disentangling the college wage premium estimating a model with endogenous education choices this article proposes and empirically implements a structural model of education choices and wage determination to quantitatively evaluate the contributions of productivity enhancement and ability signaling in the college wage premium the model is estimated under various distributional parameterizations using 1990 u s census 5 public use micro sample under these parameterizations i find that college education enhances attendees productivity by about 40 and productivity enhancement accounts for close to two thirds of the college wage premium

can falling supply explain the rising return to college for younger men a cohort based analysis although the college high school wage gap for younger u s men has doubled over the past 30 years the gap for older men has remained nearly constant in the united kingdom and canada the college high school wage gap also increased for younger relative to older men using a model with imperfect substitution between similarly educated workers in different age groups we argue that these shifts reflect changes in the relative supply of highly educated workers across age groups the driving force behind these changes is the slowdown in the rate of growth of educational attainment that began with cohorts born in the early 1950s in all three countries

misclassified treatment status and treatment effects an application to returns to education in the united kingdom abstract we study the impact of misreported treatment status on the estimation of causal treatment effects focusing on applications where no additional information or repeated measurements are available we first characterize the bias introduced by misclassification on the average treatment effect on the treated att under a conditional independence assumption in both a binary and a multiple treatment setting we find that the bias of matching type estimators computed from misclassified data cannot in general be signed we subsequently provide easily implementable methods to bound the att of interest semiparametrically in particular allowing for very general forms of impact heterogeneity and of the no treatment outcome equations as well as for some dependence of the misreporting probabilities on individual characteristics the empirical problem that motivates our paper is the estimation of the wage returns to a number of educational qualifications in the united kingdom allowing for misreporting in a

sheepskin effects in the returns to education some previous discussions have dismissed screening theories of education partly on the ground that diploma years of education do not confer especially large earnings gains similarly most empirical research on earnings functions has assumed an absence of sheepskin effects we report evidence however of substantial and statistically significant sheepskin effects although this suggests that the previous dismissals of the screening hypothesis were premature our evidence of sheepskin effects is amenable to nonscreening interpretations also according to screening theories of education individuals with more schooling tend to earn more not because or at least not solely because schooling makes them more productive but rather because it credentiates them as more productive a frequently cited article by layard and psacharopoulos 1974 however dismissed the importance of the screening hypothesis on the grounds that several of its refutable predictions were not supported by available evidence one of these was the sheepskin prediction that wages will rise faster with extra years of education when the extra year also conveys a certificate after surveying a number of studies layard and psacharopoulous henceforth lp concluded that rates of return to dropouts are as high as to those who complete a course which refutes the sheepskin version of the screening hypothesis since publication of the lp paper an undergraduate labor economics textbook has cited lp s analysis of sheepskin effects as telling criticism of the screening hypothesis a prominent proponent of the screening hypothesis riley 1979 has accepted lp s summary of the empirical evidence but responded that some versions of the screening hypothesis do not imply sheepskin effects in the meantime the ongoing flood of empirical research on earnings functions typically has continued to treat the natural logarithm of the wage rate as a linear or occasionally quadratic function of years of education with no allowance for discontinuities in diploma years 2 the estimated rates of return used by lp were based on data that did not disaggregate dropouts earnings by how many years of school they had completed lp acknowledged we would have preferred to show the earnings gain associated with each year of the course including the year when it was successfully completed this note presents a reanalysis of sheepskin effects based on the type of data lp wished they had the results contain very strong evidence of sheepskin effects after all the next section describes our analysis and the following section summarizes and discusses our

