effects of family background on earnings and returns to schooling evidence from brazil we investigate whether omitted family background variables are responsible for high returns to schooling estimated in brazil returns to schooling fall by about one third when parental schooling is added to wage equations surprisingly the schooling of fathers in law has larger effects on wages than the schooling of fathers on the basis of a model of assortative mating we interpret this as evidence that parental characteristics represent unobservable worker attributes rather than nepotism in the labor market we conclude that the family background bias in returns to schooling is modest and need not imply returns to family connections

sacred values the effect of information on attitudes toward payments for human organs abstract are attitudes about morally controversial and often prohibited market transactions affected by information about their costs and benefits we address this question for the case of payments for human organs we find in a survey experiment with us residents n 3 417 that providing information on the potential efficiency benefits of a regulated price mechanism for organs significantly increased support for payments from a baseline of 52 percent to 71 percent the survey was devised to minimize social desirability biases in responses and additional analyses validate the interpretation that subjects were reflecting on the case specific details provided rather than just reacting to any information

environmental regulation capital output and energy efficiency in china an empirical research based on integrated energy prices abstract how to improve environmental quality and achieve high quality development of economy have become important challenges for china in the new era based on the klems framework this paper analyzes the relationship between environmental regulation factor substitution and energy saving effect by using panel structure vector autoregression model and panel data of china industry from 2004 to 2014 the following conclusions are drawn 1 china s environmental regulation can promote the substitution of capital to energy however benefit of this substitution in the long run is greater than that in the short run 2 only in the long run can china s environmental regulations have significant energy saving effect technological innovation is the main reason for the improvement of energy saving effect of environmental regulation 3 china s environmental regulation will not significantly improve the structure of capital which makes the economic benefits low finally the paper discusses the possible ways to improve china s environmental regulation from the aspects of forming a scientific environmental supervision system improving energy pricing mechanism and capital structure

life expectancy and human capital investments evidence from maternal mortality declines longer life expectancy should encourage human capital accumulation since a longer time horizon increases the value of investments that pay out over time previous work has been unable to determine the empirical importance of this life expectancy effect due to the difficulty of isolating it from other effects of health on education we examine a sudden drop in maternal mortality risk in sri lanka between 1946 and 1953 which creates a sharp increase in life expectancy for school age girls without contemporaneous effects on health and which also allows for the use of boys as a control group using additional geographic variation we find that the 70 reduction in maternal mortality risk over the sample period increased female life expectancy at age 15 by 4 1 female literacy by 2 5 and female years of education by 4 0 authors

environmental and social accounting for brazil an environmentally extendedsocial accounting matrix sam has beenconstructed for brazil for the first time wereview in detail previous studies in thisfield describe the construction structure anddata sources of the brazilian sam anddemonstrate the effect of system closure examining a range of type i and type iimultipliers we show that incomes generated byfinal consumption are highly skewed towardsrich households but energy requirements andcarbon emissions are higher for the consumptionof the poor a significant negative correlationexists between employment and income on onehand and energy requirements and carbonemissions on the other while a significantpositive correlation exists between imports and energy and carbon these correlationsdemonstrate that there is scope for policiesthat pursue imports substitution and reduceenergy consumption and carbon emissions whilstincreasing employment and income

the effects of school spending on educational and economic outcomes evidence from school finance reforms since the coleman report many have questioned whether public school spending affects student outcomes the school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused dramatic changes to the structure of k 12 education spending in the united states to study the effect of these school finance reform induced changes in public school spending on long run adult outcomes we link school spending and school finance reform data to detailed nationally representative data on children born between 1955 and 1985 and followed through 2011 we use the timing of the passage of court mandated reforms and their associated type of funding formula change as exogenous shifters of school spending and we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts that were differentially exposed to school finance reforms depending on place and year of birth event study and instrumental variable models reveal that a 10 increase in per pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public school leads to 0 31 more completed years of education about 7 higher wages and a 3 2 percentage point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty effects are much more pronounced for children from low income families exogenous spending increases were associated with notable improvements in measured school inputs including reductions in student to teacher ratios increases in teacher salaries and longer school years jel codes j10 i20 h7

estimating returns to education using twins in urban china abstract this paper empirically estimates the return to education using twins data that the authors collected from urban china our ordinary least squares estimate shows that one year of schooling increases an individual s earnings by 8 4 if we use a within twin fixed effects model the return is reduced to 2 7 but rises to 3 8 after the correction of measurement error these results suggest that a large portion of the estimated returns to education is due to omitted ability or the family effect we further investigate why the true return is low and the omitted ability bias high and find evidence showing that it may be a consequence of china s education system which is highly selective and exam oriented more specifically we find that high school education may mainly serve as a mechanism to select college students but as a human capital investment per se it has low returns in terms of earnings in contrast both vocational school education and college education have a large return that is comparable to that found in the united states

