china s engagement with neo liberalism path dependency geography and party self reinvention china s post mao market reform even after the asian crisis does not conform to the standard imf world bank model and the state continues to mediate market reform three principal factors have influenced how the state mediates china s market reform path dependency a result of china s communist and nationalist revolution china s geography which favours developmental state type industrialisation and most important of all the chinese communist party s successful post mao self reinvention that has enabled it to remain in power as a monopolistic party these factors determine that china s engagement with neo liberalism will be a loose hug rather than an intimate embrace

early tracking and the misfortune of being young recent research suggests that the relative age of a student within a grade has a causal effect on educational achievement and that this effect fades with the duration of schooling in this study we estimate the causal relative age effect on track choice in austria a country where students are first tracked in grade 5 at the age of 10 years and again in grade 9 we find a strong positive relative age effect on track choice in grades 5 8 the age effect persists beyond grade 8 for students from less favorable socioeconomic backgrounds and students in urban areas

school choice school quality and postsecondary attainment we study the impact of a public school choice lottery in charlotte mecklenburg schools on college enrollment and degree completion we find a significant overall increase in college attainment among lottery winners who attend their first choice school using rich administrative data on peers teachers course offerings and other inputs we show that the impacts of choice are strongly predicted by gains on several measures of school quality gains in attainment are concentrated among girls girls respond to attending a better school with higher grades and increases in college preparatory course taking while boys do not

on the benefits of concurrent lending and underwriting this paper examines whether there are efficiencies that benefit issuers and underwriters when a financial intermediary concurrently lends to an issuer while also underwriting its public securities offering we find issuers particularly noninvestmentgrade issuers for whom informational economies of scope are likely to be large benefit through lower underwriter fees and discounted loan yield spreads underwriters both commercial banks as well as investment banks engage in concurrent lending and provide price discounts albeit in different ways we find concurrent lending helps underwriters build relationships increasing the probability of receiving current and future business for many years the 1933 glass steagall act prevented commercial banks from underwriting corporate bonds and equities due to the relaxation and recent repeal of the act many commercial banks have acquired investment banks or developed investment banking capabilities internally to create universal banks that can offer an array of financial services the entry of commercial banks into underwriting markets has increased the potential for financial institutions to offer both lending and underwriting services in particular it has become increasingly common for financial intermediaries to provide loans to a firm while also underwriting the firm s public securities in fact concurrent lending and underwriting has increased substantially over time in 1994 only 1 of seasoned equity issuers received a loan from their underwriter at around the time of issuance but by 2001 over 20 of all deals were concurrent the movement toward concurrent lending and underwriting raises a host of interesting questions first why are deals concurrent

long term effects of class size this article evaluates the long term effects of class size in primary school we use rich data from sweden and exploit variation in class size created by a maximum class size rule smaller classes in the last three years of primary school age 10 to 13 are beneficial for cognitive and noncognitive ability at age 13 and improve achievement at age 16 most important we find that smaller classes have positive effects on completed education wages and earnings at age 27 to 42 the estimated wage effect is large enough to pass a cost benefit test

rationalizing child support decisions the authors provide a framework within which the child support compliance decisions of noncustodial fathers and the child support awards set by institutional agents can be coherently interpreted the model of child support transfers is able to capture qualitatively the features of the monthly payment distribution estimated parental decision rules are used to infer the implicit weights given by institutional agents to the postdivorce welfare of parents and children the authors find that the weight attached to the combined welfare of the custodial mother and child is significantly less than the weight given to the father s welfare in most sample cases copyright 1995 by american economic association

bringing the benefits of david to goliath special economic zones and institutional improvement abstractthe theory behind special economic zones sezs focuses on their role in overcoming broader policy failings in a country this paper hypothesizes that the ability of smaller countries to reform more quickly provides a theoretical missing link as to how sezs can assist reform developing the idea of sezs as a small country in a large country using a new database the paper tests this proposition by examining if sezs have actually been able to spur on institutional improvement in large countries results show that sezs do influence the institutional development of a country contingent upon prevailing institutional trends

on the economic dividend of devolution rodriguez pose a and gill n 2005 on the economic dividend of devolution regional studies 39 405 420 recent political and academic discourse about devolution has tended to stress the economic advantages of the transfer of power from national to subnational institutions this economic dividend arises through devolved administrations ability to tailor policies to local needs generate innovation in service provision through inter territorial competition and stimulate participation and accountability by reducing the distance between those in power and their electorates this paper however outlines two related caveats first there are many forces that accompany devolution and work in an opposite direction devolved governmental systems may carry negative implications in terms of national economic efficiency and equity as well as through the imposition of significant institutional burdens second the economic gains as well as the downsides that devolution may engender are contingent to some

