This paper investigates peer effects in the academic achievement of Costa Rican students. Two measures of peer effects are used: (1) a measure of a schools’ average socioeconomic status and (2) a measure of unsatisfied basic needs at district level. The estimation of a three-level hierarchical model allows us to deal with selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity. Results show that socioeconomic peer effect, both at school and district levels, positively and significantly correlates with academic achievement. An increase in one standard deviation in the socioeconomic index has the same effect on academic achievement as an additional year of schooling; two years if the improvement occurs in the index of unsatisfied basic needs. These results are robust for mathematics, reading and science. Results from quantile regression reveal that students with high academic achievement take greater advantages from studying in schools with higher socioeconomic status (mathematics and reading). Meanwhile, students with low academic achievement are the most affected by studying in poorer districts (mathematics and science). These results show the strong feedback between educational and social inequity and constitute a good example of how poverty traps can persist in developing countries.

Although literature has emphasized that the teachers’ quality and the school environment are key factors of the academic performance, few empirical studies have quantified how much they contribute to student performance in Latin American countries. In this article, we use PISA-Costa Rica microdata and Shapley-Shorrocks decomposition to analyze how much of the variation in student performance can be explained by the teachers’ characteristics and the learning environment. We find that most of the differences in performance are due to student’s effort (not explained part of the model in the educational production function). Regarding the other explanatory factors, school and teacher characteristics explain more variability of academic performance (36% on average for math, reading and science) than the combined effect of individual and family circumstances (12.5%). Among the school’s factors, two elements have special relevance. On the one hand, the behavior of the students, highlighting the problems of absenteeism and tardiness. On the other hand, the level of autonomy of the teaching staff and the school’s principal in the design of the curriculum and the evaluations.

The present study examines cross-national variation in school-based bullying victimization. Specifically, we address whether decommodification, a concept implicated in Institutional Anomie Theory that measures the degree of a society’s social welfare protection, is a protective factor against school-based bullying victimization. To test this theory, we retrieve data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) questionnaire and combine this data with other sources capturing cross-national factors hypothesized to impact bullying victimization. The sample consists of 286,871 adolescents (with an average age of 15 years) attending 14,192 schools nested within 55 high-and-middle-income countries. We estimate multilevel regression models with three levels of analysis (student, school, and country), finding that countries with a greater degree of decommodification have lower rates of school-based bullying. Overall, our findings illustrate that the national level of social welfare protection, which had been previously neglected in this research literature, is a robust predictor of bullying victimization.

Background: Engaging in physical activity (PA) is especially significant for adolescents, as this is a key developmental stage for establishing lifelong habits. While the physical, mental, and cognitive health benefits of PA are well-documented, less is known about its relationship with adolescents’ life satisfaction (LS). Most existing evidence often involves small sample sizes, focusing particularly on developed regions, and few studies use large-scale comparative data. Methods: This study examines the association between adolescents’ LS and PA using data from the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the world’s largest comparative education survey of adolescents. Our analysis included 399,794 adolescents from 64 high- and middle-income countries and economies. We used three-level multilevel regressions. Results: We found that, after controlling for individual, family, and school factors, PA is positively and significantly associated with LS. This finding holds for the pooled sample and across the 64 countries analysed. For most countries, we did not find a significant gender moderator effect, suggesting that the positive association between PA and LS did not vary by gender. Conclusions: The findings suggest a global health promotion strategy to promote PA amongst adolescents as a normative developmental process necessary for their well-being and mental health.

This article focuses on the effect of urbanization on violent crime – particularly homicide in Costa Rica. Although violence is a major problem throughout Latin America, few empirical studies carried out in the area use high-quality socioeconomic and crime databases with a high level of geographical disaggregation. In this article, we employ data from all 473 districts of Costa Rica between 2010 and 2013. We develop a model which takes into account endogeneity problems and uses contrasts of marginal linear predictions. We conclude that the degree of urban concentration plays a key role in explaining homicide rates, other things being equal. This effect is progressive: the greater the urban concentration, the greater the increase in homicide rates. This causal relationship is not observed in offenses other than homicide.