The Estimated Effect of Catholic Schooling on Educational Outcomes using Matching Methods

• In Event: School Improvement in Different Contexts

Abstract

In educational research, the relative quality of public and Catholic schools has been one of the subjects of controversial debate. Despite inconsistent findings and conclusions, researchers agree that the challenge over the debate of estimating effect of Catholic schooling is a selection bias. In this study, we re-examine the work of Nguyen, Taylor and Bradley (2006), which evaluated the effect of Catholic schooling on educational outcomes based on data obtained from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), employing propensity score matching methods. We aim at recovering the estimated effects of Nguyen, Taylor and Bradley (2006) and improving the validity by employing a new method for multivariate matching, genetic matching (GenMatch: Diamond & Sekhon, 2005).

Authors

• Perman Gochyyev, University of California - Berkeley

• In-Hee Choi, University of California - Berkeley