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

the contribution of rising school quality to u s economic growth abstract u s public school expenditures per pupil increased by a factor of 9 during the 20th century this paper quantifies how much u s labor quality has grown due to the rise in educational spending a schooling model and cross sectional earnings variations across cohorts are exploited to identify the effect of the increased school expenditures on labor quality growth the findings are that i u s labor quality increased by 0 4 per year between 1967 and 2000 one fifth of which is attributable to the rise in educational spending and ii labor quality growth explains one quarter of the rise in labor productivity

what drives the reversal of the gender education gap evidence from germany we study the mechanisms that are associated with the gender education gap and its reversal in germany we focus on three outcomes graduation from upper secondary school any tertiary education and tertiary degree neither individual and family background nor labour market characteristics appear to be strongly associated with the gender education gap there is some evidence that the gender gap in upper secondary education reflects the rising share of single parent households which impacts boys attainment more than girls the gender education gap in tertiary education is correlated with the development of class sizes and social norms

teacher experience and the class size effect experimental evidence abstract we analyze teacher experience as a moderating factor for the effect of class size reduction on student achievement in the early grades using data from the tennessee star experiment with random assignment of teachers and students to classes of different sizes the analysis is motivated by the high costs of class size reductions and the need to identify the circumstances under which this investment is most rewarding we find a class size effect only for senior teachers the effect exists at all deciles of the achievement distribution but is less pronounced at lower deciles we further show that senior teachers outperform rookies only in small classes interestingly the class size effect is likely due to a higher quality of instruction in small classes

divorce risk wages and working wives a quantitative life cycle analysis of female labour force participation this article develops a quantitative life cycle model to study the increase in married women s labour force participation lfp we calibrate the model to match key life cycle statistics for the 1935 cohort and use it to assess the changed environment faced by the 1955 cohort we find that a higher divorce probability and changes in wage structure are each able to explain a large proportion of the lfp increase higher divorce risk increases lfp not because the latter contributes to higher marital assets or greater labour market experience however instead it is the result of conflicting spousal preferences towards the adjustment of marital consumption in the face of increased divorce risk the dramatic increase in the second half of the twentieth century in married women s labour force participation lfp has given rise to a large and growing literature that explores the roles of the multiple forces that led to this evolution some explanations have emphasised technological change in the household greenwood et al 2005 or in medical contraceptive technology goldin and katz 2002 albanesi and olivetti 2009a b knowles 2007 other explanations have emphasised changes in the wage

the effect of school quality on educational attainment and wages the paper examines the effects of school pupil teacher ratios and type of school on educational attainment and wages using the british national child development survey ncds the ncds is a panel survey which has followed a cohort of individuals born in march 1958 and has a rich set of background variables recorded throughout the individual s life the results suggest that once we control for ability and family background the pupil teacher ratio has no impact on educational qualifications or on male wages it has an impact on women s wages at the age of 33 particularly those of low ability we also find evidence that those who attend selective schools have better educational outcomes and in the case of men higher wages at the age of 33 the impact is higher for the type of individuals who are less likely not to attend selective schools but for whom a comparison group does exist among those attending

do dropouts drop out too soon wealth health and happiness from compulsory schooling abstract this paper uses compulsory schooling laws to evaluate high school dropout decisions the main empirical result is that lifetime wealth increases by about 15 with an extra year of compulsory schooling students compelled to stay in school are also less likely to report being in poor health unemployed and unhappy the main conclusion is that high school aversion alone is unlikely to explain why dropouts forgo substantial gains to lifetime wealth the results are more consistent with the possibility that adolescents ignore or heavily discount future consequences when deciding to drop out of school if teenagers are myopic making school compulsory or offering incentives to stay in school may help improve lifetime outcomes