banking panics information and rational expectations equilibrium this paper shows that bank runs can be modeled as an equilibrium phenomenon we demonstrate that some aspects of the intuitive story that bank runs start with fears of insolvency of banks can be rigorously modeled if individuals observe long lines at the bank they correctly infer that there is a possibility that the bank is about to fail and precipitate a bank run however bank runs occur even when no one has any adverse information extra market constraints such as suspension of convertibility can prevent bank runs and result in superior allocations banking panics were a recurrent phenomenon in the united states until the 1930s they have re emerged as a source of public concern and much theoretical research recently in this paper we provide an information theoretic rationale for bank runs the traditional story is that contagion is an important aspect of bank runs the idea seems to be that when the general public observes large withdrawals from the banking system fears of insolvency grow resulting in even larger withdrawals of deposits in our model some individuals withdraw because they get information that future returns are likely to be low uninformed individuals observing this also have an incentive to liquidate their investments in addition some individuals need to withdraw deposits for other than informationally based reasons thus if the random realization of such a group of individuals is unusually large then the uninformed individuals will be misled and will precipitate a run on the bank the technology is such that a large volume of withdrawals involves liquidation costs consequently runs on the bank do impose social costs a mechanism that may reduce these costs in our model is to suspend convertibility if withdrawals are high however those individuals who need to withdraw their assets for liquidity reasons are worse off ex post our model provides a rationalization for restrictions in demand deposits that were widespread prior to 1929 friedman and schwartz 7 suggest that restrictions of payments ensured

using employer hiring behavior to test the educational signaling hypothesis this paper presents a test of the educational signaling hypothesis if employers use education as a signal in the hiring process they will rely more on education when less is otherwise known about applicants we nd that employers are more likely to lower educational standards when an informal more informative recruitment channel is used so we conclude that education is used as a signal in the hiring process

self fulfilling currency crises the role of interest rates abstract we develop a stylized currency crises model with heterogeneous information among investors andendogenous determination of interest rates in a noisy rational expectations equilibrium our modelcaptures three key features of interest rates the opportunity cost of attacking the currency respondsto the investors behavior the domestic interest rate may influence the central bank s preferences fora fixed exchange rate and the domestic interest rate serves as a public signal which aggregatesprivate information about fundamentals we explore the payoff and informational channels throughwhich interest rates determine devaluation outcomes and examine the implications for equilibriumselection by global games methods our main conclusion is that multiplicity is not an artifact ofcommon knowledge in particular we show that multiplicity emerges robustly either when adevaluation is triggered by the cost of high domestic interest rates as in obstfeld 1996 or when adevaluation is triggered by the central bank s loss of foreign reserves as in obstfeld 1986 providedthat the domestic asset supply is sufficiently elastic in the interest rate and shocks to the domesticbond supply are sufficiently small christian helliwigdepartment of economicsuniversity of california los angelesbox 951477los angeles ca 90095 1477arijit mukherjiuniversity of minnesotaaleh tsyvinskidepartment of economicsharvard universitylittauer centercambridge ma 02138 3001

signalling or human capital evidence from the finnish polytechnic school reform we use data from the finnish polytechnic reform to distinguish between human capital and signalling theories of the value of education we find that the reform increased the earnings of polytechnic graduates compared with those graduating from the same schools before the reform as predicted by both the human capital and the signalling models however we also find that the relative earnings of vocational college graduates decrease after polytechnic graduates start entering the labour market this finding is inconsistent with the pure human capital model and can be interpreted as evidence that supports the signalling model

entrepreneurship human capital and labor demand a story of signaling and matching in contrast to employee qualifications there is no clear evidence that entrepreneurs qualifications positively affect their income in this study we propose that entrepreneurs can benefit from using their qualification as a signal during the process of recruiting employees this is assumed to follow a process of matching equals among equals we confirm a matching of qualification levels for highly skilled employees in denmark and an indication of this in germany partial support for matching among medium skilled employees was only found in germany with no consistent evidence of matching for low skilled employees in neither country this suggests that as skill levels of employees decrease their probabilities of working for different founders converge founders qualifications are the most reliable predictor of recruitment choices over time our findings are robust to numerous control variables as well as across industries and firm age

job market signaling and returns to education we compare two partially separating equilibria in a job market signaling model with unproductive education we find that in one of the two equilibria the fraction of the population with a threshold education level is higher even though the cost of education is higher moreover compared to the other equilibrium the population faces a higher threshold education level yet the educated attain lower wages the reason for this result is that the gross return to education can be higher despite the higher cost of education and a higher threshold

coordinating regime switches the canonical model of strategic complementarities between individual actions which exhibits multiple equilibria under perfect information is extended with heterogeneous agents and imperfect information agents observe their own cost of action and the history of the levels of aggregate activity the distribution of individual characteristics evolves through a random process and individuals are rational bayesians under plausible conditions there is a unique equilibrium with phases of high and low activity and random switches applications may be found in macroeconomics and revolutions