education returns across quantiles of the wage function alternative explanations for returns to education by race in south america private wage returns to schooling in south africa in 1993 are twice as high for nonwhites as for whites and substantially higher at advanced levels of schooling for both races to explore how these returns might be expected to change as the proportion of africans with secondary and higher education increases quantile regressions for the wage function are estimated for african males and white males if the residuals based on a standard wage function specification are interpreted as omitted ability and it is assumed that ability increases decreases returns to schooling then we expect quantile returns to increase decrease at higher quantiles this is not observed for africans at the higher and secondary school level but is evident among whites at higher educational levels the opposite pattern of differential returns favoring the least able i e lowest deciles is reported for the lower tail of the educational distribution that is for africans at the level of primary school and for whites at secondary school authors

education gender gaps in pakistan is the labor market to blame abstract differential labor market returns to male and female education are one potential explanation for large gender gaps in education in pakistan we empirically test this explanation by estimating private returns to education separately for male and female wage earners this article contributes to the literature by using a variety of methodologies ordinary least squares heckman correction two stage least squares and household fixed effects in order to estimate economic returns to education the latest nationally representative data the pakistan integrated household survey 2002 are used earnings function estimates consistently reveal a sizable gender asymmetry in economic returns to education with returns to women s education being substantially and statistically significantly higher than men s the return to an additional year of schooling ranges between 7 and 11 for men and between 13 and 18 for women there are also large direct returns to women s education at low levels of schooling

astronomics in action the graduate earnings premium and the dragon effect in singapore white u s and latin american currencies portray images of national independence heroes singapore s 2 dollar bill the most widely circulated since there is no smaller denomination shows students in a classroom listening to a professor with a university in the background underneath there is just one word education singapore s obsession with education miami herald 8 september 2009 i introduction since the groundbreaking work of mincer 1974 many academics have looked closely at the question of what the return to education might be 1 however because of the lack of data the literature does not have much to say about singapore even though a lot of research has been done for advanced countries throughout the world 2 3 in this paper we employ a recent survey from the singapore national youth council to study one aspect of this topic the return to university education in singapore having a university education is usually perceived to be good for one s career although the extent to which this is true has been a constant point of contention 4 this debate had relied largely on anecdotes instead of econometric research understandably so because data is not easily available therefore this paper hopes to offer some evidence on the causal link between university education and earnings outcome in singapore however identification is a formidable challenge as in any research that aims to estimate the return to education although the positive association between education and earnings is a virtually ubiquitous fact prima facie evidence of income gaps may misrepresent what the true return to education is because individuals tend to make educational choices according to their abilities such income gaps would contain not only the return that is due to education the quantity of interest but also the return on unobserved abilities which is the confounding effect over the years economists have sought to disentangle the causal effect of education from the confounding effect of unobserved abilities in the data but the existing estimation approaches are not easily adaptable here for example methods that employ within twin comparisons or changes in compulsory schooling laws cannot be implemented owing to data limitations and the lack of important schooling reforms in singapore 5 in fact the dataset used here was compiled for a different purpose than economics which is to provide a better understanding of singapore s youths from a sociological perspective given these issues a new estimation approach has to be considered in this paper we propose to exploit a consequence li liu and zhang 2012 of chinese traditions generating the so called dragon effect to study the causal link between university education and income in singapore chinese is the largest ethnic group and malays indians and eurasians are the main ethnic minorities according to chinese traditions there are 12 creatures in the chinese zodiac where each represents a lunar year in a 12 year cycle among them the dragon is the most auspicious creature and babies born in a dragon year are believed to be superior 6 because of this conviction the dragon year has seen upswings in the rate of birth not just in singapore but also in places where chinese culture is prevalent 7 for example figure 1 plots the birth rate from 1970 in singapore based on resident women aged between 15 and 49 8 while the fertility rate was plunging early on it did increase momentarily during the dragon year of 1976 there was another sharp increase in 1988 9 and then in 2000 which marks the highly auspicious year of the golden dragon figure 1 omitted the positive relationship between the birth rate and the dragon year provides the rationale behind the identification strategy used here as the dragon cohort is larger than usual competition for entry into university would be more intense leading to what is known as the dragon effect

