Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/167521 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 6535
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
We exploit two unusual policy features of academic high schools in Seoul, South Korea—random assignment of pupils to high schools within districts and conversion of some existing single-sex schools to the coeducational (coed) type over time—to identify three distinct causal parameters: the between-school effect of attending a coed (versus a single-sex) school; the within-school effect of school-type conversion, conditional on (unobserved) school characteristics; and the effect of class-level exposure to mixed-gender (versus same-sex) peers. We find robust evidence that pupils in single-sex schools outperform their counterparts in coed schools, which could be due to single-sex peers in school and classroom, or unobservable school-level covariates. Focusing on switching schools, we find that the conversion of the pupil gender type from single-sex to coed leads to worse academic outcomes for both boys and girls, conditional on school fixed effects and time-varying observables. While for boys, the negative effect is largely driven by exposure to mixed-gender peers at school-level, it is class-level exposure to mixed-gender peers that explains this disadvantage for girls.
Subjects: 
gender
single sex schools
school inputs
random assignment
JEL: 
I20
J16
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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