My research addresses original, causal and policy-relevant questions such as: Can teachers' stereotypic behavior explain the gender inequalities in achievements or the gender occupational gaps? Do peer networks (schoolmates and neighbors) affect students' college enrollment? Do students improve their performance when they know their rank? Does class attendance increase educational outcomes? By how much does a €1200 bursary at the age of 18 raise wages and affect migration decisions? To answer these questions, I use secondary data, but I have also done some primary-collected data collection from school authorities in Greece.
Since 2011 my colleague Sofoklis Goulas and I have combined forces in collecting new and original data on education in Greece. We have spent a lot of time and effort in an attempt to collect novel data from the Ministry of Education in Greece, as well as high schools to answer important questions. So far we have created two novel and unique datasets. This page describes briefly our endeavor.
(1) Data on University Entrance Exam scores, university admission and college major
We have collected cross-sectional data on university entrance exam performance, university of admission, self-reported college major preferences and actual college major for the universe of high school graduates in Greece between 2003 and 2011.
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(2) School transcript data on demographics, school performance, class attendance and class composition.
Our data follows a randomly selected sample of high school students in Greece over the last three grades of secondary education. Our data span ten cohorts between 2001 and 2011 and almost 150 schools. We have visited schools in large cities as well as in isolated islands and we are happy to have got our hands dirty in the collection of primary data.
A few years later I went back to those schools and asked for data on teachers. A sub-sample of the initial sample agreed to provide me with those data.
(3) Data on students' and teachers' class allocations, students' exam schedules and teachers' daily schedules.
This data follows a randomly selected sample of high school teachers over all high school grades for around nine cohorts. I have access to teachers' daily schedule (and thus information on their allocation to classes, years, grades, and subjects) and I am matched them with the student data described in 1) and 2). The final dataset includes rich information on students and each of their teachers in every subjects in high school and every exam they took in high school.
(4) Data on students' university scholarships allocated by the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY)
(5) We are currently conducting large-scale survey experiments to understand students' perceptions of role models, understand the mechanisms behind role models and examine how students react to different role models.
New Data on Education:
Rigissa Megalokonomou
Assoc. Prof. in Economics
New Data on Justice
From 2013 onwards my team of research assistants and I have been digitising data on cases from the Supreme Court.
The data collection is now completed.
This data contains rich information on all court litigants and the
characteristics of the cases.
I am very excited about this dataset, but have not utilised it sufficiently
enough yet.