pareto improving minimum wage laws by increasing the expected wage in low skill jobs a minimum wage law can reduce the incentive for low skill workers to imitate high skill workers in the signalling process the gain from reduced investment in the signal can more than offset the loss from unemployment among low skill workers so that total output increases moreover with an appropriate poll tax on workers to compensate owners of capital the law can make all workers and owners of capital better off

are there civic returns to education abstract the hypothesized effects of educational attainment on adult civic engagement and attitudes provide some of the most important justifications for government intervention in the market for education in this study i present evidence on whether these externalities exist i assess and implement two strategies for identifying the effects of educational attainment one is based on the availability of junior and community colleges the other on changes in teen exposure to child labor laws the results suggest that educational attainment has large and statistically significant effects on subsequent voter participation and support for free speech i also find that additional schooling appears to increase the quality of civic knowledge as measured by the frequency of newspaper readership

determinacy and identification with taylor rules the new keynesian taylor rule theory of inflation determination relies on explosive dynamics by raising interest rates in response to inflation the fed induces ever larger inflation unless inflation jumps to one particular value on each date however economics does not rule out explosive inflation so inflation remains indeterminate attempts to fix this problem assume that the government will choose to blow up the economy if alternative equilibria emerge by following policies we usually consider impossible the taylor rule is not identified without unrealistic assumptions thus taylor rule regressions do not show that the fed moved from passive to active policy in 1980

changes in the u s wage structure 1963 1987 application of quantile regression the 1980 s witnessed rapid changes in the structure of wages in the united states in this study recently developed techniques for quantile regression are applied to every march current population survey since 1964 and changes in the return to schooling and experience at different points of the wage distribution are examined the quantile regression technique parsimoniously describes the entire conditional wage distribution this conditional distribution is used to examine changes in within group wage inequality as measured by the difference between conditional quantiles two linear models are considered a simple one group model and a 16 group model the results suggest that the returns to schooling and experience differ across quantiles of the wage distribution but their patterns of change are similar significant differences in wage inequality are also found across the various skill groups the paper also presents a new imputation method for cps data

coordination and delay in global games abstract what is the effect of offering agents an option to delay their choices in a global coordination game we address this question by considering a canonical binary action global game and allowing players to delay their irreversible decisions those that delay have access to accurate private information at the second stage but receive lower payoffs we show that as noise vanishes as long as the benefit to taking the risky action early is greater than the benefit of taking the risky action late the introduction of the option to delay reduces the incidence of coordination failure in equilibrium relative to the standard case where all agents must choose their actions at the same time we outline the welfare implications of this finding and probe the robustness of our results from a variety of angles

human capital versus sorting the effects of compulsory attendance laws under the educational sorting hypothesis a state compulsory school attendance law will increase the educational attainment of high ability workers who are not directly affected hy the law under the human capital hypothesis such laws affect only those individuals whose hehavior is directly constrained we find that compulsory attendance laws do increase enrollment rates in age groups they do not affect directly thus our results contradict the human capital hypothesis and are consistent with the sorting hypothesis i introduction the last decade has seen considerable debate between supporters of the human capital and sorting models of education the former assert that the effect of education on wages reflects increased productivity the latter maintain that it reflects at least in part correlation between education and unobserved ability workers use education to signal their ability while employers use education to screen workers despite the importance of the debate no fully convincing tests of the hypotheses have been developed in fact many members of the profession maintain at least privately that these hypotheses cannot be tested against each other and that the debate must therefore be relegated to the realm of ideology in this paper we show that the models can be tested against each other by examining the effects of state compulsory school attendance laws we show that under the human capital hypotheis such laws will affect the educational attainment only of those who in the absence of the law would have left school prior to the minimum school leaving age on the other hand under the sorting hypothesis the effects of the law will percolate through the system increasing educational attainment even among workers not directly constrained by the law our results are consistent with the predictions of the sorting model

educational screening by certificates an empirical test this paper argues that the relevant test of wage screening effects should be based on educational certificates rather than years of schooling this is because information conveyed to firms about individual productivity through years of schooling is not sufficiently refined for making individual wage offer decisions although it may be useful for making hiring decisions

