the role of aggregation in estimating the effects of private school competition on student achievement abstract this paper investigates possible reasons for the disparity in results in the private school competition literature in particular the focus is on the data set the grade range and level of aggregation of the competition variable and on the choice of ols or iv estimation strategies the results show that the size and significance of the competition variable depends on each of these attributes although the grade range of the competition variable has a slightly smaller impact than the others private school competition does not have a consistently positive significant effect on student achievement

empirical evaluation of bureaucratic models of inefficiency two separate but related strands of literature exist regarding the efficiency of public sector service provision the theoretical base developed in the bureaucratic models of supply and the methodological base developed in the operations research and economic literatures most analyses focus exclusively on either the measurement or causes of inefficiency this paper seeks to empirically test bureaucratic models of supply by drawing on the measurement literature in anticipation of the results it is found that there does exist empirical evidence supporting some of the implications of these models

do limits matter evidence on the effects of tax limitations on student performance abstract the goal of this research is to determine if limits on the revenue raising ability of school districts translate into constraints on the ability of these districts to affect student performance we use the recent imposition of property tax limitations on school districts in the chicago metropolitan area to determine if these limits have translated into slower growth in student performance we find only limited evidence that student performance in districts subject to the tax limitations has fallen relative to student performance in districts not subject to the limitations

budget constrained frontier measures of fiscal equality and efficiency in schooling equality and efficiency are key issues in educational reform here the authors analyze the efficiency and equality consequences of various school finance reforms using a cost indirect output distance function this function readily models multiple output production under conditions of budgetary constraint and provides a natural measure of performance that is closely related to farrell type measures of efficiency the analysis suggests that despite school district inefficiency finance reforms can affect student achievement however any potential gains in output from redistribution are dwarfed by the potential gains from increased efficiency more strikingly the analysis demonstrates that budgetary reforms designed to equalize expenditures could actually increase the inequality of student achievement

applying ethics to insider trading insider trading has received a bad name in recent decades the popular press makes it sound like an evil practice where those who engage in it are totally devoid of ethical principles yet not all insider trading is unethical and some studies have concluded that certain kinds of insider trading are actually beneficial to the greater investment community some scholars in philosophy law and economics have disputed whether insider trading should be punished at all while others assert that it should be illegal in all cases this paper explores the nature of insider trading and analyzes the issues to determine the positive and negative aspects of insider trading and how policy should be changed the best hope would be for studies to be made that isolate the individuals or groups who are fraudulently harmed by insider trading if any such groups exist then clearly worded legislation could be passed to prevent any fraud from being committed against these individuals and groups while allowing non fraudulent transactions to be completed without fear of prosecution until it can be clearly determined that someone is fraudulently harmed by insider trading there should be no law or regulation restricting the practice since such restrictions violate individual rights and will likely have a negative market reaction

caveat emptor cross country data on education and the labor force abstract cross country data on education and the labor force frequently are used to describe important dimensions of development and to estimate models of economic growth and growth determinants the impact of education and related phenomena this investigation finds 1 there are serious intertemporal and inter country comparability problems with these data that may importantly affect inferences about labor force size trends and productivity and schooling investments and impact 2 data gaps are systematically related to levels of development and literacy and 3 conclusions about the determinants or consequences of development based on constructed data that have been made available to fill data gaps can be seriously misleading

microfinance and poverty in bolivia both in its institutional range and in its penetration of financial markets the microfinance sector in bolivia rivals any in the world and has played a major part in extracting the macro economy from meltdown since the mid 1980s we seek specifically to assess its impact on poverty and do this through small sample surveys on four microfinance institutions two urban and two rural using a range of poverty concepts income generated both through the borrower s enterprise and through the labour market asset holdings and diversity and various measures of vulnerability all the institutions studied had on balance positive impacts on income and asset levels with income impacts correlating negatively with income on account of poor households choosing to invest in low risk low return assets microfinance may however augment vulnerability average debt service ratios of microfinance clients are disturbingly high and if the coping mechanisms used by borrowers fail borrowers may be forced out of the

