doubly robust estimation of causal effects with multivalued treatments an application to the returns to schooling summary this paper provides doubly robust estimators for treatment effect parameters which are defined in a multivalued treatment effect framework we apply this method to the unique dataset of the 1970 british cohort study bcs70 to estimate returns to various levels of schooling the analysis is carried out for female and male samples separately to capture possible gender differences average returns are estimated for the entire population as well as conditional on having a specific educational achievement for males relative to no qualification we find an average return to o levels of 6 3 to a levels of 7 9 and to higher education of 25 4 the estimated average returns to o level and a level relative to no qualification are insignificant for females whereas the return to higher education is 19 9 copyright 2014 john wiley sons ltd

intergenerational earnings mobility in post soviet russia we make use of longitudinal data for the russian economy over 1994 2016 to obtain earnings information about parents and children we show that rank correlations give reliable estimates and find intergenerational correlations for sons and daughters that are comparable to those found in the usa and the uk sons earn more than daughters conditional on education and parents rank observable household characteristics and unobservables contribute about the same to the correlations both more than education

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

the role of demand in land re development abstract vacant previously developed land in cities can generate negative externalities on surrounding areas and is often the target of policies to promote re development this paper provides estimates of the price sensitivity of land re development a crucial parameter for the success of these policies my estimates measure how prices affect long run conversion of unused or underused previously developed land in england the empirical strategy uses school test scores and admission district boundaries in a boundary discontinuity design to generate variation in housing demand that is orthogonal to re development costs results show that the probability of re development is effectively sensitive to housing prices estimates indicate that a 1 increase in prices leads to a 0 07 percentage point reduction in the fraction of hectares containing brownfield land price differences or substantial subsidies could lead to a significant amount of re development in the long run this is confirmed by observed land use changes between 2007 and 2011 being disproportionately concentrated in high price areas

higher education career opportunities and intergenerational inequality the uk government has expressed a desire to increase social mobility with policies to help achieve this aim focused on reducing inequalities in educational attainment this paper draws together established and new information about the contribution that higher education can make to social mobility using a life course approach considering differences by family background in terms of university attendance and achievement as well as occupation and earnings following graduation we find substantial socio economic differences at each stage young people from poorer backgrounds are on average less likely to go to university than their richer peers even among the selected group who do go to university they are less likely to attend the highest status institutions less likely to graduate and less likely to achieve the highest degree classes these differences in degree outcomes contribute to the lower average earnings of graduates from poorer families but earnings differentials go well beyond those driven purely by degree attainment or institution attended the evidence strongly suggests that even after taking these factors into account graduates from affluent families are more likely to obtain a professional job and to see higher earnings growth in the labour market we discuss the implications of these findings for the prospects of higher education as a route to greater social mobility

using maimonides rule to estimate the effect of class size on scholastic achievement the twelfth century rabbinic scholar maimonides proposed a maximum class size of 40 this same maximum induces a nonlinear and nonmonotonic relationship between grade enrollment and class size in israeli public schools today maimonides rule of 40 is used here to construct instrumental variables estimates of effects of class size on test scores the resulting identiecation strategy can be viewed as an application of donald campbell s regression discontinuity design to the class size question the estimates show that reducing class size induces a signiecant and substantial increase in test scores for fourth and efth graders although not for third graders when asked about their views on class size in surveys parents and teachers generally report that they prefer smaller classes this may be because those involved with teaching believe that smaller classes promote student learning or simply because smaller classes offer a more pleasant environment for the pupils and teachers who are in them mueller chase and walden 1988 social scientists and school administrators also have a longstanding interest in the class size question class size is often thought to be easier to manipulate than other school inputs and it is a variable at the heart of policy debates on school quality and the allocation of school resources in many countries see e g robinson 1990 for the united states ofsted 1995 for the united kingdom and moshel ravid 1995 for israel this broad interest in the consequences of changing class size

assessing the case for social experiments rs ecent academic debates pit two alternative approaches to policy evaluation against one another the first is the experimental approach based on the random assignment of accepted program applicants to a recipient or treatment group and a non recipient or control group the second is the nonexperimental or econometric approach that uses a variety of microdata sources statistical methods and behavioral models to compare the outcomes of participants in social programs with those of nonparticipants the central question addressed in this paper is whether or not randomized social experiments aid in securing answers to basic questions about the evaluation of social programs there are many distinct and complementary approaches to the study of the impact of public policy including full general equilibrium analysis of policy impacts tinbergen 1956 auerbach and kotlikoff 1987 shoven and whalley 1992 kydland and prescott 1991 and less ambitious partial equilibrium microeconomic structural research programs such as those designed to estimate the impact of taxes on labor supply both approaches offer answers to many interesting counterfactual policy questions but their credibility rests critically on the quality of the empirical input used to generate their answers