unique equilibrium in a model of self fulfilling currency attacks even though self fulfilling currency attacks lead to multiple equilibria when fundamentals are common knowledge we demonstrate the uniqueness of equilibrium when speculators face a small amount of noise in their signals about the fundamentals this unique equilibrium depends not only on the fundamentals but also on financial variables such as the quantity of hot money in circulation and the costs of speculative trading in contrast to multiple equilibrium models our model allows analysis of policy proposals directed at curtailing currency attacks

another perspective on gasoline price responses to crude oil price changes the effects of oil price volatility on the responses of gasoline prices to oil price shocks have received little attention in discussions on the relationship between the prices of crude oil and gasoline in this paper we consider such effects by using a bivariate structural vector autoregression which is modified to accommodate garch in mean errors our measure of oil price volatility is the conditional variance of the oil price change forecast error we isolate the effects of volatility in the price of oil on the price of gasoline and employ simulation methods to calculate nonlinear impulse response functions nirfs to trace any asymmetric effects of independent oil price shocks on the conditional means of gasoline prices we test whether the relationship between the prices of crude oil and gasoline is symmetric using tests of the null hypothesis of symmetric impulse responses based on monthly u s data over the period from 1978 1 to 2014 11 our empirical results show that gasoline prices respond asymmetrically to positive and negative oil price shocks we also find that oil price volatility has a positive effect on the price of gasoline and it contributes to the asymmetries in the transmission of oil price shocks

the effect of human capital on earnings evidence from a reform at colombia s top university abstract in this paper i test whether the return to college education is the result of human capital accumulation or instead reflects the fact that attending college signals higher ability to employers i exploit a reform at universidad de los andes which in 2006 reduced the amount of coursework required to earn degrees in economics and business by 20 and 14 respectively but did not change the quality of incoming or graduating students the size of the entering class their average high school exit exam scores and graduation rates were not affected by the reform indicating that selection of students into the degrees remained the same using administrative data on wages and college attendance i estimate that wages fell by approximately 16 in economics and 13 in business these results suggest that human capital plays an important role in the determination of wages and reject a pure signaling model surveying employers i find that the reduction in wages may have resulted from a decline in performance during the recruitment process which led students to be placed in lower quality firms using data from the recruitment process for economists at the central bank of colombia i find that the reform reduced the probability of los andes graduates being hired by 17 percentage points

the signaling role of promotions further theory and empirical evidence an extensive theoretical literature investigates the role of promotions as a signal of worker ability we extend the theory by focusing on how the signaling role of promotion varies with education and then investigate the resulting predictions using a longitudinal data set that contains detailed information concerning the internal labor market history of a medium sized firm in the financial services industry our results support signaling being important for understanding the differences between promotion practices concerning bachelor s and master s degree holders while the evidence concerning the importance of signaling for high school graduates and phds is mixed

information manipulation coordination and regime change this article presents a model of information manipulation and political regime change there is a regime that can be overthrown but only if enough citizens participate in an uprising citizens are imperfectly informed about the regime s ability to resist an uprising and the regime can engage in propaganda that taken at face value makes the regime seem stronger than it truly is this coordination game with endogenous information manipulation has a unique equilibrium and the article gives a complete analytic characterization of the equilibrium s comparative statics holding fixed the number of signals available to citizens if the per unit signal precision is sufficiently high then the regime is harder to overthrow in contrast if the number of signals increases so that both total signal precision and the regime s costs of manipulation rise together then the regime is easier to overthrow unless there are strong economies of scale in information control

is there a wage premium for volunteer oss engagement signalling learning and noise abstractvolunteer based open source production has become a significant new model for the organization of software development economics often pictures this phenomenon as a case of signalling individuals engage in the volunteer programming of open source software oss as a labour market signal resulting in a wage premium yet this explanation could so far not be empirically tested this article fills this gap by estimating an upper bound composite wage premium of voluntary oss contributions and by separating the potential signalling effect of oss engagement from other effects although some 70 of oss contributors believe that oss involvement benefits their careers we find no actual labour market premium for oss engagement the presence of other motives such as fun of play or altruism renders oss contributions too noisy to function as a signal

