Inequality of Opportunity in Education in Spanish Regions: A Machine Learning Approach

• Autores: Pablo Bencomo Mesa, Gustavo A. Marrero , Gabriela Sicilia
• Localización: Hacienda Pública Española / Review of Public Economics, ISSN 0210-1173, Nº 252, 2025, págs. 113-162
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • Inequality of Opportunity in Achievement (IOpE) measures the importance of factors beyond the student’s control in explaining differences in academic performance. Using PISA 2018, we estimate the IOpE for Spanish regions using conditional inference tree (CIT) and forest (CIF). Using CIFs, IOpE is twice as high as those obtained using traditional approaches (on average, 43% compared to 20%).

    Murcia and Extremadura are among those with the highest IOpE, while Castilla-La Mancha and the Pais Vasco have the lowest IOpE. The circumstances that contribute most to IOpE are the cultural environment at home (number of books) and parental occupation.

• Referencias bibliográficas
  • Abdullah, A., Doucouliagos, H. and Manning, E. (2015), “Does education reduce income inequality? A meta‐regression analysis”, Journal of...
  • Biau, G. and Scornet, E. (2016), “A random forest guided tour”, Test, 25: 197-227.
  • Bourguignon, F., Ferreira, F. and Menéndez, M. (2007), “Inequality of opportunity in Brazil”, Review of Income and Wealth, 53: 585-618.
  • Breiman, L. (1996), “Bagging predictors”, Machine Learning, 24: 123-140.
  • Breiman, L (2001), “Random Forests”, Machine Learning, 45(1): 5-32.
  • Breiman, L., Friedman, J. H., Olshen, R. A. and Stone, C. J. (1984), Classification and Regression Trees, New York: Chapman and Hall.
  • Brunori, P., Peragine, V. and Serlenga, L. (2019), “Upward and downward bias when measuring inequality of opportunity”, Social Choice and...
  • Brunori, P., Hufe, P. and Mahler, D. (2021), “The roots of inequality: Estimating inequality of opportunity from regression trees and forests”,...
  • Brunori, P. and Neidhöfer, G. (2021), “The evolution of inequality of opportunity in Germany: A machine learning approach”, Review of Income...
  • Brunori, P., Hufe, P. and Mahler, D. G. (2023), “The roots of inequality: estimating inequality of opportunity from regression trees”, The...
  • Coleman, J. S., Campbell, E. Q., Hobson, C. J., McPartland, J., Mood, A. M., Weinfield, F. D. and York, R. L. (1966), Equality of Educational...
  • Dills, A. K. (2005), “Does cream-skimming curdle the milk? A study of peer effects”, Economics of Education Review, 24(1): 19-28.
  • Ferreira, F. and Gignoux, J. (2014), “The Measurement of Educational Inequality: Achievement and Opportunity”, World Bank Economic Review,...
  • Friedman, J., Tibshirani, R. and Hastie, T. (2009), The elements of statistical learning: Data mining, inference, and prediction, p. 359,...
  • Hanushek, E. A., Kinne, L., Lergetporer, P. and Woessmann, L. (2020), “Culture and Student Achievement: the Inter twined Roles of Patience...
  • Hapfelmeier, A., Hothorn, T., Ulm, K. and Strobl, C. (2014), “A new variable importance measure for random forests with missing data”, Statistics...
  • Hofmarcher, T. (2021), “The effect of education on poverty: A European perspective”, Economics of Education Review, 83: 102124.
  • Hothorn, T., Lausen, B., Benner, A. and Radespiel-Troeger, M. (2004), “Bagging Survival Trees”, Statistics in Medicine, 23(1): 77-91.
  • Hothorn, T., Hornik, K. and Zeileis, A. (2006), “Unbiased recursive partitioning: A conditional inference framework”, Journal of Computational...
  • Jerrim, J., Volante, L., Klinger, D. A. and Schnepf, S. V. (2019), Socioeconomic inequality and student outcomes across education systems....
  • Jusot, F., Tubeuf, S. and Trannoy, A. (2013), “Circumstances and efforts: how important is their correlation for the measurement of inequality...
  • Lasso de la Vega, C., Lekuona, A. and Orbe, S. (2020), “Reexamining the inequality of opportunity in education in some European countries”,...
  • Marconi, G. (2018), “Education as a Long‐Term Investment: The Decisive Role of Age in the Education‐Growth Relationship”, Kyklos, 71(1):...
  • Marrero, G. A. and Rodríguez, J. G. (2012), “Inequality of Opportunity in Europe”, Review of Income and Wealth, 58(4): 597-621.
  • Marrero, G. A., Palomino, J. C. and Sicilia, G. (2024), “Educational Attainment in Western Europe: inequality, determinants and channels of...
  • Martínez de Lafuente, D. and Vega-Bayo, A. (2023), “Meritocracy and education: Social mobility and inequality of opportunity, a machine learning...
  • Martins, L. and Veiga, P. (2010), “Do inequalities in parents’ education play an important role in PISA students’ mathematics achievement...
  • MEFP (2019), PISA 2018. Programa para la Evaluación Internacional de los Alumnos. Informe Español, Instituto de Evaluación Educativa, Madrid.
  • Meinshausen, N. (2006), “Quantile Regression Forests”, Journal of Machine Learning Research, 7: 983-999.
  • Morgan, J. N. and Sonquist, J. A. (1963), “Problems in the analysis of survey data, and a proposal”, Journal of the American statistical association,...
  • OECD (2019), PISA 2018 technical report, OECD publishing.
  • Plassot, T., Soloaga, I. and Torres, P. (2022), “Inequality of Opportunity in Mexico and its Regions: A Data-Driven Approach”, The Journal...
  • Rasch, G. (1960/1980), Probabilistic models for some intelligence and attainment tests, Danish Institute for Educational Research, Expanded...
  • Sicilia, G., Marrero, G. and Palomino, J. (2022), Desigualdad de oportunidades en el rendimiento educativo en España y Europa, Fundació La...
  • Sicilia, G. and Simancas Rodríguez, R. F. (2023), “Eficiencia y equidad educativa en España: un análisis comparativo a nivel regional”, Hacienda...
  • Sirin, S. R. (2005), “Socioeconomic status and academic achievement: A meta-analytic review of research”, Review of Educational Research,...
  • Strobl, C., Boulesteix, A. L., Zeileis, A. and Hothorn, T. (2007), “Bias in random forest variable importance measures: illustrations, sources...
  • Strobl, C., Boulesteix, A. L., Kneib, T., Augustin, T., and Zeileis, A. (2008), “Conditional variable importance for random forests”, BMC...
  • Schütz, G., Ursprung, H. W. and Wößmann, L. (2008), “Education policy and equality of opportunity”, Kyklos, 61(2): 279-308.
  • Yakovlev, P. and Leguizamon, S. (2012), “Ignorance is not bliss: On the role of education in subjective well-being”, The Journal of Socio-Economics,...