Does public spending improve educational resilience? A longitudinal analysis of OECD-PISA data

“Resilient students” are those who, despite their disadvantaged background, are able to obtain good educational results. This paper proposes a statistical procedure for identifying the proportion of resilient students for countries participating to OECD Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA) various years; then, it employs a longitudinal analysis (i.e. a set of fixed-effects [FE] models) to study the determinants of this proportion. While an important stream of the literature pointed at demonstrating that educational funding is not correlated with higher average performances of students, our findings suggest that it can help disadvantaged students in overcoming their penalizing starting conditions, at least when considering the proportion of public expenditure invested in education as a share of total public spending.