school expenditures and post schooling earnings evidence from high school and beyond studies based on inputs measured at the state level generally report that school expenditures have substantial effects on students adult wages whereas studies based on less aggregated measures report small effects the author uses wage data from high school and beyond to analyze this discrepancy and to estimate the effect of school expenditures on students post schooling earnings the author finds that the discrepancy in the literature stems mostly from two factors measurement error in district level expenditures and omitted state effects in the earnings regression the author also finds that the effect of school expenditures on earnings is significant but small a 10 increase in school spending would increase students adult wages by only 0 68 copyright 1996 by mit press

impact of financial inclusion in low and middle income countries a systematic review of reviews financial inclusion programmes seek to increase access to financial services such as credit savings insurance and money transfers despite a wealth of systematic review evidence the impacts of financial inclusion are inconclusive hence the first systematic review of systematic reviews was undertaken to synthesize the impacts of financial inclusion interventions on economic social gender and behavioural outcomes thirty two systematic reviews were identified the headline finding is that impacts are more likely to be positive than negative but the effects vary and appear not to be transformative in scope or scale as they largely occur in the early stages of the causal chain the effects of financial services on core economic and social poverty indicators are small and inconsistent there is no evidence for meaningful behaviour change outcomes the effects on women s empowerment appear generally positive but they depend upon programme features that are often peripheral to the financial service and cultural and geographical context accessing savings opportunities has small but more consistently positive effects for poor people and bears fewer downside risks for clients than credit the inconsistent quality of the primary evidence base that formed the basis of their syntheses raises concerns about the reliability of the overall findings

an economic model of teaching effectiveness the literature on the determinants of good teaching performance has been largely devoted to empirical measurement a complete review of the publications in this area would require at least an entire issue the size of this journal yet it is virtually impossible to discover attempts to derive hypotheses about the determinants of good teaching from explicit models of behavior this has led researchers into the trap of exploring only the empirical determinants of good teaching performance typically the results of student evaluations are correlated with affective personality traits of the teachers with peer evaluations of psychological compositions or even with the results of various psychological tests examples are the works of robert isaacson et al frank costin et al and wilbert mckeachie et al in most of these studies no substantive conclusions are reached regarding the determinants of effective teaching in the few studies which do contain significant findings the independent variable in question is difficult to explain as a direct determinant of teaching effectiveness for example isaacson et al find that virtually the only statistically significant determinant of effective teaching is the personality characteristic which they label culture this may imply that simply wearing a tweed jacket and taking up pipesmoking is sufficient to improve teaching this paper takes a somewhat different approach to the analysis of teaching assume that the individual in question wishes to maximize teaching effectiveness clearly there are constraints on this maximization process one must necessarily be the time budget constraint a second constraint however adds a good deal of interest to the model this constraint is best described as the bundle of characteristics available to the individual these characteristics could be termed the components of the individual s personality such attributes include physical appearance psychological makeup speaking ability and a myriad of other variables thus this model bears a resemblance to the standard economic models of monopolistic competition see a michael spence before proceeding to a formal statement of the problem a philosophical issue must be addressed what is meant by teaching effectiveness generally this is interpreted as maximizing student evaluations of teachers however this is clearly not always equivalent to maximizing student learning unfortunately the latter variable is difficult but not impossible to measure preand posttesting with standardized tests is becoming increasingly accepted for example the meaning of teaching effectiveness in this paper must unfortunately remain ambiguous some teachers concerned perhaps with obtaining tenure will interpret good teaching as obtaining good evaluations the criterion by which they are judged others may take a more eclectic viewpoint since the problem below is an individual maximization problem the precise definition of effective teaching may simply vary from individual to individual see w r allen formally this problem is exactly analogous to one first addressed by kelvin lancaster he assumes that the consumer attempts to maximize satisfaction through purchase of bundles of attributes each commodity is possessed of certain of these characteristics by consuming various combinations of these commodities the consumer is assistant professor department of economics and director center for economic education california state university hayward i would like to thank alex cassuto nancy sanders and an anonymous referee for helpful discussion in a previously unreported experiment in the department of economics california state universitybakersfield faculty members were required to wear coats and ties in classes it was subsequently observed that teaching evaluations improved unfortunately no detailed statistical results of this experiment are available for analysis