bicameralism and its consequences for the internal organization of legislatures theories of organization of legislatures have mainly focused on the u s congress explaining why committee systems emerge there but not explaining variance in organization across legislatures of different countries to analyze the effects of different constitutional features on the internal organization of legislatures we adopt a vote buying model and consider the incentives to delegate decision rights in a game among legislative chambers we show how presidential veto power and bicameral separation can encourage a legislative chamber to create internal veto players or supermajority rules while a unicameral structure can encourage legislators to delegate power to a leader

contests with limited resources abstract many interesting phenomena electoral competition r d races lobbying are instances of multiple simultaneous contests with unconditional commitment of limited resources specifically the following game is analyzed two players compete in a number of simultaneous contests the players have limited resources budgets and must decide how to allocate these to the different contests in each contest the player who expends more resources than his adversary wins a corresponding prize mixed strategy equilibria are characterized in the case of identical values and budgets and the connections with the classical blotto game are analyzed

programme evaluation with multiple treatments this paper reviews the main identification and estimation strategies for microeconometric policy evaluation particular emphasis is laid on evaluating policies consisting of multiple programmes which is of high relevance in practice for example active labour market policies may consist of different training programmes employment programmes and wage subsidies similarly sickness rehabilitation policies often offer different vocational as well as non vocational rehabilitation measures first the main identification strategies control for confounding variables difference in difference instrumental variable and regression discontinuity identification are discussed in the multiple programme setting thereafter the different nonparametric matching and weighting estimators of the average treatment effects and their properties are examined download discussion paper pdf 484 kb

asymmetric effects of endowment changes on foreign investment source and host countries this paper explores the asymmetric impact of factor endowment changes on foreign investment source and host countries using a ricardo wilson multifactor continuum of goods model where there is a technological basis for trade even if the countries are equivalent in all respects except for capital endowments it is discovered that host country capital growth must be immiserizing in the source country provided that the two countries are initially alike in all respects except for capital endowments while a stringent single good macdougall kemp restriction suffices to guarantee that source country labor growth is immiserizing in the host country initial equivalence between countries is insufficient

rich dad smart dad decomposing the intergenerational transmission of income we construct a simple model consistent with becker and tomes that decomposes the intergenerational income elasticity into the causal effect of financial resources the mechanistic transmission of human capital and the role that human capital plays in the determination of fathers permanent incomes we show how a particular set of instrumental variables could separately identify the money and human capital transmission effects using data from a 35 percent sample of swedish sons and their fathers we show that only a minority of the intergenerational income elasticity can be plausibly attributed to the causal effect of fathers financial resources

going green does it depend on education gender or income sustainable development entails meeting our present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs this requires us to treat economic social and environmental aspects in an integrated way but little is known about the nature of individual preferences towards the trade offs involved in this effort for the first time we study individual preferences towards the environment social well being and financial well being by using a survey of over 1400 households in the netherlands using nonparametric parametric and matching methods we find that gender and education are important factors for sustainability rather than income levels moreover results indicate that educated females put the greatest value on going green whilst being socially minded

monotone instrumental variables with an application to the returns to schooling for fifty years econometric analyses of treatment response have made extensive use of instrumental variable iv assumptions holding that mean response is constant across specified subpopulations of a population of interest 2 yet the credibility of mean independence conditions and other iv assumptions has often been a matter of considerable disagreement with much debate about whether some covariate is or is not a valid instrument in an application of interest there is therefore good reason to consider weaker but more credible assumptions to this end we introduce monotone instlumental variable miv assumptions holding that mean response varies weakly monotonically across specified subpopulations we study the identifying power of these miv assumptions and give an empirical application the findings reported here add to the literature developing nonparametric bounds on treatment effects 3 this paper uses the same formal setup as manski 1997 there is a probability space j x2 p of individuals each member j of population j has observable covariates xi e x and a response function yj t y mapping the mutually exclusive and exhaustive treatments t e t into outcomes yj t e y person j has a realized treatment zj e t and a realized outcome y 1 y zi both of which are observable the latent outcomes yj t

