. & Wagner, Gert G., 2001. "Economic and Social Perspectives of Immigrant Children in Germany," IZA Discussion Papers 301, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nicole Schneeweis, 2006. "How should we organize schooling to further children with migration background?," Economics working papers 2006-20, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    2. Entorf, Horst & Lauk, Martina, 2006. "Peer effects, social multipliers and migrants at school: an international comparison," Darmstadt Discussion Papers in Economics 164, Darmstadt University of Technology, Department of Law and Economics.
    3. Andreas Ammermueller, 2007. "Poor Background or Low Returns? Why Immigrant Students in Germany Perform so Poorly in the Programme for International Student Assessment," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(2), pages 215-230.
    4. Nieto, S. & Ramos, R., 2011. "¿La sobreeducación de los padres afecta al rendimiento académico de sus hijos?," Regional and Sectoral Economic Studies, Euro-American Association of Economic Development, vol. 11(3).
    5. Entorf, Horst & Lauk, Martina, 2006. "Peer effects, social multipliers and migration at school: An international comparison," HWWI Research Papers 3-3, Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI).
    6. Ammermüller, Andreas, 2005. "Educational Opportunities and the Role of Institutions," ZEW Discussion Papers 05-44, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    7. Entorf, Horst & Tatsi, Eirini, 2009. "Migrants at School: Educational Inequality and Social Interaction in the UK and Germany," IZA Discussion Papers 4175, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Meunier, Muriel, 2011. "Immigration and student achievement: Evidence from Switzerland," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(1), pages 16-38, February.
    2. Ammermüller, Andreas, 2004. "PISA: What Makes the Difference? Explaining the Gap in PISA Test Scores Between Finland and Germany," ZEW Discussion Papers 04-04, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    3. Ammermüller, Andreas, 2005. "Educational Opportunities and the Role of Institutions," ZEW Discussion Papers 05-44, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    4. Joanna Tyrowicz & Lucas van der Velde, 2017. "When the opportunity knocks: large structural shocks and gender wage gaps," GRAPE Working Papers 2, GRAPE Group for Research in Applied Economics.
    5. Ammermüller Andreas, 2005. "Educational Opportunities and the Role of Institutions," ROA Research Memorandum 004, Maastricht University, Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA).
    6. Usamah Fayez Al-Farhan, 2010. "Changes in the Gender Wage Gap in Germany during a Period of Rising Wage Inequality 1999-2006: Was it Discrimination in the Returns to Human Capital?," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 293, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
    7. Karolina Goraus & Joanna Tyrowicz & Lucas van der Velde, 2017. "How (Not) to make women work?," GRAPE Working Papers 1, GRAPE Group for Research in Applied Economics.
    8. Töpfer, Marina, 2017. "Detailed RIF decomposition with selection: The gender pay gap in Italy," Hohenheim Discussion Papers in Business, Economics and Social Sciences 26-2017, University of Hohenheim, Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences.
    9. Orazem, Peter F. & King, Elizabeth M., 2008. "Schooling in Developing Countries: The Roles of Supply, Demand and Government Policy," Handbook of Development Economics, in: T. Paul Schultz & John A. Strauss (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 55, pages 3475-3559, Elsevier.
    10. Nadir Altinok & Geeta Kingdon, 2012. "New Evidence on Class Size Effects: A Pupil Fixed Effects Approach," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 74(2), pages 203-234, April.
    11. Barry Reilly, 1999. "The gender pay gap in Russia during the transition, 1992‐96," The Economics of Transition, The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, vol. 7(1), pages 245-264, March.
    12. Angel López-Nicolás & Jaume García & Pedro J. Hernández, 2001. "How wide is the gap? An investigation of gender wage differences using quantile regression," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 26(1), pages 149-167.
    13. Inés P. Murillo & Hipólito Simón, 2014. "La Gran Recesión y el diferencial salarial por género en España," Hacienda Pública Española / Review of Public Economics, IEF, vol. 208(1), pages 39-76, March.
    14. Ekaterina Selezneva & Philippe Van Kerm, 2016. "A distribution-sensitive examination of the gender wage gap in Germany," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 14(1), pages 21-40, March.
    15. Nicholas W Papageorge & Kevin Thom, 2020. "Genes, Education, and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 18(3), pages 1351-1399.
    16. Edin, Per-Anders & Richardson, Katarina, 1999. "Swimming with the tide: solidarity wage policy and the gender earnings gap," Working Paper Series 1999:3, IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.
    17. Beblo, Miriam & Wolf, Elke, 2003. "Sind es die Erwerbsunterbrechungen? : ein Erklärungsbeitrag zum Lohnunterschied zwischen Frauen und Männern in Deutschland (Is it the employment interruptions? * a contribution to explaining the wage ," Mitteilungen aus der Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany], vol. 36(4), pages 560-572.
    18. repec:zbw:rwidps:0023 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Francine D. Blau & Lawrence M. Kahn, 2003. "Understanding International Differences in the Gender Pay Gap," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 21(1), pages 106-144, January.
    20. René Böheim & Klemens Himpele & Helmut Mahringer & Christine Zulehner, 2011. "The Gender Pay Gap in Austria: Tamensi Movetur!," WIFO Working Papers 394, WIFO.
    21. Milan Vodopivec & Peter F. Orazem, 2000. "Male-female differences in labor market outcomes during the early transition to market: The cases of Estonia and Slovenia," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 13(2), pages 283-303.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Educational production; PISA-E; decomposition; immigration;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H52 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Education
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:2908. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/zemande.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.