energy efficiency rebounding to a sound analytical perspective abstract recent controversy suggests that energy efficiency policies used to reduce carbon emissions might actually increase overall energy consumption the result would be an unintended increase in carbon emissions this paper examines the underlying issues of this so called rebound effect from both a historical perspective and through the results of a recent macroeconomic analysis completed for the united states depending on the assumptions of income and price elasticities as well as the supply demand interactions within a macroeconomic model the rebound effect might reduce overall savings by about 2 3 compared to a pure engineering analysis in other words an economy wide cost effective engineering savings of 30 might turn out to be only a 29 savings from a macroeconomic perspective despite the impact of a rebound effect the net result of energy efficiency policies can be a highly positive one

understanding the twentieth century growth in u s school spending persistent increases in spending on elementary and secondary schools have gone virtually undocumented real expenditure per student increased 3 percent per year over the period 1890 1990 decomposition of the spending growth shows that it resulted from a combination of falling pupil staff ratios increasing real wages to teachers and rising expenditure outside of the classroom although the expansion of education for the handicapped has had a disproportionate effect on spending most of the growth in expenditure during the 1980s came from other sources significant teacher salary increases particularly for females have failed to keep up with wages in other occupations

the impact of doe building technology energy efficiency programs on u s employment income and investment abstract the u s department of energy s office of energy efficiency and renewable energy eere analyzes the macroeconomic impacts of its programs that are designed to increase the energy efficiency of the u s residential and commercial building stock the analysis is conducted using the impact of sector energy technologies imset model a special purpose 188 sector input output model of the u s economy designed specifically to evaluate the impacts of energy efficiency investments and saving for the analysis described in the paper imset was amended to provide estimates of sector by sector capital requirements and investment in the scenario of the fiscal year fy 2005 building technologies bt program the technologies and building practices being developed and promoted by the bt program have the potential to save about 2 9 10 15 btu in buildings by the year 2030 about 27 of the expected growth in building energy consumption by the year 2030 the analysis reported in the paper finds that by the year 2030 these savings have the potential to increase employment by up to 446 000 jobs increase wage income by 7 8 billion reduce needs for capital stock in the energy sector and closely related supporting industries by about 207 billion and the corresponding annual level of investment by 13 billion and create net capital savings that are available to grow the nation s future economy

technologies energy systems and the timing of co2 emissions abatement an overview of economic issues abstract this paper provides an overview of economic issues involved in timing limitations on co2 emissions from energy systems it highlights issues relating to technology availability development and diffusion and the inertia of energy systems as being particularly important the paper sets this in the context of wider uncertainties surrounding the problem and briefly considers other aspects relevant to timing the paper is stimulated by the debate in the usa about optimal abatement paths in particular recent claims that it would be economically preferable to defer such abatement action in favour of measures that support technology development but do not affect emission trends for many years this paper categorizes the various economic issues involved and concludes that for each economic argument that has been advanced to justify deferring emission constraints there are counter vailing economic arguments that could be used in support of rapid near term emissions abatement rational policy lies between these extremes a policy of deferring all emissions abatement exposes economic systems and industries as well as the environment to significantly greater costs and risks than those arising from a more balanced approach furthermore the modelling studies that have been used to justify deferring emissions abatement do so because they embody the economic factors favourable to delay and largely neglect the countervailing issues to the point where their results have little relevance to the overall problem of timing emissions abatement

economic energy and greenhouse emissions impacts of some consumer choice technology and government outlay options abstract the impacts of selected spending options in the australian economy are determined in terms of energy consumption greenhouse gas emissions and a range of economic parameters six case studies of one current practice and one alternative environmentally motivated spending option are carried out describing consumer choices technologies and government outlays the assessment method is based on input output theory and as such enables both the direct and indirect effects of spending to be quantified in general the results indicate that pro environmental objectives such as reductions in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are compatible with broad socio economic benefits such as increases in employment and income and reductions in imports

employment and other macroeconomic benefits of an innovation led climate strategy for the united states abstract climate protection policy and its analysis are pursued in the context of other societal goals among them the maintenance of economic growth and high employment too often however analysis of energy and climate policy does not realistically reflect technological conditions and the dynamics of technological change this tendency unnecessarily associates the decline in energy consumption or carbon emissions with the decline in national economic output or income but there is ample prima facie evidence to the contrary just as in the 19th century when the perceived need to reduce labor inputs as part of the production process spurred labor saving technological progress now the need to reduce energy and pollution costs could spur innovation and diffusion of efficient and clean energy technologies this in turn can increase overall growth in economic productivity energy technology analysts have identified many such existing and near term commercial technologies as well as innovations that can be foreseen beyond the immediate technological horizon which would become widely used if policies were developed to overcome market and institutional barriers this paper presents a macroeconomic analysis for a set of policies that would induce the adoption of more efficient and low carbon technologies and finds that overall employment and economic output could be increased by small amounts while significantly reducing carbon emissions