rules of the game the place of institutions in regional economic change gertler m s rules of the game the place of institutions in regional economic change regional studies institutions exert a pervasive influence on the evolution and character of regional economies yet this role is poorly understood within recent debates on neoliberalism varieties of capitalism and other approaches to the study of economic change a reconstituted institutional economic geography must accommodate individual agency institutional evolution interscalar relations and comparative methodologies examining recent work on universities in local economies as well as on creativity based strategies and social inclusion polarization it is shown how locally distinctive institutional architectures shape evolutionary trajectories leading to differentiated social and economic outcomes the paper then enunciates some important principles of methodology and theory building in institutional analysis gertler m s les regles du jeu le role des institutions dans le developpement economique region

luther and the girls religious denomination and the female education gap in nineteenth century prussia martin luther urged each town to have a girls school so that girls would learn to read the gospel thereby evoking a surge of building girls schools in protestant areas using county and town level data from the first prussian census of 1816 we show that a larger share of protestants decreased the gender gap in basic education this result holds when using only the exogenous variation in protestantism due to a county s or town s distance to wittenberg the birthplace of the reformation similar results are found for the gender gap in literacy among the adult population in 1871

small states in big trouble state reorganization in australia denmark new zealand and sweden in the 1980s in australia denmark new zealand and sweden in the 1980s coalitions of politicians fiscal bureaucrats and capital and labor in sectors exposed to international competition allied to transform the largest single nontradables sector in their society the state particularly the welfare state they exposed state personnel and agencies to market pressures and competition to reduce the cost of welfare and other state services the impetus for change came from rising foreign public and private debt rising public debt levels and expensive welfare states interacted to create a tax wedge between employers wage costs and workers received wages this undercut international competitiveness worsening current account deficits and leading to more foreign debt accumulation two factors explain variation in the degree of reorganization in each country differences in their electoral and constitutional regimes and the willingness of left parties to risk splitting their core constituencies introduction of market pressures is an effort to go beyond the liberalization of the economy common in industrial countries during the 1980s and both to institutionalize limits to welfare spending and to change the nature of statesociety relations away from corporatist forms of interest intermediation in short not just less state but a different state

breaking the cycle the effect of education on welfare receipt among children of welfare recipients abstract we examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare backgrounds use welfare themselves our data consist of administrative educational records for grade 12 students in a canadian province linked with their own and their parents welfare records we address potential endogeneity problems by 1 controlling for ability using past test scores 2 using an instrument for graduation based on school principal fixed effects and 3 using a heckman singer type unobserved heterogeneity estimator graduation would reduce the probability of welfare receipt of drop outs by 1 2 to 3 4 effects are larger for individuals from troubled family backgrounds and low income neighbourhoods

labour market impacts of school expenditure and class size evidence from china this study is a first attempt to estimate the impact of school resources on students subsequent labour market earnings in china combining unprecedented school data from the early 1950s to the 199

industrial capitalisation and spatial transformation in chinese cities strategic repositioning state owned enterprise capitalisation and the reproduction of urban space in beijing this study examines the urbanisation of capital in the context of a socialist economy undergoing profound market transition it identifies the dynamics of state capital as a missing link in understanding the variegated forces shaping chinese cities through a case study of beijing china s capital city contrary to the popular perception of the rolling back of state owned enterprises soes as a natural outcome of capital switching from a declining primary circuit to a booming secondary circuit this empirical study of urban transformation in the beijing metropolis identifies an intriguing trajectory of capitalisation without privatisation whereby the commodification of the land and housing market has been accompanied by a growing share of capital assets under the ownership control of soes and a spatial concentration of state capital toward the city centre since the turn of the new century the development experience centred on the capitalisation of soes is shown to be reflective of the new strategic

