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on Education |
| By: | Claudia Uribe; Richard J. Murnane; John B. Willett; Marie Andrée Somers |
| Abstract: | Many countries use tax revenues to subsidize private schools. Whether these policies meet social objectives depends, in part, on the relative quality of education provided by the two types of schools. We use data on elementary school students and their teachers in Bogotá, Colombia to examine difference in resource mixes and differences in the relative effectiveness of public and private schools. We find that, on average, the schools in the two sectors are equally effective. However, they produce education using very different resource combinations. Moreover, there are large differences in the effectiveness of schools in both sectors, especially in the private sector. The results of our analysis shed light on the quantity-quality tradeoff that governments in many developing countries face in deciding how to use scarce educational resources. |
| JEL: | I2 |
| Date: | 2005–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11670&r=edu |
| By: | Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano; Giovanni Peri |
| Abstract: | Recent influential empirical work has emphasized the negative impact immigrants have on the wages of U.S.-born workers, arguing that immigration harms less educated American workers in particular and all U.S.-born workers in general. Because U.S. and foreign born workers belong to different skill groups that are imperfectly substitutable, one needs to articulate a production function that aggregates different types of labor (and accounts for complementarity and substitution effects) in order to calculate the various effects of immigrant labor on U.S.-born labor. We introduce such a production function, making the crucial assumption that U.S. and foreign-born workers with similar education and experience levels may nevertheless be imperfectly substitutable, and allowing for endogenous capital accumulation. This function successfully accounts for the negative impact of the relative skill levels of immigrants on the relative wages of U.S. workers. However, contrary to the findings of previous literature, overall immigration generates a large positive effect on the average wages of U.S.-born workers. We show evidence of this positive effect by estimating the impact of immigration on both average wages and housing values across U.S. metropolitan areas (1970-2000). We also reproduce this positive effect by simulating the behavior of average wages and housing prices in an open city-economy, with optimizing U.S.-born agents who respond to an inflow of foreign-born workers of the size and composition comparable to the immigration of the 1990s. |
| JEL: | F22 J61 J31 R13 |
| Date: | 2005–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11672&r=edu |
| By: | Steven J. Davis; Luis Rivera-Batiz |
| Abstract: | Employment rates in Puerto Rico range from 55 to 65 percent of U.S. rates during the past thirty years. This huge employment shortfall holds for men and women, cuts across all education groups, and is deeper for persons without a college degree. The shortfall is concentrated in the private sector, especially labor-intensive industries that rely heavily on less educated workers. Motivated by these facts, we identify several factors that undermine employment growth and business development, including high minimum wage requirements, a history of tax incentives for capital-intensive activities, a host of regulatory entry barriers, and a business climate in which profitability and survival too often rest on the ability to secure favors from the government,. We pay close attention to the permitting process whereby the government oversees and regulates construction and real estate development projects, the commercial use of equipment and facilities, and the periodic renewal of various business licenses. Based on interviews with experts and participants in the permitting process, and supplemented by other sources, we compile evidence that the permitting process is excessively slow and costly, fraught with uncertainty, subject to capricious outcomes, susceptible to corruption, and prone to manipulation by business rivals and special interest groups. |
| JEL: | J21 J23 D73 O54 |
| Date: | 2005–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11679&r=edu |
| By: | LARREA CARLOS (FLACSO); MONTALVO PEDRO (FLACSO); RICAURTE ANA (FLACSO) |
| Abstract: | This study analyzes social, ethnic and regional determinants of child malnutrition, as well as the effects of access to health services in the Andean Region, through a comparison between Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. These three countries share a profile with high stunting prevalence and strong socio-economic, regional and ethnic disparities. The analysis is conducted using DHS (Peru 1992, 1996 and 2000, Bolivia 1997) and LSMS (Ecuador 1998) surveys and it focuses on an international comparative perspective. In the case of Ecuador a detailed analysis is provided. The main task was to identify the determinants of the z-score indicators for height and weight for age. For that matter, multiple equation models were estimated, applying instrumental variables and combining different multivariate procedures, to identify the relative importance of education, housing, ethnicity and contextual regional factors as determinants of stunting in each national case. In all cases we have found strong negative ethnic effects of indigenous ethnicity as well as contextual regional negative factors for highland regions. The results remain significant even after controlling for all relevant socio- economic determinants, such as education, housing and economic status, with few exceptions. |
| Keywords: | nutrition,health,child,cronic,waste,stunting,Child anthropometric measures Principal component analysis |
| JEL: | I |
| Date: | 2005–09–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wpa:wuwphe:0509011&r=edu |