production and innovation when techniques are tacit the case of education abstract the central theme of this paper is that the conventional economic theory of production does not hold even approximately in a field like education after examining the result of input output studies in education and the effect of government attempts to enhance education effectiveness we provide a sketch of a new production theory for sectors where techniques are poorly articulated and idiosyncratic

modeling multiple outputs in educational production functions for some time now economists have conceptualized learning as a production process most educational production functions specify only one output usually a measure of cognitive achievement some recent studies have recognized the multidimensional aspects of schooling specifying outputs in both the cognitive and affective domains introducing multiple outputs into the production function raises interesting theoretical and empirical issues one issue is the manner in which various outputs are interrelated how one models output interactions in educational production functions may be important are the outputs multiple products if so are they independently or simultaneously produced or are the outputs joint products answers to these questions may affect empirical estimates of the educational production function s this paper briefly describes how one might approach this problem we argue on conceptual grounds that modeling outputs in the cognitive and affective domains as joint products is preferable in addition we compare the three approaches empirically to evaluate the sensitivity of educational production function parameter estimates to output specification

partial fiscal decentralization reforms and educational outcomes a difference in differences analysis for spain abstract several arguments derived from fiscal federalism theory suggest that decentralization may improve the provision of public goods and services however theory remains inconclusive regarding these effects under partial decentralization the aim of this study is to examine this hypothesis by evaluating the effects on educational outcomes of the partial fiscal decentralization reform that took place in spain during the 1980s since education competences were devolved to the regions at different points in time we can consistently estimate the effects of this reform by applying the differences in differences method and by using the non decentralized regions as the comparison group we find that the reform had a sizeable impact on the percentage of students dropping out early from school the effects are much stronger for regions with a high level of revenues we also find that the effects are concentrated in the high school program and that the reform was not able to improve educational outcomes in the vocational program we interpret these results as evidence that decentralization improved the match between education policy and population preferences

managing the risks of corporate political donations a utilitarian perspective this paper applies a utilitarian analysis to corporate political donations unlike the more common rights based analyses it is argued that the optimal policy is the one that best satisfies society s rational preferences concerning donor influence adequate financing donor pressure and the cost of maintaining and enforcing the democratic system this analysis suggests that a ban is best if it would be generally observed and sufficient financing from other sources is available otherwise a donation cap is a better option further lobbyists should be banned from donating small gifts and drafting bills for candidates the impact of disclosure and other risk management mechanisms are also considered

schools and housing markets an examination of school segregation and performance in connecticut this paper estimates a dynamic model of price level school performance and school racial and ethnic composition in the state of connecticut the paper finds that increasing minority representation in a labor market area reinforces the existing pattern of school segregation changes in segregation appear to be influenced by demographic trends in urban areas and by the labour market factors that determine those trends there is no evidence however to suggest that this process affects housing prices rather the housing market appears to adjust relatively quickly

schooling and economic well being the role of nonmarket effects standard estimates of the economic value of additional schooling based on earnings differences associated with differences in the level of schooling attained cover only a portion of the total effects of education that are valued by citizens we first identify a catalog of nonmarketed effects many of which have been recently studied by economists and then propose a procedure for estimating a willingness to pay value for these effects using empirical estimates of the magnitude of a selection of these effects found in the literature we calculate willingness to pay values using our proposed procedure these illustrative calculations suggest that standard estimates of the benefit of incremental schooling substantially understate the full value of such investments

teacher training teacher quality and student achievement abstract we study the effects of various types of education and training on the productivity of teachers in promoting student achievement previous studies on the subject have been hampered by inadequate measures of teacher training and difficulties in addressing the non random selection of teachers to students and of teachers to training we address these issues by estimating models that include detailed measures of pre service and in service training a rich set of time varying covariates and student teacher and school fixed effects we find that elementary and middle school teacher productivity increases with experience informal on the job training the largest gains from experience occur in the first few years but we find continuing gains beyond the first five years of a teacher s career in contrast we do not find a consistent relationship between formal professional development training and teacher productivity however this may be partly driven by estimation issues as we find more significant positive effects of formal training in the subject grade combination where estimates should be most precise middle school math there is no evidence that teachers pre service undergraduate training or college entrance exam scores are related to productivity

