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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Elizabeth Dhuey; David Figlio; Krzysztof Karbownik; Jeffrey Roth |
| Abstract: | We present evidence of a positive relationship between school starting age and children’s cognitive development from age 6 to 15 using a regression discontinuity design and large-scale population-level birth and school data from the state of Florida. We estimate effects of being relatively old for grade (being born in September versus August) that are remarkably stable – always just around 0.2 SD difference in test scores – across a wide range of heterogeneous groups, based on maternal education, poverty at birth, race/ethnicity, birth weight, gestational age, and school quality. While the September-August difference in kindergarten readiness is dramatically different by subgroup, by the time students take their first exams, the heterogeneity in estimated effects effectively disappears. We document substantial variation in compensatory behaviors targeted towards young for grade children. While the more affluent families tend to redshirt their children, young for grade children from less affluent families are more likely to be retained in grades prior to testing. School district practices regarding retention and redshirting are correlated with improved outcomes for the groups less likely to use those remediation approaches (i.e., retention in the case of more-affluent families and redshirting in the case of less-affluent families.) We also study college and juvenile detention outcomes using administrative data from a large Florida school district, and show that being an older age at school entry increases children’s college attainment and reduces the likelihood of being incarcerated for juvenile crime. |
| JEL: | I20 |
| Date: | 2017–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23660&r=dem |
| By: | Neidhöfer, Guido; Serrano, Joaquín; Gasparini, Leonardo |
| Abstract: | The causes and consequences of the intergenerational persistence of inequality are a topic of great interest among various fields in economics. However, until now, issues of data availability have restricted a broader and cross-national perspective on the topic. Based on rich sets of harmonized household survey data, we contribute to filling this gap computing time series for several indexes of relative and absolute intergenerational education mobility for 18 Latin American countries over 50 years, and making them publicly available. We find that intergenerational mobility has been rising in Latin America, on average. This pattern seems to be driven by the high upward mobility of children from low-educated families; at the same time, there is substantial immobility at the top of the distribution. Significant cross-country differences are observed and are associated with income inequality, poverty, economic growth, public educational expenditures and assortative mating. |
| Keywords: | inequality,intergenerational mobility,equality of opportunity,transition probabilities,assortative mating,education,human capital,Latin America |
| JEL: | D63 I24 J62 O15 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:fubsbe:201720&r=dem |
| By: | Donna Feir & Jasmin Thomas (Department of Economics, University of Victoria) |
| Abstract: | We study the labour force impact of introducing formal childcare services to 34 Inuit communities in Canada's North. We use geographic variation in the timing and intensity of the introduction of childcare services in the late 1990s and early 2000s to estimate the impact of increased access to childcare. We combine the 1996, 2001, and 2006 long-form census files with data on the number of childcare spaces in each of the 34 communities over time. We find that a one standard deviation increase in the number of childcare spaces per 100 children increases labour force participation in single-adult households by 3.6 percent. We find no impact in households with more than one adult present. We suggest plausible explanations for these findings and avenues for future research. |
| Keywords: | Inuit, childcare, labour force participation |
| JEL: | J13 J15 J18 |
| Date: | 2017–08–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vic:vicddp:1702&r=dem |
| By: | Miguel Flores; Alexander Patt; Jens Ruhose; Simon Wiederhold |
| Abstract: | We present the first evidence that international emigrant selection on education and earnings materializes through occupational skills. Combining novel data from a representative Mexican task survey with rich individual-level worker data, we find that Mexican migrants to the United States have higher manual skills and lower cognitive skills than non-migrants. Conditional on occupational skills, education and earnings no longer predict migration decisions. Differential labor-market returns to occupational skills explain the observed selection pattern and significantly outperform previously used returns-to-skills measures in predicting migration. Results are persistent over time and hold within narrowly defined regional, sectoral, and occupational labor markets. |
| Keywords: | occupational skills, emigrant selection |
| JEL: | F22 O15 J61 J24 |
| Date: | 2017–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cid:wpfacu:84a&r=dem |
| By: | Phiri, Andrew; Mukuka, Doreen |
| Abstract: | Our study investigates the cointegration relationship between suicides and unemployment in South Africa using annual data collected between 1996 and 2015 applied to the ARDL model. Furthermore, our empirical analysis is gender and age specific in the sense that the suicide data is disintegrated into different ‘sex’ and ‘age’ demographics. Our empirical results indicate that unemployment is insignificantly related with suicide rates with the exception for citizens above 75 years. On the other hand, other control variables such as per capita GDP, inflation and divorce appear to be more significantly related with suicides. Collectively, these findings have important implications for policymakers. |
| Keywords: | Unemployment; Suicide; Cointegration; Causality; South Africa; Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). |
| JEL: | C22 C51 E24 E31 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:80749&r=dem |