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

why the apple doesn t fall far understanding intergenerational transmission of human capital parents with higher education levels have children with higher education levels however is this because parental education actually changes the outcomes of children suggesting an important spillover of education policies or is it merely that more able individuals who have higher education also have more able children this paper proposes to answer this question with a unique dataset from norway using the reform of the education system that was implemented in different municipalities at different times in the 1960s as an instrument for parental education we find little evidence of a causal relationship between parents education and children s education despite significant ols relationships we find 2sls estimates that are consistently lower than the ols estimates with the only statistically significant effect being a positive relationship between mother s education and son s education these findings suggest that the high correlations between parents and children s education are due primarily to family characteristics and inherited ability and not education spillovers

a transitional institution for the emerging land market in urban china chinese economic reforms since 1978 have been a continuous process of fundamental institutional change the new institution of ambiguous property rights over state owned urban land evolves from the

land leasing and local public finance in china s regional development evidence from prefecture level cities by analysing the evolution of local governments roles in different periods of china s growth in transition this paper explores local fiscal incentives to use subsidised land and infrastructure as key instruments in regional competition for manufacturing investment since the mid 1990s local land development behaviour is related to china s current land use institutions and intergovernmental arrangements on the basis of panel data covering prefectural level cities from 1999 to 2003 the paper empirically identifies and compares the fiscal impacts of different forms of land leasing by negotiation versus by auction tender policy implications are drawn from this analysis for the further reform of china s urban land system and fiscal institutions

special economic zones and the opening of the chinese economy some lessons for economic liberalization abstract this paper studies the implications of special economic zones in china s economic transition and attempts to draw some policy lessons for economic liberalization in a more general context establishing the zones has been the first and most crucial step that china took to reform and open its economy since 1979 the zones establishment performance and impacts on china s transition are examined in addition to related reform efforts and policy issues it is argued that the zones may serve as a policy means in facilitating trade and financial liberalization enhancing resource utilization and promoting economic growth and structural changes

experimental estimates of education production functions this paper analyzes data on 11 600 students and their teachers who were randomly assigned to different size classes from kindergarten through third grade statistical methods are used to adjust for nonrandom attrition and transitions between classes the main conclusions are 1 on average performance on standardized tests increases by four percentile points the first year students attend small classes 2 the test score advantage of students in small classes expands by about one percentile point per year in subsequent years 3 teacher aides and measured teacher characteristics have little effect 4 class size has a larger effect for minority students and those on free lunch 5 hawthorne effects were unlikely

the long run educational cost of world war ii an important component of the long run cost of a war is the loss of human capital suffered by school age children who receive less education austrian and german individuals who were 10 years old during the conflict or were more directly involved through their parents received less education than comparable individuals from nonwar countries such as switzerland and sweden we also show that these individuals experienced a sizable earnings loss some 40 years after the war which can be attributed to the educational loss caused by the conflict the implied consequences in terms of gross domestic product loss are calculated

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

collateral damage the german food crisis educational attainment and labor market outcomes of german post war cohorts using the german 1970 census to study educational and labor market outcomes of cohorts born during the german food crisis after world war ii i document that those born between november 1945 and may 1946 have significantly lower educational attainment and occupational status than cohorts born shortly before or after several alternative explanations for this finding are tested most likely a short spell of severe undernutrition around the end of the war has impaired intrauterine conditions in early pregnancies and resulted in long term detriments among the affected cohorts this conjecture is corroborated by evidence from austria

new trends of suburbanization in beijing since 1990 from government led to market oriented feng j zhou y and wu f new trends of suburbanization in beijing since 1990 from government led to market oriented regional studies since the 1990s suburbanization has been continuing in china along with the deepening of market transition the process of suburbanization has gone beyond purely government initiated relocation of households and polluting industries based on the newest population census this paper identifies some major new trends of suburbanization in beijing the new round of suburbanization has been driven by the construction of suburban villas and affordable housing rising private car ownership the decentralization of industry and the development of large suburban shopping malls and retail parks passively relocated households are no longer the dominant source of suburbanization suburbanization in beijing has evolved into a new stage of more market oriented development in the suburbs feng j zhou y et wu f nouvelles tendances de la suburbanisation a beijing pekin depuis 1

unemployment marriage and divorce in this paper we examine whether the business cycle plays a role in marriage and divorce we use data on spain since the differences between recession and expansion periods across regions are quite pronounced in that country we find that the unemployment rate is negatively associated with the marriage rate pointing to a pro cyclical evolution of marriage however the response of the divorce rate to the business cycle is mixed results show the existence of different patterns depending on geography divorce rates in coastal regions are pro cyclical while in inland regions divorces react to unemployment in a counter cyclical way