dueling policies why systemic risk taxation can fail abstract two policy instruments for the banking sector are investigated namely systemic risk taxation and constructive ambiguity about bailout policy bailout expectations can induce moral hazard in the form of excessive risk taking by banks systemic risk taxation induces banks to prefer uncorrelated investments leading to lower systemic risk formation constructive ambiguity generates uncertainty about bailout prospects however systemic risk taxation also may inform banks about the regulator s concern for financial stability and thereby its bailout policy this result leads to a trade off between systemic risk taxation and constructive ambiguity and highlights the need to consider interdependence across policies when evaluating their effectiveness

estimating the labor market signaling value of the ged this paper tests the labor market signaling hypothesis for the general educational development ged equivalency credential using a unique data set containing ged test scores and social security administration ssa earnings data we exploit variation in ged status generated by differential state ged passing standards to identify the signaling value of the ged net of human capital effects our results indicate that the ged signal increases the earnings of young white dropouts by 10 to 19 percent we find no statistically significant effects for minority dropouts

does longer compulsory schooling affect mental health evidence from a british reform abstract in this paper we examine whether longer compulsory schooling has a causal effect on mental health exploiting a 1972 reform which raised the minimum school leaving age from age 15 to 16 in great britain using a regression discontinuity design we find that the reform did not improve mental health we provide evidence that extending the duration of compulsory schooling impacts mental health through channels other than increased educational attainment we argue that these effects may mitigate or offset the health returns to increased educational attainment

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

signaling in higher education the effect of access to elite colleges on choice of major i introduction it is a well established fact that more educated individuals earn higher wages there are two primary theories for the source of this education wage premium the first is the human capital accumulation or full information model in which education directly enhances productivity and thereby increases an individual s wages the second is the signaling model of the labor market first proposed by spence 1973 wherein the monetary returns to schooling are partially explained by information asymmetries between individuals and employers these two models lead to strikingly similar labor market predictions which has made testing between them difficult i provide a new test of the signaling model against the full information model using individuals choices of college major this test is novel in that it focuses on the quality of an individual s education as a potential signal rather than the quantity of education furthermore while other tests have focused on high school students or other specific groups e g general education diploma takers in tyler et al 2000 and mba students in hussey 2012 this test sheds light onto the decision making process of college going students in a full information model productivity is costlessly observed by both the individual and the employer each individual chooses her optimal level of education to improve productivity and wages given her ability and the marginal cost of schooling in the signaling framework information is asymmetric such that employers cannot perfectly observe individual ability or true productivity employers use education levels to infer expected productivity while each individual chooses her level of schooling to signal a higher innate ability and potential productivity to employers the equilibrium result in both models is that higher ability individuals obtain more education and accordingly earn higher wages while the equilibria in both models appear similar the extent to which individuals sort on ability depends on the amount of information asymmetry in the labor market under the signaling model the individual s social and private returns to education do not necessarily coincide the private return is a combined effect of the social return from increased productivity and the signaling effect of being identified perhaps falsely as a high ability individual this disparity between private and social returns could lead to an inefficient allocation of schooling in the competitive labor market the implication that investment in schooling might lead to a deadweight loss for society has prompted many attempts to distinguish between these two theories bedard 2001 hussey 2012 lang and kropp 1986 riley 1979 wolpin 1977 and to measure what portion of the returns to schooling is attributable to signaling effects altonji and pierret 1997 2001 clark and martorell 2014 fang 2006 tyler et al 2000 however the empirical evidence differentiating the two models has been fairly limited and testing between the full information and signaling models of education has proven difficult i propose a new model applying the signaling framework of spence 1973 to the postsecondary environment in this model major field of study can be used by individuals to signal unobserved ability and productivity to employers i show that this leads to a prediction that geographic areas with high access to elite colleges result in fewer science technology engineering and mathematics stem majors among lower ability students at nonelite colleges this is distinct from the prediction of a full information model where the level of access to elite schools should only affect those high ability individuals who are eligible to attend an elite school using data from the national center for education statistics baccalaureate beyond survey and the geographic variation in access to elite schools across the united states i find evidence that is consistent with the signaling model prediction