the public choice of educational choice the very small literature explaining i how citizens have voted in two california voucher referenda ii how legislators have voted on voucher bills in the state of florida and the us congress and iii the variation across states in charter school provisions is summarized new empirical evidence documenting the cross state variation in the success of voucher referenda and voucher bills is examined voucher bill characteristics and state characteristics play important roles voucher bills have been passed only in the more conservative republican states and almost all of the successful voucher programs have been targeted at large struggling school districts

anticipating the consequences of school reform a new use of dea we use dea type linear programming techniques to simulate a basic component of educational reform eliminating restrictions on the allocation of school personnel our technique allows us to identify potential output gains or equivalently potential cost savings from reform we can also identify which personnel groups are likely to gain and lose under this reform when we apply our model to a sample of texas school districts we find evidence that the educational establishment has substantial economic rents to protect from school reform and that the primary beneficiaries of reform are likely to be affluent school districts with few minority students the technique which relies on the relationship between the direct and indirect distance functions can be easily generalized to measure the potential gains from removing other input restrictions such as union work rules environmental regulations or deed restrictions

causal effects in education abstract in recent years a wave of new studies on the effects of educational interventions on student performance has emerged the realization that inputs in the education process are endogenous is important for the validity of traditional findings because of ignoring endogeneity bias all traditional estimates might be wrong recent studies exploit exogenous variation in interventions in education produced by controlled or natural experiments results generated by this methodological innovation differ substantially from the traditional findings this article reviews this new literature illustrates new methods for identifying causal effects of interventions in education and compares the findings with the traditional literature

is microcredit a blessing for the poor a meta analysis examining development outcomes and contextual considerations abstract increasing efforts aim at economic development and the reduction of poverty in developing countries through microcredit enabled entrepreneurship following the award of the nobel peace prize to prof yunus microcredit lending has risen to prominence and the volume of microcredit loans has increased substantially however theory on the outcomes of this financing form is controversial furthermore the academic community lacks conclusive empirical evidence about the impact of such programs primary empirical studies report fragmented and to a large extent contradictory results in this meta analysis we empirically synthesize a total of 545 quantitative empirical findings from 90 studies conducted to date our findings reveal a positive impact of microcredit on key development outcomes at the level of the client entrepreneurs additionally we scrutinize how the development context influences the effectiveness of microcredit and find that microcredit generally has a greater impact in more challenging contexts with our findings we contribute to research on the nexus of entrepreneurship and economic development and offer recommendations for practitioners and academics working on this promising frontier

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

school decentralization helping the good get better but leaving the poor behind abstract the decentralization of public services is a major feature of institutional innovation the main argument in support of decentralization is that it brings decisions closer to the people thereby alleviating information asymmetries and improving accountability however decentralization can also degrade service provision in poor communities that lack the ability to voice and defend their preferences in this paper we analyze the average and distributional effects of school decentralization on educational quality in argentina we find that decentralization had an overall positive impact on student test scores the decentralization gains however did not reach the poor thus although bringing decisions closer to the people may help the good get better the already disadvantaged may not receive these benefits

public education supply and student performance this paper develops a model of public exchange whereby voters and education policy makers exchange with one another within school districts because school district consolidation lowers alternatives to voters parents consolidation is hypothesized to raise public education spending because weakened intergovernmental competition allows policy makers to promote their own utility rather than that of constituents models of public education spending and academic performance are estimated over 1988 1990 while evidence indicates little support for the traditional treatment of the leviathan hypothesis that greater competition lowers public spending this paper argues that education spending by itself does not fully provide a valid test of the leviathan hypothesis since spending by itself does not necessarily indicate the quality of public education programmes empirical evidence indicates that greater numbers of schools and school districts promote higher student achievement as evidenced by higher math and v

tax limits and the qualifications of new teachers abstract this paper examines the impact of local tax limits on new teacher quality using data from the national center for education statistics we find that tax limits systematically reduce the average quality of education majors as well as new public school teachers in states that have passed these limits the average relative test scores of education majors in tax limit states declined by ten percent as compared to the relative test scores of education majors in states that did not pass limits this relationship is strengthened if we control for school finance equalization reforms or examine tax limits passed in two different periods

