Here you can find a summary of my dissertation as well as the current projects I am working on.
For some of the projects there is a working paper available upon request, and I will be happy to share it and discuss it with you in case you are interested!
Working papers
Espadafor, M., Lievore, I., Valdés, M., and Bernardi, F. Educationally downwardly mobile but occupationally immobile? A Safety Net for Those Falling Short of Tertiary Education in Tertiary-Educated Families.
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This study diverges from conventional perspectives on educational inequality by
scrutinising a relatively neglected group: individuals who experience downward educational
mobility despite having tertiary-educated parents. Drawing on data from
the European Social Survey across 25 European countries, we explore the occupational
outcomes of those falling short of tertiary education. Two central research
questions guide our analysis: first, whether these individuals have an increased likelihood
of securing high socioeconomic status occupations compared to peers from
non-tertiary-educated families, and second, if there are consistent patterns of occupational
attainment across European countries for this group.
Guided by compensatory advantage theory, we anticipate that individuals from
socioeconomically advantaged families, who fail to attain tertiary education, are
less susceptible to falling into unskilled employment. Preliminary results uncover a
notable disparity: individuals who fail to attain tertiary education but have tertiaryeducated
parents are about 3 times less likely to end up in a low ISEI position when
compared to their peers who do not have a tertiary-educated parent. This highlights
the crucial role of parental education in shaping the employment trajectory of those
who fall short of tertiary education. We further contribute to the literature by
applying a micro-class approach. We delve into the most prevalent occupations
among those who fail to transition to tertiary education, unravelling some of the
support structures provided by parents with tertiary education.
This research contributes to the broader discourse on social mobility and challenges
assumptions of education-based meritocracy in post-industrial societies. The
study’s unique focus on educational downward mobility and a micro-class analysis
enriches discussions on the nuanced relationship between education, socioeconomic
background, and specific occupational attainment patterns.
- Draft available upon request .
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In late 2018, the government of Madrid instituted a low emission zone (LEZ) in the central district of the city, aiming primarily to alleviate traffic-related emissions and enhance air quality. Extensive research has documented the adverse effects of air pollution on academic performance. Consequently, the success of Madrid’s LEZ in reducing traffic-related emissions could potentially translate into improved performance among students schooled in the designated area. Through a difference-in-differences design, we demonstrate the policy's effectiveness in improving air quality during the four years following its implementation. Subsequently, we show a noteworthy increase of 0.17 standard deviations in the average EvAU scores (high-stakes examinations for university admittance) of high schools within the LEZ, a crucial advantage for gaining entry into the most competitive university programs. Importantly, our findings reveal positive spillover effects in the surroundings of the LEZ area and a larger effect the longer and earlier the exposure to cleaner air. In sum, our study offers compelling empirical evidence of the beneficial educational impacts resulting from the implementation of a low emission zone successful in improving air quality.
- Draft available here: https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2023-048.pdf .
Lievore, I., Valdés, M., Bernardi., F and Espadafor, M. The geographic of educational inequalities in Europe over time.
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This study explores the geography of social inequality and intergenerational mobility in European tertiary education attainment. Analysing data from the European Social Survey (waves 1-10), this study aims to describe the potential role of national as well as regional and sub-regional contexts in shaping individual tertiary education opportunities. Results show substantial cross-country disparities, as well as a sharp divide in inequalities in tertiary education attainment within European countries. In parallel, we observe a general decline in educational inequalities over time, even if this decline is not followed by a convergence in the levels of Inequalities in Educational Opportunities (IEOs) across countries: the differences in educational inequalities between countries remain stable over time, and European countries show great variation in their trends of inequalities in tertiary education attainment over time.
- Draft available here: https://zenodo.org/records/10401330 .
Espadafor, M. Are boys more vulnerable to family disadvantage? Evidence from the United Kingdom.
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There is a growing literature showing the importance of family socioeconomic status (SES) for explaining the male disadvantage in education. However, when and through which channel these gaps emerge remains unclear. This article examines whether and when family SES moderates gender differences in several educational outcomes.
Focusing on the timing and the domain of the gender-SES gaps, this article contributes to the literature by testing the relative importance of birth characteristics, academic skills and values for explaining the gender-SES gap in education. To test these channels, I use the Millennium Cohort Study and focus on children's trajectories from birth to age seventeen.
Results suggest that girls and boys within each level of family SES start with equal health at birth and cognitive abilities throughout schooling. In contrast, high-SES families are able to moderate and compensate for the higher incidence of boys externalising behaviours and school detachment as gender identities become more salient at school.
- Draft available upon request .
Espadafor, M. & Bernardi, F. The uneven risk and effect of grade retention across family origins.
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This chapter focuses on the uneven effect of a remediation policy within the educational system: grade retention. We study the transition from Compulsory Education to higher secondary education in Spain, where retaking is relatively high. We investigate whether retaking a grade during compulsory education reduces the probability of remaining in the education system and whether the effect of retaking on school continuation decisions differs by family socioeconomic status. We leverage differences in regional educational laws to use an Instrumental Variable design that accounts for selection bias in educational transition models. Results show that (1) high-SES families are able to moderate the risk of falling into grade retention, but that (2) increases the chances of dropping out for all. However, (3) its effect is substantially more detrimental for children from low socioeconomic status. Finally, we show that naïve models that do not consider reverse causality and selection bias underestimate inter-generational transmission of educational inequalities. Results suggest that grade retention fails as a remediation policy and instead increases the inter-generational transmission of inequalities in education.