early late or never when does parental education impact child outcomes we estimate the causal effect of parents education on their children s education and examine the timing of the impact we identify the causal effect by exploiting the exogenous shift in parents education levels induced by the 1972 minimum school leaving age reform in england increasing parental education has a positive causal effect on children s outcomes that is evident in preschool assessments at age 4 and continues to be visible up to and including high stakes examinations taken at age 16 children of parents affected by the reform attain results around 0 1 standard deviations higher than those whose parents were not impacted

reflections on northern rock the bank run that heralded the global financial crisis in september 2007 television viewers and newspaper readers around the world saw pictures of what looked like an old fashioned bank run that is depositors waiting in line outside the branch offices of a united kingdom bank called northern rock to withdraw their money the previous u k bank run before northern rock was in 1866 at overend gurney a london bank that overreached itself in the railway and docks boom of the 1860s bank runs were not uncommon in the united states up through the 1930s but they have been rare since the start of deposit insurance backed by the federal deposit insurance corporation in contrast deposit insurance in the united kingdom was a partial affair funded by the banking industry itself and insuring only a part of the deposits at the time of the run u k bank deposits were fully insured only up to 2 000 pounds and then only 90 percent of the deposits up to an upper limit of 35 000 pounds when faced with a run the incentive to withdraw one s deposits from a u k bank was therefore very strong for economists the run on northern rock at first seemed to offer a rare opportunity to study at close quarters all the elements involved in their theoretical models of bank runs the futility of public statements of reassurance the mutually reinforcing anxiety of depositors as well as the power of the media in galvanizing and channeling that anxiety through the power of television images however the storyline of the northern rock bank run does not fit the conventional narrative on september 13 2007 the bbc s evening television news broadcast first broke the news that northern rock had sought the bank of england s support the next morning the bank of england announced that it would provide emergency liquidity support it was only after that announcement that is after the

earnings effects of different components of schooling human capital versus screening in this paper the authors divide actual years of schooling into effective years repeated years skipped years inefficient routing years and dropout years estimation of earnings functions reveals that this topology is statistically superior to the usual concepts of either actual or effective years of schooling based on the authors distinction they formulate tests that discriminate between the human capital theory and the screening hypothesis the results give strong support to the human capital theory and refute the screening hypothesis

compulsory education and the benefits of schooling causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using u s state schooling laws as instruments typically rely on specifications which assume common trends across states in the factors affecting different birth cohorts differential changes across states during this period such as relative school quality improvements suggest that this assumption may fail to hold across a number of outcomes including wages unemployment and divorce we find that statistically significant causal estimates become insignificant and in many instances wrong signed when allowing year of birth effects to vary across regions

inflation determination with taylor rules is new keynesian analysis critically flawed abstract cochrane 2007 has strongly questioned the basic economic logic of current monetary policy analysis arguing that new keynesian nk models imply rational expectations paths with explosive inflation that do not imply explosions in real variables relevant for transversality conditions consequently the usual logic does not rule out solutions with explosive inflation that result does not however justify negative conclusions about nk analysis for a different criterion is logically satisfactory it is that to be plausible a re solution must satisfy the property of least squares learnability adoption of this criterion serves to justify in principle the bulk of current mainstream analysis

a spillover based theory of credentialism i propose a model in which credentials such as diplomas are instrumentally valuable to workers the model avoids an important criticism of standard job market signalling models by tying a worker s wage to their output a worker s productivity is influenced by the skills of their co workers where such skills arise from an ability augmenting investment that is made prior to matching with co workers credentials allow workers to demonstrate their investment to the labour market thereby allowing them to match with high skill co workers in equilibrium despite the positive externality associated with a worker s investment i show how overinvestment is pervasive in equilibrium

schooling as human capital or a signal a new way is proposed to distinguish between the human capital and the signaling theories of the value of education if education is a signal then the essence of the signal should be distilled in the position of an individual in the distribution of education for his cohort estimating earnings equations that include both absolute years and relative percentile measures of education provides a test of the two competing theories analyzing two separate panel data sources under a range of alternative specifications we find that the years measure of schooling has a consistently significant positive effect on earnings but that the rank measure rarely does this evidence supports the conclusion that human capital rather than signaling is the predominant explanation of schooling s value