inequality in socio emotional skills a cross cohort comparison abstract we examine changes in inequality in socio emotional skills very early in life in two british cohorts born 30 years apart we construct comparable scales using two validated instruments for the measurement of child behaviour and identify two dimensions of socio emotional skills internalising and externalising using recent methodological advances in factor analysis we establish comparability in the inequality of these early skills across cohorts but not in their average level we document for the first time that inequality in socio emotional skills has increased across cohorts especially for boys and at the bottom of the distribution we also formally decompose the sources of the increase in inequality and find that compositional changes explain half of the rise in inequality in externalising skills on the other hand the increase in inequality in internalising skills seems entirely driven by changes in returns to background characteristics lastly we document that socio emotional skills measured at an earlier age than in most of the existing literature are significant predictors of health and health behaviours our results show the importance of formally testing comparability of measurements to study skills differences across groups and in general point to the role of inequalities in the early years for the accumulation of health and human capital across the life course

dreaming big self valuations aspirations networks and the private school earnings premium an important axis of inequality in britain is the private state school divide the success of private schools in britain in delivering high academic achievements and better paid jobs has been attributed to these schools engendering high self evaluations greater aspirations and social networks using recently repaired data on secondary school type from the 1970 british cohort study we find that internal locus of control aspirations and access to networks but not self esteem are raised by private schooling locus of control and aspirations but not networks or self esteem each have modest effects on earnings at age 42 yet only a small part of the private school earnings premium is accounted for by all these factors much of the premium is due rather to educational attainments this evidence suggests that strategies to strengthen self evaluations or aspirations in state schools will contribute little on their own to the objective of greater equality or social mobility

effectiveness of sequences of one euro jobs for welfare recipients in germany empirical evidence reveals that german welfare recipients often participate in multiple active labour market programmes almps however evidence on the effectiveness of almps exists mostly for single almp participations so far this article evaluates the sequential participation in almps for welfare recipients in germany based on comprehensive administrative data to control for dynamic selection that arises in the evaluation of sequences using a dynamic causal model and an inflow sample of welfare recipients the article analyses the effects of sequences of a public employment programme called one euro jobs on labour market outcomes for female participants in one euro jobs in the first period especially in west germany the results imply that participating in two consecutive one euro jobs compared with receiving only welfare benefits for two consecutive periods better facilitates integration into regular employment moreover taking part in a one euro job directly after entry into welfare receipt is

the determinants of earnings a behavioral approach we survey the determinants of earnings and propose a framework for understanding labor market success we suggest that the advantages of the children of successful parents go considerably beyond the benefits of superior education the inheritance of wealth or the genetic inheritance of cognitive ability we suggest that noncognitive personality variables such as attitudes towards risk ability to adapt to new economic conditions hard work and the rate of time preference affect both earning and the transmission of economic status across generations

the effectiveness of active labour market policies a meta analysis this paper provides a meta analysis of microeconometric evaluation studies on the effectiveness of active labor market policies the analysis is built upon a systematically assembled data set of causal impact estimates from 57 experimental and quasi experimental studies providing 654 estimates published between january 1990 and december 2017 we distinguish between the short and longer term impacts in our analysis at 6 12 24 and 36 months after program start after correcting for publication bias and country specific macroeconomic characteristics subsidized labor and public employment programs have negative short term impacts which gradually turn positive in the longer run schemes with enhanced services including job search assistance and training programs do not have these negative short term effects and stay positive from 6 until 36 months after program start

lifetime earnings and the vietnam era draft lottery evidence from social security administrative records errata the randomly assigned risk of induction generated by the draft lottery is used to construct estimates of the effect of veteran status on civilian earnings these estimates are not biased by the fact that certain types of men are more likely than others to service in the military social security administrative records indicate that in the early 1980s long after their service in vietnam had ended the earnings of white veterans were approximately 15 percent less than the earnings of comparable nonveterans copyright 1990 by american economic association

cross country differences in intergenerational earnings mobility international studies of the extent to which economic status is passed from one generation to the next are important for at least two reasons first each study of a particular country characterizes an important feature of that country s income inequality second comparisons of intergenerational mobility across countries may yield valuable clues about how income status is transmitted across generations and why the strength of that intergenerational transmission varies across countries the e rst section of this paper explains a benchmark measure of intergenerational mobility commonly used in u s studies the second section summarizes comparable empirical e ndings that have accumulated so far for countries other than the united states the third section sketches a theoretical framework for interpreting cross country differences in intergenerational mobility

