Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1112.1541

Are private schools better than public schools? Appraisal for Ireland by methods for observational studies

Danny Pfeffermann·Victoria Landsman
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

In observational studies the assignment of units to treatments is not under control. Consequently, the estimation and comparison of treatment effects based on the empirical distribution of the responses can be biased since the units exposed to the various treatments could differ in important unknown pretreatment characteristics, which are related to the response. An important example studied in this article is the question of whether private schools offer better quality of education than public schools. In order to address this question, we use data collected in the year 2000 by OECD for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Focusing for illustration on scores in mathematics of 15-year-old pupils in Ireland, we find that the raw average score of pupils in private schools is higher than of pupils in public schools. However, application of a newly proposed method for observational studies suggests that the less able pupils tend to enroll in public schools, such that their lower scores are not necessarily an indication of bad quality of the public schools. Indeed, when comparing the average score in the two types of schools after adjusting for the enrollment effects, we find quite surprisingly that public schools perform better on average. This outcome is supported by the methods of instrumental variables and latent variables, commonly used by econometricians for analyzing and evaluating social programs.

Explore related subjects

stat.AP

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Danny Pfeffermann, Victoria Landsman. 2011-12-07. Are private schools better than public schools? Appraisal for Ireland by methods for observational studies. https://doi.org/10.1214/11-aoas456

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Geospatial Foundation Models Capture Health-Relevant Dimensions of Place Beyond Conventional Social Risk Indices

Area-based social risk indices summarize residents' socioeconomic conditions but incompletely capture physical features of place that may affect health. We evaluated whether numerical representations of physical place produced by four geospatial foundation model families from 2022 satellite data explained residual variance in tract-level associations between the Area Deprivation Index, Social Deprivation Index, and Social Vulnerability Index with health outcomes. We used LightGBM to predict variables from the American Community Survey and 40 chronic disease and health-behavior outcomes from CDC PLACES across 82,646 census tracts in the contiguous United States, evaluating performance across 10 held-out states. Among survey variables, models were moderately predictive of some variables including housing type (R-squared up to 0.54) but weak for disability, unemployment, and income disparity. For health outcomes, models explained up to 54% of variance left unexplained by social risk indices, with the largest gains for annual checkups, arthritis, and high blood pressure. Mean total variance explained by geospatial foundation models across the 40 health-related outcomes increased from 0.31 in the smallest tract-size decile to 0.39 in the largest. Geospatial foundation models capture health-relevant features of place not represented by conventional social risk indices and may usefully augment them in epidemiological analyses.

stat.AP↗
arXiv2026

Transporting summary measures of relative effects from randomised trials to the treated patient population: an application to breast cancer endocrine therapy

Randomised trials often report relative treatment effects, such as risk ratios and hazard ratios, for trial populations. Clinical decision-making, however, often benefits from estimates of absolute treatment effects in the population eligible for treatment. Trial participants may not represent this target population well, and restrictions on access to individual participant trial data can further complicate absolute effect estimation. Routine care data are often representative of the target population but may be subject to uncontrolled confounding. We consider estimation of the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT), an absolute measure, by combining a representative sample of treated routine care patients with summary measures (i.e., estimated risk or hazard ratios) from either a randomised trial or a meta-analysis of trials. Under marginal or conditional transportability assumptions, the ATT is shown to be identifiable. The implications of collapsibility of the effect measure on transportability are discussed, and plug-in estimators of the ATT are presented. Simulation studies are used to assess finite sample performance of the estimators in a range of settings. The proposed methods are applied to estimate the ATT of endocrine therapy on 15-year breast cancer mortality using results from a meta-analysis of randomised trials and England's National Disease Registration Service.

stat.AP↗
arXiv2026

Overcoming Model Misspecification in Bayesian Inference of Molecular Signalling Networks

Bayesian inference of molecular signalling networks usually relies on tractability of the marginal likelihood, enabling the set of possible networks to be efficiently explored. As such, linear models with independent errors and conjugate priors are routinely used. However, the dynamics of molecular signalling are nonlinear, and relevant confounders are often unobserved; failure to account for these complexities will almost certainly lead to over-confident inferences in the standard Bayesian framework. To confront this reality, we develop a post-Bayesian approach to inference of molecular signalling networks, guided by the principle that uncertainty should not vanish when the statistical model is misspecified, even in the infinite-data limit. Technically, we extend the predictively-oriented (PrO) posterior of McLatchie et al. (2025) to the setting of latent variable models, empirically investigating the properties of PrO posteriors in the challenging network inference context.

stat.AP↗