life cycle schooling and dynamic selection bias models and evidence for five cohorts of american males this paper examines an empirical regularity found in many societies that family influences on the probability of transiting from one grade level to the next diminish at higher levels of education we examine the statistical model used to establish the empirical regularity and the intuitive behavioral interpretation often used to rationalize it we show that the implicit economic model assumes myopia the intuitive interpretive model is identified only by imposing arbitrary distributional assumptions onto the data we produce an alternative choice theoretic model with fewer parameters that rationalizes the same data and is not based on arbitrary distributional assumptions

early gender gaps among university graduates abstract we use data from six cohorts of university graduates in germany to assess the extent of gender gaps in college and labor market performance twelve to eighteen months after graduation men and women enter college in roughly equal numbers but more women than men complete their degrees women enter college with slightly better high school grades but women leave university with slightly lower marks immediately following university completion male and female full timers work a very similar number of hours per week but men earn more than women across the pay distribution with an unadjusted gender gap in full time monthly earnings of about 20 log points on average including a large set of controls reduces the gap to 5 10 log points the single most important proximate factor that explains the gap is field of study at university

unilateral divorce the decreasing gender gap and married women s labor force participation married women s labor force participation lfp increased dramatically in the united states between the 1940 and 1960 cohort the two cohorts lived under different divorce regimes unilateral divorce rather than mutual consent the 1960 cohort also had a lower gender wage gap we use a quantitative dynamic life cycle model of endogenous marital status calibrated to key statistics for the 1940 cohort to study the effects of these two changes we find that both drivers combined are able to account for over 50 percent of the increase in married women s lfp and also generate large movements in marriage and divorce rates

federalism and the soft budget constraint the government s incentives to bail out inefficient projects are determined by the trade off between political benefits and economic costs the latter depending on the decentralization of government two effects of federalism are derived first fiscal competition among local governments under factor mobility increases the opportunity costs of bailout and thus serves as a commitment device the competition effect second monetary centralization together with fiscal decentralization induces a conflict of interests and thus may harden budget constraints and reduce inflation the checks and balance effect the authors analysis is used to interpret china s recent experience of transition to a market economy copyright 1998 by american economic association

gender differences in educational attainment evidence on the role of tracking from a finnish quasi experiment this paper studies the relationship between the timing of tracking of pupils into vocational and academic secondary education and gender differences in educational attainment and income we argue that in a system that streams students into vocational and academic tracks relatively late age 15 16 girls are more likely to choose the academic track than boys because of gender differences in the timing of puberty we exploit the finnish comprehensive school reform of the 1970 s to analyze this hypothesis this reform postponed the tracking of students from the age of 10 11 to 15 16 and was adopted gradually by municipalities so that we can observe members of the same cohorts in both systems we find that the postponement of the tracking age increased gender differences in the probability of choosing the academic secondary education and in the probability of continuing into academic tertiary education the reform had particularily negative effects on boys from non academic family backgrounds finally the reform decreased the gender wage gap in adult income by four percentage points

the phantom gender difference in the college wage premium abstract a growing literature seeks to explain why so many more women than men now attend college a commonly cited stylized fact is that the college wage premium is and has been higher for women than for men after identifying and correcting a bias in estimates of college wage premiums i find that there has been essentially no gender difference in the college wage premium for at least a decade a similar pattern appears in quantile wage regressions and for advanced degree wage premiums

the size of countries does it matter borders are a man made institution and as such their shape cannot be taken as part of the physical landscape the size of countries is endogenous to politico economic forces this paper discusses recent efforts by economists to study three related questions what determines the evolution of the size of countries does size matter for economic success given the trend toward decentralization and of creation of supernational unions such as the eu is the meaning of national borders evolving jel h10

could do better the effectiveness of incentives and competition in schools this paper studies the eects of incentive mechanisms and of the competitive environment on the interaction between schools and stu dents in a set up where their eort aects the students educational attainment we show that increasing the power of the incentive scheme and the eectiveness of competition may have the counterintuitive ef fect of lowering the students attainment in a simple dynamic set up where the reputation of the schools aects recruitment we show that increased competition leads to segregation of pupils by ability

