A propensity score matching method to study the achievement of students in upper secondary schools

In the paper, we investigate the effects of some family characteristics on the achievement of students in the first year of the upper secondary schools of the province of Bologna. We employ a matching strategy based on propensity score to create treatment groups, corresponding to the values of the factor under study, with the same distribution of observed covariates. As a result, students are stratified in blocks according to the propensity score to obtain estimates of the average treatment effect using nearest neighbour matching. In order to further compare the achievements of students of upper secondary schools in the city of Bologna with those in the other towns of the province, we show that valid inference is assured by controlling for family characteristics whose influence on the outcome has been previously assessed.