higher education elite institutions and inequality abstract we develop a model of higher education to analyze the effects of elite institutions on individual educational decisions and aggregate labor market outcomes elite institutions allow the most talented of a given population to separate themselves from the larger pool of agents enrolled in higher education and to earn the associated wage premium in the labor market as elite institutions engage in cream skimming the returns to publicly accessible education decrease and enrollment in public higher education declines the resulting effect on income inequality is ambiguous since elite education increases income dispersion at the top of the income distribution and decreases income dispersion at the bottom

technology adoption in the presence of network externalities we analyze technology adoption in industries where network externalities are significant the pattern of adoption depends on whether technologies are sponsored a sponsor is an entity that has property rights to the technology and hence is willing to make investments to promote it key findings include the following 1 compatibility tends to be undersupplied by the market but excessive standardization can occur 2 in the absence of sponsors the technology superior today has a strategic advantage and is likely to dominate the market 3 when one of two rival technologies is sponsored that technology has a strategic advantage and may be adopted even if it is inferior 4 when two competing technologies both are sponsored the technology that will be superior tomorrow has a strategic advantage

the economics of financing higher education different arguments exist pro and contra tax financed subsidies in higher education it has been argued that private incentives to study are sufficiently high while the financing of those subsidies can be deemed regressive as they are co financed by relatively poorer non students alternatively several arguments have been put forward why higher tax financed subsidies are desirable such as externalities and credit constraints this study scrutinizes these different arguments and discusses the implications for the different ways in which higher education can be financed calculations of private returns across the oecd confirm that private incentives to invest in higher education are high however economic theory poses that it is the marginal social return that must guide policy which will reflect both equity and efficiency considerations we assess the potential regressivity of higher education subsidies using different perspectives and assess the different efficiency arguments for government intervention in higher education tax financed subsidies turn out to be regressive in most cases but depending on the perspective and the country under examination discussion of the efficiency arguments is focused on those that are most relevant in light of the empirical evidence and their relevance for the different financing modes externalities uninsurable risk credit constraints and misprediction we conclude that to deal with the more credible failures in higher education tax financed subsidies are blunt instruments for a large share of the countries under consideration shifting towards income contingent loans or graduate taxes appears more appropriate when taking into account both efficiency and equity considerations

public information private information and the multiplicity of equilibria in coordination games abstract i study coordination games with incomplete public and private information and relate equilibrium convergence to convergence of higher order beliefs as the players signals become more and more precise the equilibrium manifold converges to the correspondence of common knowledge equilibria whenever the variance of the public signal converges to 0 at a rate faster than one half the rate of convergence of the variance of private signals the same condition also determines the convergence of common p belief to common knowledge which leads to a simple intuition for its origin and an immediate generalization of the former results about equilibrium convergence journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d82

the compelling effects of compulsory schooling evidence from canada abstract compulsory school laws have existed for more than a hundred years and policies to mandate further education continue to be discussed the implications of these laws however are not well understood historical changes to compulsory schooling in canada permit an examination of their effects on would be dropouts under very different circumstances than those during changes in other countries mandating education substantially increased adult income and substantially decreased the likelihood of being below the low income cut off unemployed and in a manual occupation these findings suggest significant gains from this legislation which seem unlikely offset by the costs incurred while having to remain in school jel classification i20 i28

the changing distribution of male wages in the uk this paper uses microeconomic data from the u k family expenditure surveys fes and the general household surveys ghs to describe and explain changes in the distribution of male wages since the late 1970s wage inequality has risen very fast in the u k and this rise is characterized both by increasing education and age differentials we show that a large part of the changes in the u k can be summarized quite simply as increases in eduction differentials and a decline of growth of entry level wages which persist subsequently this fact we interpret as cohort effects we also show that like in the u s an important aspect of rising wage inequality is increased within group wage dispersion finally we use the ghs to evaluate the role of alternative education measures