north south trade and capital flows in a ricardian model of accumulation abstract a class based asymmetric general equilibrium model of the world economy is developed to trace the trajectory of the north south terms of trade the world profit rate the northern real wage and the level of southern employment in the presence of capital accumulation and technical progress it is shown that i accumulation must be accompanied by a continuing deterioration in the terms of trade of the south and may entail a cumulative contraction in its level of employment and ii technical progress in the south will of necessity produce a long run worsening of its terms of trade and assuming world demand for southern goods is priceinelastic of its level of unemployment

north south trade and southern industrialization abstract this paper presents a simple model of international trade and growth between a mature industrial region the north and a semi industrial primary exporting region the south under capital autarky per capita southern industrial output is minimized if the north is at the golden rule point regardless of whether capital is internationally mobile northern transfers to the south will not necessarily raise southern industrial output unless they reach a critical level additional transfers may crowd northern private investment in the south out if this critical level is not attained the effects of changes in saving behavior and technical progress are also studied

europe s industrialization and colonial underdevelopment in the light of ricardo s corn model abstract the paper discusses the dynamics of sectoral resource allocation in an extension of ricardo s corn model to a north south world system it is shown that free trade and capital mobility in the presence of capital accumulation must entail in the flexible wage metropolis a secular shift of resources out of agriculture into manufacturing accompanied by real wage growth in the labor surplus colonies a necessary expansion of commerical agriculture but an ambiguous evolution of manufacturing output and employment giving rise to the possibility of a secular contraction in overall colonial market employment

earnings and employment effects of continuous off the job training in east germany after unification the effects of continuous off the job training oft for east germans after unification are analyzed in terms of their earnings and employment probabilities using the potential outcome approach to causality as general framework different matching procedures are suggested for the estimation they allow for permanent and transitory shocks that influence oft participation and labor market outcomes the matching procedures also take account of individually different starting dates the data are taken from the german socio economic panel gsoep 1990 1994 this dataset is very informative with respect to factors influencing the participation in training the results show no positive effects of training

evaluation of swedish youth labor market programs this paper evaluates two swedish active labour market programmes for youth namely youth practice and labour market training a non parametric matching approach is applied to estimate the average p

the trend and mechanism of intergenerational income mobility in china an analysis from the perspective of human capital social capital and wealth intergenerational income mobility is the extent to which children s incomedepends on their parents the increasing of intergenerational income mobilitycan relieve the social pressure caused by the income gap and provide the incentivefor hardworking and human capital investment using microdata and economicempirical technique this study analyses the time trend and structuralmechanism of china s intergenerational income mobility in 1988 2005 theresults suggest the intergenerational income mobility improves in the early period then becomes stable and even shows a deteriorating sign recently humancapital social capital and wealth explain more than 60 per cent of the intergenerationalincome mobility in china with wealth contributing the largest proportion promoting education equality eliminating the labour market segmentationand deepening the market oriented reform are suggested to help improve theintergenerational income mobility in china

effectiveness of one euro jobs do programme characteristics matter recent german labour market reforms introduced a large scale workfare programme called one euro jobs to activate welfare recipients and improve their employment prospects in programme design leeway is left to regional actors using administrative data and propensity score ps matching this article investigates the association between programme design and effectiveness so as to provide insight on how to increase programme effectiveness first effects of different types of one euro jobs according to planned duration and weekly working hours compared to waiting are estimated second programme types are compared directly to disentangle selection and programme effects as expected lock in effects are larger for participations with a longer planned duration but not for those with longer weekly working hours one euro jobs do not generally increase the employment prospects for east german men beyond 2 years after programme start and longer and more intensive participations even decrease employment prosp

united kingdom education 1997 2001 this paper reviews the achievements of the labour government s education policy between 1997 and 2001 tony blair claimed that his government would make education a priority the first part of the paper reviews the scale of education spending in relation to the economy at large and within the education budget the second part of the paper looks at the productivity of schools how far have the changes that have affected schools in the past 10 years and in the past 5 years in particular had an impact on the quality of school achievements the paper suggests there have been significant improvements not just on average but especially in the gains made in poor areas and in the least good schools finally the paper discusses the funding of higher education the introduction of income related loans to cover maintenance and up front fees the paper concludes that some serious errors were made in policy design even so the use of the inland revenue as the collection agency was a successful innovation and should be built upon

the changing economic advantage from private schools private schooling is an important feature of education systems across the world despite its relatively small size the british private school sector has a long history and plays a prominent role in society we provide evidence showing that private schools have been successful in transforming their ability to generate the academic outputs that are most in demand in the modern economy the private state school wage differential has risen significantly over time and a significant factor has been faster rising educational attainment for privately educated individuals