choice of ontario high schools and student sorting by ability to what extent can offering more choice in schooling lead to cream skimming or the sorting of students by ability i study whether increased choice leads to student sorting by ability into high schools in the greater toronto area on average 41 of students opt out of the high school to which they would normally be assigned based on their residence students are more likely to opt out in areas where accessibility to other schools is greatest due to population density and explicit open enrolment policies while students of higher ability are generally more likely to opt out an interaction term between school choice and ability is insignificant suggesting that increased choice does not have differential impacts by student ability findings are robust to changes in assumptions about instrument exogeneity

the influence of private school enrollment on public school performance school choice reform refers to changes that allow parents greater freedom to choose schools for their children school choice reform is contentious because it fundamentally alters the environment in which public and private schools operate and could result in significant changes for both demanders and suppliers of education this article develops a model of public education with imperfect exit to predict how private school enrollment influences performance of public schools empirical evidence from data on all private and public schools in california provides substantial support for the hypothesis that public school test scores are inversely related to private school enrollments and charter school enrollments when private and charter schooling reflects exiting by parents unhappy with local public schools implications regarding how expanded private school choice might influence public school performance in california and elsewhere are discussed

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

dollars and performance treating alcohol misuse in maine abstract if public funds are allocated efficiently then an increase in funding should improve the performance of substance abuse treatment programs in the data used in this paper performance measured as abstinence rates and expenditures per patient are not positively correlated one explanation is that funding is endogeneous i e programs treating more difficult patients receive more funding the data comes from all maine s outpatient drug free programs that received public funding between 1991 and 1994 after controlling for endogeneity this paper concludes that the marginal impact of expenditures per patient on abstinence rates is small and statistically insignificantly different from zero

assessing school efficiency in portugal using fdh and bootstrapping this study explores a new data set that contains information both on inputs and outputs for a sample of portuguese secondary schools an fdh reference technology is used to determine radial technical efficiency scores and slacks although it is known that there is no reason to assume convexity in the study of education efficiency frontiers this is the first study ever to use fdh at the school level effectively relaxing the convexity assumption a two stage approach is used whereby the significant environmental variables that explain fdh efficiency scores and slacks are identified for the purpose of statistical inference the first application of the bootstrapping algorithms suggested by simar and wilson 2003 is conducted the study concludes that the unemployment rate access to health care services adult education and living infrastructures are determinants of school efficiency the differences between the coast and the interior of portugal seem to be more relevant as far as school efficiency is

the effect on black white wage differences of differences in the quantity and quality of education using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth for the years 1979 88 the author examines the extent to which black white differences in educational attainment educational quality and unmeasured individual ability can explain black white wage differences an analysis that corrects for both selectivity and ability biases inherent in estimating the education wage relationship shows that the main source of the black white wage differential is the racial difference in the quality rather than quantity of schooling in fact the author concludes closing the racial gap in the basic skills learned in school could reduce the wage differential by two thirds

intergenerational transfers production and income distribution abstract we consider an overlapping generations economy where the aggregative production process uses physical capital and human capital intergenerational transfers from parents to their children are motivated by altruism we distinguish between two types of transfers investment of parents in the education of their offspring and capital transfer the gift bequest motive we show that the intensity of each type of altruism and hence the composition of the two types of transfers affect significantly the equilibrium output and the intragenerational income distributions comparing competitive equilibria from the same initial distributions of capital transfers and human capital we derive a the economy with the higher education inclined altruism attains lower output and more equal intragenerational income distributions if either the production function s elasticity of substitution is not large or the altruism is weak b for more bequest inclined altruism the effects are usually reversed c under public provision of education higher bequest inclined altruism results in lower output and less equal distribution of income in all dates