income schooling and ability evidence from a new sample of identical twins we develop a model of optimal schooling investments and estimate it using new data on approximately 700 identical twins we estimate an average return to schooling of 9 percent for identical twins but estimated returns appear to be slightly higher for less able individuals simple cross section estimates are marginally upward biased these empirical results imply that abler individuals attain more schooling because they face lower marginal costs of schooling not because of higher marginal benefits

school inputs and educational outcomes in south africa we examine the relationship between educational inputs primarily pupilteacher ratios and school outcomes in south africa immediately before the end of apartheid government black households were severely limited in their residential choice under apartheid and attended schools for which funding decisions were made centrally by white controlled entities over which they had no control the allocations resulted in marked disparities in average class sizes controlling for household background variables we find strong and significant effects of pupilteacher ratios on enrollment on educational achievement and on test scores for numeracy

schooling and labor market consequences of school construction in indonesia evidence from an unusual policy experiment between 1973 and 1978 the indonesian government engaged in one of the largest school construction programs on record combining differences across regions in the number of schools constructed with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the program suggests that each primary school constructed per 1 000 children led to an average increase of 0 12 to 0 19 years of education as well as a 1 5 to 2 7 percent increase in wages this implies estimates of economic returns to education ranging from 6 8 to 10 6 percent

estimates of the returns to schooling from sibling data fathers sons and brothers data on brothers and on fathers and sons from the national longitudinal survey are used to consider the impact of omitted variables and measurement errors on the economic returns to schooling the analysis suggests that the upward bias in estimated returns due to omitted variables is likely offset by an equal downward bias resulting from measurement errors in reported schooling controlling for both of these potential sources of bias yields results comparable to conventional regression estimates of the economic return to schooling

how information affects support for education spending evidence from survey experiments in germany and the united states to study whether current spending levels and public knowledge of them contribute to transatlantic differences in policy preferences we implement parallel survey experiments in germany and the united states in both countries support for increased education spending and teacher salaries falls when respondents receive information about existing levels treatment effects vary by prior knowledge in a manner consistent with information effects rather than priming support for salary increases is inversely related to salary levels across american states suggesting that higher salaries could explain much of germans lower support for increases information about the tradeoffs between specific spending categories shifts preferences from class size reduction towards alternative purposes additional german experiments indicate that information effects extend to specific reform proposals and to other areas of public spending

the job generation impacts of expanding industrial cogeneration sustainable economic development requires the efficient production and use of energy combined heat and power chp offers a promising technological approach to achieving both goals while a recent u s executive order set a national goal of 40 gw of new industrial chp by 2020 the deployment of chp is challenged by financial regulatory and workforce barriers discrepancies between private and public interests can be minimized by policies promoting energy based economic development in this context a great deal of rhetoric has addressed the ambiguous goal of growing green jobs our research provides a systematic evaluation of the job impacts of an investment tax credit that would subsidize industrial chp deployment we introduce a hybrid analysis approach combining simulations using the national energy modeling system with input output modeling nems simulates general equilibrium effects including supply and demand side resources we identify first order employment impacts by creating bill of goods expenditures for the installation and operation of industrial chp systems second order impacts are then estimated based on the redirection of energy bill savings accruing to consumers these include jobs across the economy created by the lower electricity prices that would result from increased reliance on energy efficient chp systems on a jobs per gwh basis we find that the second order impacts are approximately twice as large as the first order impacts

impacts of market based climate change policies on the us pulp and paper industry abstract much of the policy debates on climate issues have centered on the optimal level and timing of policy interventions that cost effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions we briefly review the range of policy issues in our paper and assess the impact that climate change policies may have on energy use and carbon emissions in the us pulp and paper industry we then present results from time series based analyses of changes in technologies and fuel mix and compare the results with engineering based technology analyses of us pulp and paper production for a copy of the model and software send e mail to mruth bu edu projections based on information for eight paper and paperboard categories are presented for the years 1995 2020 the findings indicate that under a wide range of specifications and policy assumptions carbon emissions from fossil fuel use per ton of product are likely to decline when combined with investment incentives an additional cost effective reduction in carbon emissions per ton of product will be realized however expected increases in output from the industry are likely to be higher than the reductions in energy and carbon intensities the policy implications of these findings are discussed