does money matter for intergenerational income transmission the intergenerational income elasticity iie is a crucial measure of income mobility in this article we develop a structural model to examine the channels through which this elasticity operates using data from the panel study of income dynamics we separately identify the human capital and the financial components the human capital component examines the transmission of human capital independent of financial investments whereas the financial component examines the impact of income that is uncorrelated with human capital that is exogenous income using a two stage framework we show that the iie operates through both channels moreover our estimates show that the financial component may have a larger effect than previously estimated plausibly attributing to 36 of intergenerational income transmission indeed this result holds even when the financial component is defined in an incredibly narrow manner this suggests that cash payments could promote intergenerational mobility

stochastic monotonicity in intergenerational mobility tables summary the aim of this paper is to test for stochastic monotonicity in intergenerational socio economic mobility tables in other words we question whether having a parent from a high socio economic status is never worse than having one with a lower status using existing inferential procedures for testing unconditional stochastic monotonicity we first test a set of 149 intergenerational mobility tables in 35 different countries and find that monotonicity cannot be rejected in hardly any table in addition we propose new testing procedures for testing conditional stochastic monotonicity and investigate whether monotonicity still holds after conditioning on a number of covariates such as education cognitive and non cognitive skills based on the ncds cohort data from the uk our results provide evidence that monotonicity holds even conditionally moreover we do not find large differences in our results when comparing social class and wage class mobility copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

saving taxes through foreign plant ownership this paper analyzes to which extent foreign plant ownership involves lower tax payments than domestic plant ownership we employ a model of endogenous foreign subsidiary ownership to derive a set of empirically testable hypotheses about the differential taxation of foreign and domestically owned subsidiaries we assess these hypotheses in a data set of 33 577 european foreign and domestically owned manufacturing plants we identify a significant tax saving of endogenous foreign owner ship on average foreign owners pay 594 euros per employee or about 56 percent less than domestic owners of similar subsidiaries this effect is larger in thinner markets with fewer plants in markets with a greater relative presence of foreign owners and for foreign owners of larger plants

accounting for intergenerational income persistence noncognitive skills ability and education we analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings we seek to account for the level of income persistence in the 1970 bcs cohort and also to explore the decline in mobility in the uk between the 1958 ncds cohort and the 1970 cohort the mediating factors considered are cognitive skills non cognitive traits educational attainment and labour market attachment changes in the relationships between these variables parental income and earnings are able to explain over 80 of the rise in intergenerational persistence across the cohorts

a microeconometric evaluation of rehabilitation of long term sickness in sweden in this study the effects of various types of rehabilitation programmes on labour market out comes are estimated a main feature of this study is that it jointly evaluates multiple treat ments by nonparametric matching estimators the study is based on a large sample of per sons in western sweden who are long term sick and could participate in rehabilitation pro grammes our results suggest that work place training is superior to the other rehabilitation programmes with respect to labour market outcomes but compared to non participation no positive effects are found doi 10 1002 jae 757 download appendix pdf 147 kb

non cognitive child outcomes and universal high quality child care exploiting a rich panel data child survey merged with administrative records along with a pseudo experiment generating variation in the take up of pre school across municipalities we provide evidence of the effects on non cognitive child outcomes of participating in large scale publicly provided universal pre school programs and family day care vis a vis home care we find that compared to home care being enrolled in pre school at age three does not lead to significant differences in child outcomes at age seven no matter the gender or mother s level of education family day care on the other hand seems to significantly deteriorate outcomes for boys whose mothers have a lower level of education finally increasing hours in family day care from 30 40 hours per week to 40 50 hours per week and hours in pre school from 20 30 hours per week to 30 40 hours per week leads to significantly poorer child outcomes

the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games i theory the article presents information about the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games in this paper and its sequel presents study the existence of nash equilibrium in games where agents payoff functions are discontinuous the enquiry is motivated by a number of recent studies that have uncovered serious existence problems in seemingly innocuous economic games in the sequel to this paper authors have explained the utility function in the economic games referred to earlier are neither continuous nor quasi concave however they demonstrate that the payoff functions in mildly modified versions of these constructs exhibit two weaker forms of continuity which together with the requirement of quasi concavity suffice for the existence of an equilibrium from this one may conclude that at least in the modified versions of these models discontinuities in the payoff functions are not the real source of the problem rather it is the failure of the payoff functions to the quasi concave which is responsible for the non existence of equilibrium these observations bear on the existence of nash equilibrium in pure strategies

