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on Education |
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Issue of 2013‒05‒05
ten papers chosen by Joao Carlos Correia Leitao University of Beira Interior and Technical University of Lisbon |
| By: | Daiji Kawaguchi; Hiroshi Ono |
| Abstract: | In spite of the significant restructuring of the university system in the postwar period, national universities continue to occupy the top end of the prestige hierarchy of universities in Japan. In this paper, we examine long-term trends in the educational credentials of Japanese corporate executives. We use high-quality data from the directory of corporate executives to assess whether the mechanisms of elite production has changed over time. We find that the fraction of corporate executives graduating from private universities increased significantly, in accordance with the massive expansion of private universities in the postwar period. At the same time, our cohort-based analysis finds that private university graduates are being recruited into executive positions at a pace that exceeds its natural growth rate. Our findings weaken the view that certain prestigious universities are stable institutions to reproduce the nation's elites. The improved access to university education results in greater educational diversity and heterogeneity among the nation's elites. |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hst:ghsdps:gd12-297&r=edu |
| By: | Meghir, Costas (Yale University, IFS and NBER); Palme, Mårten (Dept. of Economics, Stockholm University); Simeonova, Emilia (Tufts University, Princeton University and NBER) |
| Abstract: | We examine how an education policy intervention - the introduction of a comprehensive school in Sweden that increased the number of compulsory years of schooling, affected cognitive and non-cognitive skills and long-term health. We use administrative and survey data including background information, child ability and long-term adult outcomes. We show that education reform increased skills among children, but the effects on long-term health are overall negligible. We demonstrate that effects vary across socio-economic backgrounds and initial skill endowments, with significant improvements in cognition and skills for lower Socio-economic status individuals and lower ability people. |
| Keywords: | Mortality; cognitive skills; non-cognitive skills; education reform |
| JEL: | I12 I14 I18 I21 |
| Date: | 2013–04–23 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:sunrpe:2013_0010&r=edu |
| By: | Elizabeth Davidson; Randall Reback; Jonah E. Rockoff; Heather L. Schwartz |
| Abstract: | The No Child Left Behind (NLCB) Act required states to adopt accountability systems measuring student proficiency on state administered exams. Based on student test score performance in 2002, states developed initial proficiency rate targets and future annual benchmarks designed to lead students to 100% proficiency on state exams by 2014. Any year a school fails to meet these targets, either across all students or by various subgroups of students, the school does not make Adequate Yearly Progress. While the federal government’s legislation provided a framework for NCLB implementation, it also gave states flexibility in their interpretation of many NCLB components, and school failure rates ranged from less than 1% to more than 80% across states. In this paper, we explore how states’ NCLB implementation decisions affected their schools’ failure rates. Wide cross-state variation in failure rates resulted from how states’ decisions (e.g., confidence intervals applied to proficiency rates, numerical thresholds for a student subgroup to be held accountable) interacted with each other and with school characteristics like enrollment size, grade span, and ethnic diversity. Subtle differences in policy implementation led to dramatic differences in measured outcomes. |
| JEL: | H7 H75 I21 I28 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18988&r=edu |
| By: | Peter Boone; Ila Fazzio; Kameshwari Jandhyala; Chitra Jayanty; Gangadhar Jayanty; Simon Johnson; Vimala Ramachandrin; Filipa Silva; Zhaoguo Zhan |
| Abstract: | We conducted a survey covering 20% of villages with 200-1000 population in rural Guinea-Bissau. We interviewed household heads, care-givers of children, and their teachers and schools. We analysed results from 9,947 children, aged 7-17, tested for literacy and numeracy competency. Only 27% of children were able to add two single digits, and just 19% were able to read and comprehend a simple word. Our unannounced school checks found 72% of enrolled children in grades 1-4 attending their schools, but the schools were poorly equipped. Teachers were present at 86% of schools visited. Despite surveying 351 schools, we found no examples of successful schools where children reached reasonable levels of literacy and numeracy for age. Our evidence suggests that interventions that raise school quality in these villages, rather than those which target enrolment, may be most important to generate very sharp improvements in children's educational outcomes. |
| Keywords: | Education, Africa, survey results, numeracy, literacy |
| JEL: | O1 O55 I2 F35 H43 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1201&r=edu |
| By: | Darwin Cortes; Daniel Montolio |
| Abstract: | Abstract How the degree of publicness of goods affect violent conflict? Based on the theoretical model in Esteban and Ray (2001) we find that the effect of the degree of publicness depends on the group size. When the group is small (large), the degree of publicness increases (decreases) the likelihood of conflict. This opens an empirical question that we tackle using microdata from the Colombian conflict at the municipality level. We use three goods with different publicness degree to identify the sign of the effect of publicness on conict. These goods are coca crops (private good), road density (public good subject to congestion) and average education quality (a purer public good). After dealing with endogeneity issues using an IV approach, we find that the degree of publicness reduces the likelihood of both paramilitary and guerrilla attacks. Moreover, coca production exacerbates conflict and the provision of both public goods mitigates conflict. These results are robust to size, geographical, and welfare controls. Policies that improve public goods provision will help to fight the onset of conflict. |
| Date: | 2013–04–24 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:col:000092:010725&r=edu |
| By: | Pfeiffer, Friedhelm; Reuß, Karsten |
| Abstract: | The paper studies the power of educational investments in relation to transfers for fostering lifetime income and for reducing income inequality in Germany. The welfare analysis is based on a model of age-dependent human capital accumulation, featuring dynamic complementarities in skill formation over the life cycle, and calibrated for the period of ongoing demographic transition until 2080. If policy aims at reducing the inequality of lifetime income among people of the same generation, educational investments for people younger than or equal to seventeen do a better job compared to transfers in adulthood. In an intergenerational perspective all cohorts born after 1976 will gain from tax-financed additional investments in preschooleducation introduced in 2011. Additional investments into secondary education will, as a rule, not cause life time income to raise enough to compensate its costs. -- |
