Although widely used in policy debates, the literature on children’s outcomes when raised by same-sex parents mostly relies on small selective samples or samples based on cross-sectional survey data. This has led to a lack of statistical power and the inability to distinguish children born to same-sex parents from children of separated parents. We address these issues by using unique administrative longitudinal data from the Netherlands, which was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage. These data include 2,971 children with same-sex parents (2,786 lesbian couples and 185 gay male couples) and over a million children with different-sex parents followed from birth. The results indicate that children raised by same-sex parents from birth perform better than children raised by different-sex parents in both primary and secondary education. Our findings are robust to use of cousin fixed effects and coarsened exact matching to improve covariate balance and to reduce model dependence. Further analyses using a novel bounding estimator suggest the selection on unobserved characteristics would have to be more than three times higher than the selection on observed characteristics to reduce the positive estimates to zero.

In efficiency studies, inputs and outputs are often noisy measures, especially when education data is used. This article complements the conditional efficiency model by correcting for bias within conditional draws, using the m out of n bootstrap procedure. With a unique panel dataset, we estimate managerial efficiency, which accounts for nondiscretionary variables, and explain efficiency differentials of adult education programs in Flanders. Our results suggest that the characteristics of learners in a program matter for managerial efficiency, and that teacher characteristics are strongly correlated with efficiency differentials, as more homogeneity in the teacher workforce appears to result in higher program efficiency.

Modular education refers to the division of conventional courses into smaller components or modules. Each module enables students to obtain a partial certificate that can be combined into a qualification. This article evaluates whether modular education, which is widely used in secondary and tertiary education, has been effective in reducing school dropout. For this purpose, the study exploits a policy change in the Flemish Community of Belgium, which recently introduced modular education for some programmes. Using a difference-in-differences framework with diverse adoption dates per school, the results indicate that modular education may significantly reduce school dropout by 2.5 percentage points, with the largest effects on foreign origin students. Therefore, modular education is likely to be an effective policy to tackle school dropout and reduce the ethnic attainment gap. Additionally, students enrolled in modular education are more likely to be employed and to incur higher earnings on the labour market.

This article compares the labour market outcomes of high school dropouts to high school graduates who did not enroll into higher education, but immediately entered the labour market. Using parental educational background as an instrument on a rich administrative dataset in the Flemish Region of Belgium, we find no returns to a high school diploma on average. However, these results hide considerable heterogeneity by gender and educational track. While females and individuals in vocational education may benefit from a diploma, male graduates and students holding a general education diploma may even be worse off on the labour market than dropouts. We show that sectoral heterogeneity acts as an underlying mechanism in the returns to a high school diploma (JEL I21, I28, J24).