competition for a majority we define the class of two player zero sum games with payoffs having mild discontinuities which in applications typically stem from how ties are resolved for such games we establish sufficient conditions for existence of a value of the game maximin and minimax strategies for the players and a nash equilibrium if all discontinuities favor one player then a value exists and that player has a maximin strategy a property called payoff approachability implies existence of an equilibrium and that the resulting value is invariant games with the same payoffs at points of continuity have the same value and equilibria for voting games in which two candidates propose policies and a candidate wins election if a weighted majority of voters prefer his proposed policy we provide tie breaking rules and assumptions about voters preferences sufficient to imply payoff approachability these assumptions are satisfied by generic preferences if the dimension of the space of policies exceeds the number of voters or with no dimensional restriction if the electorate is sufficiently large each colonel blotto game is a special case in which each candidate allocates a resource among several constituencies and a candidate gets votes from those allocated more than his opponent offers in this case for simple majority rule we prove existence of an equilibrium with zero probability of ties

intergenerational mobility in britain in this paper we use longitudinal data on children and their parents to assess the extent of intergenerational mobility in britain based on data from the national child development survey a cohort of all individuals born in a week of march 1958 we find that the extent of intergenerational mobility is limited we report an intergenerational correlation of the order 40 to 60 for fathers and sons and 45 to 70 for fathers and daughters in terms of labour market earnings and years of schooling an examination of quartile transition matrices between parental and child earnings outcomes reveals a similar pattern finally it seems on the basis of these transition matrices that there is an important asymmetry in intergenerational earnings mobility with upward mobility from the bottom of the earnings distribution being more likely than downward mobility from the top

estimating the benefit incidence of an antipoverty program by propensity score matching this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled estimating the benefit incidence of an antipoverty program by propensity score matching conducted between 1997 and 1998 in argentina the study observed that the average direct gain to the participant is found to be about half the gross wage over half of the beneficiaries are in the poorest decile nationally and 80 percent are in the poorest quintile the propensity score matching psm estimator is reasonably robust to a number of changes in methodology participants are more likely to be poor than non participants participants are less well educated live in poorer neighborhoods and are more likely to be members of neighborhood associations and political parties average gains are similar between men and women but are higher for younger workers funding for the study derives from the world bank research committee

the returns to education microeconomics in this paper we focus on education as a private decision to invest in human capital and the estimation of the rate of return to that private investment while the literature is replete with studies that estimate the rate of return using regression methods where the estimated return is obtained as the coefficient on a years of education variable in a log wage equation that contains controls for work experience and other individual characteristics the issue is surrounded with difficulties we outline the theoretical arguments underpinning the empirical developments and show that the evidence on private returns to the individual is compelling despite some of these issues surrounding the estimation of the return to schooling our evidence based on estimates from a variety of datasets and specifications is that there is an unambiguously positive effect on the earnings of an individual from participation in education moreover the size of the effect seems large relative to the returns on other investments

the class pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations this article demonstrates how class origin shapes earnings in higher professional and managerial employment taking advantage of newly released data in britain s labour force survey we examine the relative openness of different high status occupations and the earnings of the upwardly mobile within them in terms of access we find a distinction between traditional professions such as law medicine and finance which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals and more technical occupations such as engineering and it that recruit more widely moreover even when people who are from working class backgrounds are successful in entering high status occupations they earn 17 percent less on average than individuals from privileged backgrounds this class origin pay gap translates to up to 7 350 11 000 lower annual earnings this difference is partly explained by the upwardly mobile being employed in smaller firms and working outside london but it remains substantial even net

multi dimensional skills specialization and oligopolistic competition in higher education abstract this paper develops a differentiated products model of school competition that distinguishes among different dimensions that matter in the skill acquisition process the model predicts that when identical schools compete for students specialization may arise as a competition strategy this serves rich students education goals well poorer students however may attend schools with specializations that do not cater to their relative strengths by doing so these poorer students complement the weaknesses of the richer students through peer effects and receive financial aid in return the empirical analysis provides strong support for the model s predictions about within school implications of specialization

a microeconometric evaluation of the active labour market policy in switzerland in the second part of the 1990 s switzerland conducted an ambitious active labour market policy almp encompassing a wide variety of programmes we evaluate the effects of these programmes on the individual employment probability of potential participants our econometric analysis uses unusually informative data origi nating from administrative unemployment and social security records we apply a matching es timator adapted for the case of multiple programmes we find substantial positive effects for one particular programme that is a unique feature of the swiss almp it consists of a wage subsidy for temporary jobs in the regular labour market that would otherwise not be taken up by the unemployed we also find large negative effects for traditional employment programmes oper ated in sheltered labour markets for training courses the results are mixed doi 10 1111 1468 0297 00072 download internet appendix pdf 2 590 kb