cohort effects and the returns to education in west germany using a mincer type wage function we estimate cohort effects in the returns to education for west german workers born between 1925 and 1974 the main problem to be tackled in the specification is to separately identify cohort experience and possibly also age effects in the returns for women we find a large and robust decline in schooling premia in the private sector the returns to a further year of post compulsory education fell from twelve per cent for the 1945 49 cohort to about seven per cent for those born in the early 1970s cohort effects in men s returns to education are less obvious but we do find evidence that they too have declined we conclude by identifying possible reasons for the decline

college choice and wages estimates using data on female twins the authors assess the impact of college quality on women s earnings and the influence of family and individual endowments on college choice using new data from a survey of identical and nonidentical twins born in minnesota the estimates reject models that ignore school choice the statistically preferred estimates suggest that ph d granting private universities with well paid senior faculty and smaller enrollments produce students who have significantly higher earnings later in life both the quantity of schooling and the quality of schooling resources are allocated to higher endowed individuals which exacerbates preexisting inequality in human capital and biases conventional estimates of school quality effects copyright 1996 by mit press

zero returns to compulsory schooling in germany evidence and interpretation abstract we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings using changes in compulsory schooling laws in west germany after world war ii most estimates in the literature indicate returns in the range of 10 to 15 while our research design is very similar to studies for various other countries we find a zero return we find no evidence that this is due to labor market institutions or the apprenticeship training system in germany the result might be due to the fact that the basic skills most relevant for the labor market are learned earlier in germany than in other countries

wish you were here quasi experimental evidence on the effect of education on self reported attitude toward immigrants abstract we use european social survey and labour force survey data from 2002 to 2012 to estimate the causal effect of years of education on european natives opinion toward immigration by exploiting the exogenous discontinuity generated by reforms in compulsory education in europe in the 1940s through the 1990s our findings show that higher levels of education lead to a more positive reported attitude toward immigrants we also investigate the mechanisms behind the effect of education on reported attitudes by evaluating both economic and non economic channels we find that higher levels of education place individuals in occupations that are less exposed to the negative effects of migration although not in sectors occupations where the share of migrants is necessarily smaller suggesting that migrants and low educated natives may be complementary rather than substitutes in the labour market in addition education alters values and the cognitive assessment of the role of immigration in host societies with a positive effect on reported attitude toward diversity and on the assessment of immigration s role in host countries our findings suggest that education as a policy instrument can increase social cohesion in societies that are subject to large immigration flows

educational reform ability and family background in this paper we evaluate the impact of a major school reform that took place in the 1950s in sweden on educational attainment and earnings the reform which has many common elements with reforms in other european countries including the uk consisted of increasing compulsor schooling imposing a national curriculum and abolishing selection by ability into academic and non academic streams at the age of 12 comprehensive school reform our data combines survey data with administrative sources we find that the reform increased both the educational attainment and the earnings of children whose fathers had just compulsory education however the earnings of those with educated parents declined possibly because of a dilution of quality at the top end of the education levels the overall effect of the reform was however positive

explaining women s success technological change and the skill content of women s work the closing of the gender wage gap is an ongoing phenomenon in industrialized countries however research has been limited in its ability to understand the causes of these changes due in part to an inability to directly compare the work of women to that of men in this study we use a new approach for analyzing changes in the gender pay gap that uses direct measures of job tasks and gives a comprehensive characterization of how work for men and women has changed in recent decades using data from west germany we find that women have witnessed relative increases in non routine analytic tasks and non routine interactive tasks which are associated with higher skill levels the most notable difference between the genders is however the pronounced relative decline in routine task inputs among women with little change for men these relative task changes explain a substantial fraction of the closing of the gender wage gap our evidence suggests that these task changes are driven at least in part by technological change we also show that these task changes are related to the recent polarization of employment between low and high skilled occupations that we observed in the 1990s