| Keywords: | early education,demographic change,inequality over the life span,redistributive policy |
| JEL: | D63 H55 I20 J11 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:13021&r=edu |
| By: | Richard Blundell (University College London); Monica Costa Dias (Institute for Fiscal Studies and CEF-UP at the University of Porto); Costas Meghir (Cowles Foundation, Yale University); Jonathan Shaw (Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London) |
| Abstract: | We consider the impact of Tax credits and income support programs on female education choice, employment, hours and human capital accumulation over the life-cycle. We thus analyze both the short run incentive effects and the longer run implications of such programs. By allowing for risk aversion and savings we are also able to quantify the insurance value of alternative programs. We find important incentive effects on education choice, and labor supply, with single mothers having the most elastic labor supply. Returns to labour market experience are found to be substantial but only for full-time employment, and especially for women with more than basic formal education. For those with lower education the welfare programs are shown to have substantial insurance value. Based on the model marginal increases to tax credits are preferred to equally costly increases in income support and to tax cuts, except by those in the highest education group. |
| Keywords: | Female labor supply, Welfare reform, Tax credits, Education choice, Dynamic discrete choice models, Life cycle models |
| JEL: | H2 H3 J22 J24 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1892&r=edu |
| By: | Marcello Bofondi (Bank of Italy); Luisa Carpinelli (Bank of Italy); Enrico Sette (Bank of Italy) |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of the increase in Italian sovereign debt risk on credit supply on a sample of 670,000 bank-firm relationships between December 2010 and December 2011, drawn from the Italian Central Credit Register. To identify a causal link, we exploit the lower impact of sovereign risk on foreign banks operating in Italy than on domestic banks. We study firms borrowing from at least two banks and include firm x period fixed effects in all regressions to controlling for unobserved firm heterogeneity. We find that Italian banks tightened credit supply: the lending of Italian banks grew by about 3 percentage points less than that of foreign banks, and their interest rates were 15-20 basis points higher, after the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis. We test robustness by splitting foreign banks into branches and subsidiaries, and then examine whether selected bank characteristics may have amplified or mitigated the impact. We also study the extensive margin of credit, analyzing banks' propensity to terminate existing relationships and to grant new loan applications. Finally, we test whether firms were able to compensate for the reduction of credit from Italian banks by borrowing more from foreign banks. We find that this was not the case, so that the sovereign crisis had an aggregate impact on credit supply. |
| Keywords: | credit supply, sovereign debt crisis, bank lending channel |
| JEL: | G21 F34 E44 E51 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_909_13&r=edu |
| By: | Markus Simeth (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), College of Management, Switzerland); Julio Raffo (World Intellectual Property Organization, Economics and Statistics Division, Geneva, Switzerland) |
| Abstract: | Whereas recent scholarly research has provided many insights about universities engaging in commercial activities, there is still little empirical evidence regarding the opposite phenomenon of companies disseminating scientific knowledge. Our paper aims to fill this gap and explores the motivations of firms that disclose research outcomes in a scientific format. Besides considering an internal firm dimension, we focus particularly on knowledge sourcing from academic institutions and the appropriability regime using a cost-benefit framework. We conduct an econometric analysis with firm-level data from the fourth edition of the French Community Innovation Survey (CIS4) and matched scientific publications for a sample of 2,512 R&D performing firms from all manufacturing sectors. The analysis provides evidence that the access to important scientific knowledge imposes the adoption of academic disclosure principles, whereas the mere existence of collaborative links with academic institutions is not a strong predictor. Furthermore, the results suggest that overall industry conditions are influential in shaping the cost-benefit rationale of firms with respect to scientific disclosure. |
| Keywords: | R&D, Industrial Science, Knowledge Disclosure, University-Industry collaboration |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wip:wpaper:6&r=edu |
| By: | Fatih Guvenen; Michelle Rendall |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage. Historically, due to disparities in earning power and education across genders, married women often found themselves in an economically vulnerable position, and had to suffer one of two fates in a bad marriage: either they get divorced (assuming it is available) and struggle as low-income single mothers, or they remain trapped in the marriage. In both cases, education can provide a route to emancipation for women. To investigate this idea, we build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions. A key feature of the model is that women bear a larger share of the divorce burden, mainly because they are more closely tied to their children relative to men. Our focus on education is motivated by the fact that divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep the future returns from their human capital upon divorce (unlike their physical assets), making education a good insurance against divorce risk. However, as women further their education, the earnings gap between spouses shrinks, leading to more unstable marriages and, in turn, further increasing demand for education. The framework generates powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to a large rise in divorce rates and a decline in marriage rates (similar to those observed in the US data) from relatively modest exogenous driving forces. Further, in the model, women overtake men in college attainment during the 1990s, a feature of the data that has proved challenging to explain. Our counterfactual experiments indicate that the divorce law reform of the 1970s played an important role in all of these trends, explaining more than one-quarter of college attainment rate of women post-1970s and one-half of the rise in labor supply for married women. |
| Keywords: | Marriage ; Women - Education |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedmwp:704&r=edu |