intergenerational wealth mobility and the role of inheritance evidence from multiple generations this study estimates intergenerational correlations in mid life wealth across three generations and a young fourth generation and examines how much of the parent child association that can be explained by inheritances using a swedish data set we find parent child rank correlations of 0 3 0 4 and grandparents grandchild rank correlations of 0 1 0 2 conditional on parents wealth grandparents wealth is weakly positively associated with grandchild s wealth and the parent child correlation is basically unchanged if we control for grandparents wealth bequests and gifts strikingly account for at least 50 per cent of the parent child wealth correlation while earnings and education are only able to explain 25 per cent

oil price capital mobility and oil importers a general equilibrium macro analysis abstract a three region three commodity general equilibrium model is constructed to explore the impact of opec s pricing policies on major macro variables of importer economies the aim of this paper is to explore general macro characteristics of the trading economies to aid understanding of the world economy response after opec i and opec ii in terms of the evolution of north south terms of trade rates of profit and output levels we support the view of a world economy in a three regions setting north south opec the analysis increases our understanding of why regions respond differently to the same external shock and how from different regimes of capital mobility we should derive alternative policy implications with the current rise in oil prices the topic promises to be relevant for some time although the direction of the shocks has been reserved

personality traits technology adoption and technical efficiency evidence from smallholder rice farms in ghana although a large literature highlights the impact of personality traits on key labor market outcomes evidence of their impact on agricultural production decisions remains limited data from 1 200 ghanaian rice farmers suggest that noncognitive skills polychronicity work centrality and optimism significantly affect simple adoption decisions returns from adoption and technical efficiency in rice production and that the size of the estimated impacts exceeds that of traditional human capital measures greater focus on personality traits relative to cognitive skills may help accelerate innovation diffusion in the short term and help farmers to respond flexibly to new opportunities and risks in the longer term

estimating the effect of financial aid offers on college enrollment a regression discontinuity approach an important problem faced by colleges and universities that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation this article shows how discontinuities in an east coast college s aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions semiparametric estimates based on a regression discontinuity rd approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students

capital mobility and growth in a north south model abstract the paper introduces international equalization of profit rates into a north south model of growth a la findlay 1980 it examines the effects on north south income and employment differentials of the introduction of international capital mobility and given such mobility of shifts in regional technology savings and demand parameters the postulated structural asymmetries between the north and the south are shown to act in such a way as to pervasively bias against the south the functioning of the world economy

changing roles of ability and education in u s intergenerational mobility using data on young adults from the 1979 and 1997 national longitudinal survey of youth we investigate the changing roles of ability and education in the transmission of economic status across generations we find that ability plays a substantially diminished role for the most recent cohort whereas education plays a much larger role the first finding results primarily from a smaller effect of children s ability on status the second from an increased correlation between parental status and educational attainment a replication of the analysis by gender reveals that the changes in the role of ability are largely driven by men whereas the changes in education s role are largely driven by women jel j62 i24

unifying ricardo s theories of growth and comparative advantage the paper formally integrates ricardo s two sector growth model with his theory of comparative advantage differences with conventional representations of ricardian trade theory as well as with heckscher ohlin samuelson theory are noted it is shown that the ricardian equilibrium terms of trade are fully determinate as against the standard millian view also trade may depending on direction of specialization inhibit rather than promote growth and lead to a net contraction of the world economy copyright 1986 by the review of economic studies limited

new developments in trade theory and ldcs abstract this paper surveys the new literature on international trade relevant to the north south controversy in the first part two types of north south models are considered the unequal exchange theory of lewis and emmanuel and the models of dynamic interaction of findlay taylor and others the analysis focuses on the determinants of growth the terms of trade and relative employment in the world economy in the second part the paper reviews the empirical literature on south north and south south trade and the theories of north south technological gaps intra industry trade and external economies finally we analyze the literature on exports and economic growth and the neo classical keynesian and disequilibrium approaches to the theory of import controls

decomposing economic mobility transition matrices the intergenerational mobility literature has consistently found that the distribution of adult economic outcomes differ markedly depending on parental economic status yet much remains to be understood about the drivers or determinants of this relationship existing literature on potential drivers focuses primarily on mean effects to help provide a more complete picture of the potential forces driving economic persistence we propose a method to decompose transition matrices and related indices specifically we decompose differences between an estimated transition matrix and a benchmark transition matrix into portions attributable to differences in characteristics between individuals from different households a composition effect and portions attributable to differing returns to these characteristics between individuals from different households a structure effect we also incorporate a detailed decomposition based on copula theory that decomposes the composition effect into portions attributable to specific covariates and their interactions we illustrate our method using data on white men from the 1979 national longitudinal survey of youth estimation is based on an extended mincer equation that includes cognitive and non cognitive measures to address the potential endogeneity of education we implement an iv strategy that allows us to estimate causal effects and investigate the role of unobserved ability