political action committee contributions and u s congressional voting on sugar legislation this study examines the simultaneous relationship between political action committee pac contributions and congressional votes on u s sugar legislation we extend the conventional analysis by specifying a three equation system in which each congressman s vote depends on contributions received from pro sugar and anti sugar coalitions while the propensity of each of these coalitions to contribute depends simultaneously on the congressman s anticipated voting decision and the contributions of the opposing coalition logrolling is also accommodated by considering the effect that contributions from other coalitions have had on voting decisions we find evidence of a three way linkage between votes and competing campaign contributions and conclude that the effectiveness of pac contributions reflects the dominance of political pressure over ideological concerns

schools and housing values this study combines historical and quantitative methods to determine the market response to a major nineteenth century american urban architectural form the speculatively built row house the paper estimates a hedonic price index which decomposes the

micro credit initiatives for equitable and sustainable development who pays abstract there is a growing acknowledgement that micro credit programs have potential for equitable and sustainable development however my anthropological research on the micro credit program of the grameen bank shows that bank workers are expected to increase disbursement of loans among their members and press for high recovery rates to earn profit necessary for economic viability of the institution to ensure timely repayment in the loan centers bank workers and borrowing peers inflict an intense pressure on women clients in the study community many borrowers maintain their regular payment schedules through a process of loan recycling that considerably increases the debt liability on the individual households increases tension and frustration among household members produces new forms of dominance over women and increases violence in society

does financial development contribute to poverty reduction the article examines the contribution of financial development to poverty reduction in developing countries building on earlier research which has established links between financial development and economic growth and between economic growth and poverty reduction the article tests for a causal process linking financial sector growth and poverty reduction the empirical results indicate that up to a threshold level of economic development financial sector growth contributes to poverty reduction through the growth enhancing effect the impact of financial development on poverty reduction will be affected however by any change in income inequality resulting from financial development

the impact of educational standards on the level and distribution of earnings the goal of this paper is to present the following finding an egalitarian policy maker might prefer higher standards than would a policy maker whose goal was to maximize the sum of earnings the result is based on the observation that if workers are differentiated with respect to ability an increase in educational standards will increase the earnings of both the most able and the least able workers the only workers whose earnings fall are those workers who after the increase fail to continue meeting the standard

corporate political strategy an examination of the relation between political expenditures environmental performance and environmental disclosure two fundamental business ethics issues that repeatedly surface in the academic literature relate to business s role in the development of public policy suarez s l 2000 does business learn the university of michigan press ann arbor mi roberts r w and d d bobek 2004 accounting organizations and society 29 5 6 565 590 and its role in responsibly managing the natural environment newton l 2005 business ethics and the natural environment blackwell publishing oxford when studied together researchers often examine if and how corporations influence environmental policy decisions drawing from literatures on corporate political activity corporate social and environmental performance and corporate environmental disclosure we develop and empirically examine two research questions concerning the relations between corporate political expenditures environmental performance and environmental disclosure the questions are 1 do corporations that are poorer environmental performers spend more on political activities than their better performing counterparts 2 is there an association between corporations spending on political activities and the extent of their financial report environmental disclosures we investigated these questions through analyses of data we gathered on a sample consisting of 119 u s environmentally sensitive firms for the 2001 2002 election cycle after controlling for firm size and specific industry effects our tests reveal a significant inverse relationship between firm environmental performance and political spending this is consistent with the notion that u s firms with relatively poorer environmental performance records engage more intensely in corporate political activities as part of their overall strategic management of their relationship with the state in addition a significant and positive association between the amount of political spending and the extent of environmental disclosure suggests that environmental disclosure and political spending are both proactive complementary tactics to strategically manage public policy pressure if corporations strategies are intentionally designed to unreasonably limit their environmental responsibilities or to misrepresent firm environmental performance then we argue that these activities reflect a significant lapse in ethical conduct

do schools matter for high math achievement evidence from the american mathematics competitions this paper uses data from the american mathematics competitions to examine the rates at which different high schools produce high achieving math students there are large differences in the frequency with which students from seemingly similar schools reach high achievement levels the distribution of unexplained school effects includes a thick tail of schools that produce many more high achieving students than is typical several additional analyses suggest that the differences are not primarily due to unobserved differences in student characteristics the differences are persistent across time suggesting that differences in the effectiveness of educational programs are not primarily due to direct peer effects

