The effect of districts' social development on student performance

This paper explores the relationship between student performance and social development in the districts where schools are located. The empirical research, which focuses on Costa Rica, combines geolocalized data of schools from PISA 2012 with a composite index of social development that has four components: health, economy, education and electoral participation. Our results show that social development has positive, but diminishing effects, on test scores and accounts for 11.6%, 13.1% and 14.8%, respectively, of the total variance in math, reading and science. The economic and education dimensions of social development positively correlate with academic achievement. In the case of electoral participation, the estimations show a significant effect only in math. We find no significant effect of health. Educational policies should give particular emphasis to the lowest-ranked districts where the expected returns from policies that increase social development are the highest.