switching regression estimates of the intergenerational persistence of consumption i introduction since the seminal work of friedman 1957 and modigliani and brumberg 1954 the fact that life cycle consumption is much smoother than income has been established as one of the cornerstones in macroeconomics economic agents are able to optimize on their life cycle consumption via the means of saving and borrowing similarly family dynasties may be able to optimize on their lifetime consumption across generations through the channel of intergenerational transfers however despite strong evidence of the massive intergenerational asset transfers kotlikoff and summers 1981 few studies except perhaps mulligan 1997 1999 and waldkirch ng and cox 2004 1 have explored the intergenerational dynamics of consumption by contrast there is a large body of estimates on intergenerational relationships in income or earnings for the united states and for other countries around the world 2 investigating the intergenerational consumption relationship would complement our knowledge of the relationship of intergenerational income or earnings consumption is a more direct measure of economic well being than income furthermore understanding the intergenerational effects of parental financial transfers on consumption would be helpful for sensible public policy design if parents are transferring resources in various forms including financial transfers in an optimal manner to promote their offspring s overall well being then government transfer programs that target disadvantageous individuals at specific life stages through specific channels e g education financial aids or food stamp programs may replace or crowd out parental inputs without achieving the same optimal effects on the overall well being of these individuals broadly our study is linked to the question of how to interpret parental financial transfers to their adult children 3 financial transfers from parents can occur in the form of inter vivos i e between living persons gifts 4 or bequests 5 6 the literature has debated on whether post education financial transfers are driven by parental altruism or by an exchange arrangement in return for services delivered or expected to be delivered from adult children previous studies have found evidence that inter vivos transfers are consistent with both motives cox 1987 1990 7 yet bequest transfers consistent with neither tomes 1981 wilhelm 1996 mcgarry 1999 showed that an altruistic parent makes inter vivos transfers to ease his child s liquidity constraints therefore strongly related to her current income and arranges bequest transfers in response to the child s permanent income therefore only partially related to her current income our study is more closely linked to the view that treats bequest receipt as a signal of access to credit markets for human capital investments becker and tomes 1986 argued that altruistic parents leave financial bequests to children only after they have made efficient human capital investments in their children under imperfect credit markets there are credit constrained parents who cannot self finance these investments without forgoing own consumption that has an opportunity cost higher than the market interest rate this results in a lower consumption transmission from parents to children in constrained families besides signaling access to credit markets financial transfers including bequests enable a parent to guard his her offspring against any relative downward trending of consumption that arises from relative downward trending of lifetime income thus contribute to a higher degree of persistence in consumption from this perspective the total welfare cost of credit constraints goes beyond what is revealed by education achievement or lifetime income and the benefit of being born in a richer family is not limited to being able to afford elite education this study tests the connection between credit constraint and intergenerational consumption persistence using bequest receipt as the signal of constraint status for the parental households

the contribution of early life versus labour market factors to intergenerational income persistence a comparison of the uk and sweden we explore whether differences in intergenerational income mobility between the uk and sweden show up early in life finding stronger associations between parental income and birthweight height and school performance in the uk we investigate whether these differentials can account for the country difference in income mobility while differences in the associations in birthweight and height are too weak to matter school performance does account for a substantial part of this difference however country differences in the earnings returns to these skills are at least as important as the differences in the link between parental income and skills

the political economy of intergenerational income mobility the intergenerational elasticity of income is considered one of the best measures of the degree to which a society gives equal opportunity to its members while much research has been devoted to measuring this reduced form parameter less is known about its underlying structural determinants using a model with exogenous talent endowments endogenous parental investment in children and endogenous redistributive institutions we identify the structural parameters that govern the intergenerational elasticity of income the model clarifies how the interaction between private and collective decisions determines the equilibrium level of social mobility two societies with similar economic and biological fundamentals may have vastly different degrees of intergenerational mobility depending on their political institutions we offer empirical evidence in line with the predictions of the model we conclude that international comparisons of intergenerational elasticity of income are not particularly informative about fairness without taking into account differences in politico economic institutions jel e24 j62 j68 p16