|
on Labour Economics |
| By: | James J. Heckman; Dimitriy V. Masterov |
| Abstract: | This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. Targeted early interventions have proven to be very effective in compensating for the effect of neglect. Improvements in traditional measures of school quality, tuition subsidies, company-sponsored and public job training are unlikely to be as effective. We review the evidence and present several policy recommendations. |
| JEL: | I21 I22 I28 J31 |
| Date: | 2005 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1390&r=lab |
| By: | Mihails Hazans |
| Abstract: | Latvia has recorded sustained GDP and productivity growth since 1997. Yet unemployment rates, despite gradual decrease, have remained high. Hazans explores the mysteries of unemployment in Latvia. He analyzes labor flows between employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation and finds the following results: • The type of education and the region of residence appear to be the most important determinants of success in finding jobs by the unemployed. • The unemployed from ethnic minorities have lower chances to find a job within a year, other things equal, while the difference between genders is not significant. However, neither ethnicity nor gender seems to matter as far as the transition from employment to unemployment is concerned. • Regional disparities in job destruction seem to be less sizable than disparities in job creation. • The analysis of job search methods by the unemployed indicates that two target groups of state employment policy (young unemployed and long-term unemployed) appear to make relatively little use of the public employment service. The author also looks at the impact of education, age, gender, ethnicity, and regional factors on individual earnings. The relative position of youth and women in Latvian labor market, compared with prime?age men, is less unfavorable than in many other countries. Yet the gender wage gap has increased recently, and the same is true for regional disparities. Beneficiaries of the so-called “new” education system have a relatively high market value, especially with graduates from universities and general secondary schools. Finally, returns to experience seem to be nonexistent for many adult workers without higher education. This paper—a product of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Division, Europe and Central Asia Region—is part of a larger effort in the region to understand labor market dynamics. |
| Keywords: | Labor & Employment; Transition Economies |
| Date: | 2005–01–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:3504&r=lab |
| By: | Meltem Dayioglu (Department of Economics, METU); Serap Türüt-Asik (Department of Economics, METU) |
| Abstract: | The paper attempts to determine whether there are significant gender differences in academic performance among undergraduate students in a large public university in Turkey based on three indicators; university entrance scores, performance in the English preparatory school and in the program the student is majoring in. The paper finds that a smaller number of female students manage to enter the university and when they do so, they enter with lower scores. However, once they are admitted to the university, they excel in their studies and outperform their male counterparts. This result holds after controlling for the field of study and individual attributes. |
| Keywords: | Academic achievement, undergraduate students, gender disparity, Turkey |
| JEL: | I21 J16 |
| Date: | 2004–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:met:wpaper:0417&r=lab |
| By: | Shilpa Manaktala (University of Connecticut, School of Business); John D. Phillips (University of Connecticut, School of Business); Karen Teitel (Department of Economics, College of the Holy Cross) |
| Abstract: | We identify 133 firms that between July and December 2002, announced plans to voluntarily adopt the fair value method of accounting for stock-based compensation. We investigate whether such announcements increased the quality of these firms’ earnings as perceived by market participants. Answering this research question not only provides evidence relevant to the debate surrounding the expensing of employee stock options, but doing so provides evidence that conservative accounting choices in general lead to higher perceived earnings quality. Using two measures of earnings quality, the price-earnings relation and the earnings response coefficient, we find evidence consistent with an increase in perceived earnings quality for these firms relative to a control set of firms that in 2002 did not announce plans to adopt the SFAS 123 stock-based compensation recognition provisions. |
| Keywords: | SFAS, stock options, accounting, expensing options, fair value method |
| Date: | 2004–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hcx:wpaper:0413&r=lab |