non public competition and public school performance evidence from west virginia abstractin this study we investigate whether non public school enrolment affects the performance of public school districts if homeschooling and private schools act as competition public school districts test scores should be positively associated with non public enrolment using data on west virginia county school districts and controlling for endogeneity with an instrumental variables approach we find that a one standard deviation increase in relative non public enrolment in a county is associated with statistically significant improvements in public school district test scores our findings thus confirm that non public enrolment and the competition it provides act to improve rather than impede public school performance

the determinants of donative revenue flows from alumni of higher education an empirical inquiry institutions of higher education are increasingly relying upon alumni giving and endowment earnings as sources of funding this paper utilizes a new database on average alumni donations at the institutional level and institutional characteristics to explore the role that lagged institutional characteristics and policy have on subsequent donations to the institution our results confirm the noncontemporaneous effects of variations in the average scholastic achievement of matriculated students a proxy for both student quality and student socioeconomic status on subsequent donative revenue flows and indirectly address some of the open questions left by previous theoretical inquiries

on the contract curve a test of alternative models of collective bargaining the traditional model of collective bargaining confines unions to settlements constrained by the employer s labor demand curve but an alternative model places wage employment outcomes on a contract curve that extends beyond the labor demand curve this paper derives a multidimensional hedonic contract curve model in which employment security provisions are used to maintain efficient bargains outside the employer s demand curve and distinguishes empirically between the contract curve and demand constraint models using data for public school teachers in new york state estimates clearly support the contract curve model over the demand constraint model by linking the gap between compensation and the value of the marginal product to the strength of employment security provisions

human capital vs signalling explanations of wages increases wages by directly increasing the worker s productivity this learning explanation is usually associated with human capital theory however it seems unlikely that learning explains all the wage differences associated with schooling and work history better educated workers are not a random sample of workers they have lower propensities to quit or to be absent are less likely to smoke drink or use illicit drugs and are generally healthier it is unlikely that employers make full use of differences in propensities to quit or to be absent or sick when hiring workers these characteristics are often not directly observed and the americans with disabilities act precludes firms from using either poor health or the likelihood of future sickness as a hiring criterion unless it is directly related to job performance however if low levels of education are associated with these unfavorable employee characteristics and employers are allowed to take education into account when hiring workers we would expect employers to favor better educated workers as a means of reducing their costs of sickness and job turnover in turn students will take these hiring criteria into account when deciding how long to stay in school students will choose a length of schooling to signal their ability to employers and employers will demand a minimum level of schooling

ethics and lobbying the case of real estate brokerage members of licensed occupations benefit from legal standards that limit entry into their professions is it ethical for these professionals to give political support to these standards i examined the case of real estate brokers and found that their educational requirements raise average commissions by one quarter of a percentage point costing consumers 5 4 billion per year without improving the quality of brokerage services the case raises interesting ethical issues which are difficult to resolve

the quality of schooling quantity alone is misleading although much research discusses the quantity of schooling as an effective impact on productivity and earnings most such research leaves out the idea of the quality of schooling which may cause biases in the estimated returns to schooling this paper consequently attempts to extend the standard mincerian approach to incorporate school quality as well as quantity it demonstrates how exclusion of quality in the standard procedure may cause biases in the estimated returns to years of schooling probably in the upward direction the paper explores the implications of this extension of the standard model for the case of young brazilian males it shows that the estimate of the private return to years of schooling using the preferred quality inclusive specification is only one half the estimate using the standard procedure indicating substantial upward bias in the standard estimates it further outlines a method for estimating a social return to quality and finds that it exceeds substantially the social return to quantity the paper then shows why this in turn suggests there may be an equity productivity trade off in schooling investments

location and education in south african cities under and after apartheid we model a south african city during apartheid in which both schooling and mobility are restricted on the basis of race and after apartheid in which no restrictions are imposed we first show that the inequality between blacks and whites decreases when apartheid laws are removed indeed blacks are better off because of human capital externalities due to the possibility of mixing with white students whereas whites are worse off due to negative human capital externalities and intensified land market competition after apartheid we also show that reducing the commuting costs of black children always increases the utility of black families and may even increase that of whites