- Draft available upon request.
- Funded by the GEOSMITE Project.
Espadafor, M. & Passaretta, G. Does family socioeconomic status compensate for an early entry into school life? Evidence from Germany, with Giampiero Passaretta.
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Previous literature shows that children who enter school at a younger age under perform compared to older classmates throughout school and adulthood.In this article, we analyse whether families differently react towards younger-for-grade children and when differences across family socioeconomic status (SES) in school entry age emerge. We contribute to the literature by providing an analytical example of one channel that could contribute to inequality in learning and achievement.
Using the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and a novel research design, we estimate the effect of school entry age on various cognitive domains throughout primary education and in the transition to academic secondary school. First, we find that an early school entry age leads to lower cognitive abilities. Unlike previous studies, these effects are equal across family origins: high-SES families do not engage in remediation strategies for younger than grade students. However, by the time students reach the transition to secondary school, only low-SES younger than grade children have a lower likelihood to be recommended to the academic track.
Overall, our results suggest that while high SES families do not react towards a disadvantage in terms of performance, they do in terms of expected attainment. These findings challenge the compensatory advantage hypothesis, by which children from high SES families are less on prior negative outcomes.
- Draft available upon request.
Espadafor, M. and García Sierra, A. The intergenerational effect of educational expansion: evidence from a natural experiment in Spain.
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The association between parental education and children's educational outcomes has been long studied. However, standard cross-sectional analyses often present endogeneity problems and fail to explore which parental characteristics drive these processes. In this article, we focus on the role of parental education. We explore if (1) changes in parental education are related, in the long term, to children's educational attainment and if (2) differential returns to schooling have implications for the overall transmission of educational (dis)advantages. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we leverage the 1970 Educational Reform in Spain to estimate the causal effect of parental education on children's attainment. This reform extended the compulsory school age, generating a sharp rise in educational attainment for the affected cohorts. Preliminary results suggest that exogeneous increases in educational attainment in the parent generation also translate into better educational outcomes for future generations. Conversely, these changes do not translate in an increase of the inter-generational transmission of educational inequalities across families.
- Presentation available upon request.
In preparation
Gil-Hernández, C.J., & Espadafor, M. An Elephant in the (Class)room? Teacher’s Bias in Grading and Track Recommendations by Student’s family SES
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Teachers are the gatekeepers and evaluators of academic merit in educational systems. The literature shows teachers’ bias in assessments as a function of students’ ascribed characteristics such as gender, ethnicity or socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, most previous research overlooks the role of teachers as relevant actors in the early stages of the status attainment process, suffers from methodological flaws, and focuses on gender or ethnicity.
This article provides new evidence on teachers’ bias as a mechanism of intergenerational educational reproduction. We ask whether family SES has a residual effect on teachers’ grades and track recommendations, net of student cognitive and non-cognitive skills and if the teacher’s bias is the greatest among low-performing students. We further discuss the findings’ theoretical and normative implications for inequality of educational opportunity.
We answer these questions using data from the German National Educational Panel Study and study a cohort of students during primary education. Most previous research measured teacher bias as the difference between teachers’ grades and blindly assessed standardised test scores at a snapshot across schools. This approach might reflect biases by measurement error, students exerting less effort in low-stakes testing and different grading standards across schools. We address these methodological flaws by examining extensive cognitive and non-cognitive measures throughout elementary education and controlling for school-fixed effects. Furthermore, we account for any remaining students’ unobserved characteristics by implementing an instrumental variable design, leveraging exogenous variation in tests-scores from different domains.
Results show that teachers perceive high-SES students more favourably. They assign a 15% standard deviation higher GPA in maths and German to high-SES and give up to 10% more recommendations to secondary academic schools (Gymnasiums) to high-SES students than to their equally skilled low-SES schoolmates. Furthermore, teachers’ bias toward students’ family SES in grading and track recommendations is the largest among low-cognitive performers.
On going projects
Espadafor, M & Cozzani, M. Abortion access and perinatal health in Spain.
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Women's reproductive rights---having the ability to choose whether and when to have children--- are linked to improved women's reproductive health and socioeconomic well-being. Does different access to contraceptives have an impact on infant health? In this paper, we examine the impact of access to abortion as an exogenous input into infant health production and women's health.
We examine the sharp expansion in access to abortion in Spain. Combining administrative data sets on voluntary termination of pregnancy and birth registers (2011-2019), we estimate the association between abortion rates and birth outcomes. We analyse the impact of different access to abortion on measures of infant health: the incidence of poor birth outcomes, and the neonatal mortality rate. Preliminary results point to an increase in positive birth outcomes where abortion rates are higher. This study will contribute to a growing body of work that points to the importance of women's autonomy as a determinant of their and their newborns' health.