residential redevelopment and the entrepreneurial local state the implications of beijing s shifting emphasis on urban redevelopment policies the entrepreneurial nature of local government activities has significantly influenced socioeconomic and spatial changes in urban china it is against this backdrop that property led redevelopment projects were implemented in beijing after 1990 guided by a programme whose very success depended on the participation of real estate capital for financial contributions in 2000 however a new policy was put in practice which aimed at supplying affordable housing on government provided land to increase the rehousing rate this paper analyses the implications of this shifting emphasis on beijing s redevelopment policy and examines whether the local government has become less entrepreneurial and more socially inclusive in its redevelopment approach based on the case study of two redevelopment projects the paper argues that the local state s entrepreneurial nature has persisted and that this is largely due to its power to dispose of urban land use rights effectively making local governments de facto landlords

gender gap in peer to peer lending evidence from china abstract this paper documents and analyzes the gender gap in the online credit market using data from renrendai a leading peer to peer lending platform in china we show that lending to female borrowers is associated with better loan performance including a lower probability of default a higher expected profit and a lower expected loss than for their male peers however despite the higher creditworthiness we don t find any measurable gender impact on funding success rate meaning that female borrowers have to compensate lenders by providing higher profitability to achieve a similar funding probability these evidences indicate the existence of a gender gap that discriminate against female borrowers further analysis implies that this gender gap is independent of the amount of information disclosed by borrowers

gender gaps in the effects of childhood family environment do they persist into adulthood we examine the differential effects of family disadvantage on the education and adult labor market outcomes of men and women using high quality administrative data on the entire population of denmark born between 1966 and 1995 we link parental education and family structure during childhood to male female and brother sister differences in adolescent outcomes educational attainment and adult earnings and employment our results are consistent with u s findings that boys benefit more from an advantageous family environment than do girls in terms of grade school outcomes father s education which has not been examined in previous studies is particularly important for sons however we find a very different pattern of parental influence on adult outcomes gender gaps in educational attainment employment and earnings are increasing in maternal education benefiting daughters paternal education decreases the gender gaps in educational attainment favoring sons and labor market outcomes favoring daughters we conclude that differences in the behavior of school aged boys and girls may be poor proxies for differences in skills that drive longer term outcomes

reform and openness why china s economic reforms have delayed democracy most theories that seek to explain democratization look to changes in the economy as the precursor to significant political liberalization locating the main causal factor in either severe economic crisis or rapid economic growth in the chinese context by contrast the communist party has extricated itself from the socialist social contract with the urban working class without losing its grip on political power moreover china has maintained a rapid pace of economic growth for over twenty five years without significant political liberalization comparative analysis of china s post 1978 reform policies yields insights both across types of socialist transition comparing china with eastern europe and russia and across time comparing china with other high growth east asian economies a key factor in china s ability to reform the economy without sacrificing political control is the timing and sequencing of its foreign direct investment fdi liberalization there are two key variables that are important to this comparative analysis china s pattern of ownership diversification and china s mode of integration into the global economy the article relates these two variables to the success of economic change without political liberalization in particular how fdi liberalization has affected relations between workers and the ruling communist party reform and openness in this context resulted in a strengthened chinese state a weakened civil society especially labor and a delay in political liberalization

higher education enrolment in bangladesh does the wage premium matter abstractthis paper empirically examines the decisions of individuals to enrol in a course of tertiary education in bangladesh focussing on the period 1999 to 2009 of particular interest is whethe

college entry by blacks since 1970 the role of college costs family background and the returns to education college enrollment of black 18 19 year old high school graduates declined from 1980 through 1984 and then rebounded after 1984 this paper presents data from a time series of cross sections of 18 19 year old youths from 1973 through 1988 to test the role of family background direct college costs local economic conditions and returns to college in driving these trends the evidence suggests that on the one hand increases in direct college costs were driving enrollment rates downward throughout the eighties on the other hand dramatic increases in average parental education for black youths exerted upward pressure on college enrollment by blacks particularly in the latter half of the decade the net effect of these two factors contributed to the pattern of decline and recovery observed during the eighties

effect of secondary school fees on educational attainment in this study the heterogeneity of the fee abolition process in west german secondary schools is used to identify the effect of school fees on educational attainment and to obtain an estimate of the price elasticity of upper secondary education the analysis is based on representative individual level data from three annual surveys of the german mikrozensus while coefficients cannot be estimated precisely the results suggest that on average upper secondary school attainment increased by at least 8 percent in response to the fee abolition the educational attainment of females appears to be more price sensitive than that of males