Abstract
This dissertation aims to deal with three issues on education of economics in Taiwan: the educational achievement of pupils with immigrant and native mothers, gender differences in the impact of weight status on academic performance and assessment of admission methods on academic performance for economics majors. The introductions of three chapters are as follows. In chapter 1, we take advantage of the Taiwan Assessment of Student Achievement data set to empirically evaluate whether the test score differentials between pupils with immigrant and native mothers are substantial across subjects, grades and years. Our results show that there exist test score differentials between the two groups after controlling for the students' individual characteristics and family background. The Chinese, Math and English subjects exhibit larger test score gaps relative to Science and Society. We also find that the academic gaps between native students and pupils with mothers from Southeast Asian countries tend to widen, while the students' performance is about the same as that for native students if their mothers are from mainland China, confirming that the language proficiency of immigrant mothers significantly affects pupils' learning. Our empirical results may suggest that remedial teaching (or an equivalent preferential policy) for the lower-grade pupils with immigrant mothers might be required to create a fair environment for learning, and such a policy should take the nationality of those foreign mothers into account. In chapter 2, we take advantage of the Taiwan Education Panel Survey data set to empirically evaluate whether a student's academic performance, measured by his or her test score, is affected by the body weight status of the student. We show that a student's weight status has no impact on his or her academic performance based on an OLS estimation; however, this result is likely to be incorrect due to the potential endogeneity problem, and we further use the propensity score matching method to address this issue. If the entire sample is considered, we find that both overweight and underweight students perform worse than students of normal weight. If we separate sample students into two groups according to their gender, we obtain different results for the different groups. While the male students tend to perform worse when they are either underweight or overweight, the adverse effect on the academic performance is larger for underweight students than for overweight students. By contrast, the academic performance of a female student will be affected only if she is overweight, but not if she is underweight. The policy implication that the government or the schools should have different plans for different gender groups can be drawn from our empirical finding. In chapter 3, we adopt the data from the Department of Economics at National Tsing Hua University to empirically evaluate whether the academic performance differentials between undergraduates with two broad entrance channels are significant across subjects and grades. Our results show that there exist academic performance differentials between the two groups in some subjects after controlling for the students' individual characteristics. The core subjects in economics, such as Economics (I, II), Microeconomics (I, II) and Macroeconomics (I) exhibit academic performance gaps. We also find that the academic gaps between senior undergraduates with different admission methods tend to decline or disappear. Our empirical results suggest the economics department to recruit freshman by the College Admission through Recommendation and Screening (CARS) channel in the sense that they have a better performance on economics core courses.