dynamic debt runs we develop a dynamic model of debt runs on a rm which invests in an illiquid asset by rolling over staggered short term debt contracts i e dierent contracts mature at dierent times we derive a unique threshold equilibrium in which creditors coordinate their asynchronous rollover decisions based on the rm s publicly observable and time varying fundamental the coordination problem ampli es the creditors concerns about the rm s future rollover risk created by its time varying fundamental and causes each maturing creditor to run ahead of others even when the current fundamental is substantially higher than its liability our model provides a set of implications on the roles played by volatility illiquidity and debt maturity in driving debt runs as well as on rms capital adequacy standards and credit risk

signaling in a global game coordination and policy traps this paper introduces signaling in a global game so as to examine the informational role of policy in coordination environments such as currency crises and bank runs while exogenous asymmetric information has been shown to select a unique equilibrium we show that the endogenous information generated by policy interventions leads to multiple equilibria the policy maker is thus trapped into a position in which self fulfilling expectations dictate not only the coordination outcome but also the optimal policy this result does not rely on the freedom to choose out of equilibrium beliefs nor on the policy being a public signal it may obtain even if the policy is observed with idiosyncratic noise

the hazards of debt rollover freezes incentives and bailouts we investigate the trade o between incentive provision an di ne ient rollover freezes for a firm financed with short term debt first debt maturity that is too short term is ine cient even with incentive provision th eo ptimal maturity is an interior solution that avoids excessive rollover risk whil ep roviding su ient incentives for the manager to avoid risk shifting when the firm is in good health second allowing the manager to risk shift during a freeze actually increase sc reditor conf idence debt policy should not prevent the manager from holding what may appear to be otherwise low mean strategies that have option value during a freeze third a limited but not perfectly reliable form of emergency financing during a freeze a bailout may improve the terms of the trade o and increase total ex ante va lue by instilling confidence in the creditor markets our conclusions highlight the endogenous interaction between risk from the asset and liability sides of the balance sheet

a test of dual labor market theory despite substantial differences in their views of the appropriate policy response to the existence of poverty neither the proponents of dual market theory nor its critics have proposed potentially conclusive tests of the dual market hypothesis this paper presents a test of the two central propositions of dual market theory 1 the existence of two distinct labor markets with different wage setting mechanisms and 2 the existence of barriers to mobility between the labor markets we find considerable support for both hypothesis estimation of a switching model of wage determination with unknown regimes yields two distinct wage equations the one which most workers are associated with closely resembles the standard human capital regression with significant returns to education and experience the other equation is flat with no returns to human capital these two equations resemble the predictions of dual market theory for the primary and secondary markets respectively further we present evidence that at least some non white workers are involuntarily confined to the secondary market this crowding of minority workers into the low wage labor market accounts for a substantial portion of white non white wage differences we interpret these results as providing empirical support for the dual market hypothesis and for recent theoretical work on efficiency wagemodels in addition combining the efficiency wage argument with the observation that much of the white non white wage difference is explained by the exclusion of non whites from the primary sector suggests an explanation for the persistance of wage differences this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

allocation of human capital and innovation at the frontier firm level evidence on germany and the netherlands this paper examines how productivity eects of human capital and innovation vary at dierent points of the conditional productivity distribution our analysis draws upon two large unbalanced panels of 6 634 enterprises in germany and 14 586 enterprises in the netherlands over the period 2000 2008 considering 5 manufacturing and services industries that dier in the level of technological intensity industries in the netherlands are characterized by a larger average proportion of high skilled employees and indus tries in germany by a more unequal distribution of human capital intensity except for low technology manufacturing average innovation performance is higher in all industries in germany and the innova tion performance distributions are more dispersed in the netherlands in both countries we observe non linearities in the productivity eects of investing in product innovation in the majority of indus tries frontier rms enjoy the highest returns to product innovation whereas the most negative returns to process innovation are observed in the best performing enterprises of most industries in both countries we nd that the returns to human capital increase with proximity to the technological frontier in industries with a low level of technological intensity strikingly a negative complementarity eect between human capital and proximity to the technological frontier is observed in knowledge intensive services which is most pronounced for the netherlands suggestive evidence for the latter points to a winner takes all interpretation of this nding

ruling out unstable equilibria in new keynesian models the taylor rule is an incomplete description of monetary policy within a new keynesian model the nk model should be formulated with a money demand function and also embody a terminal condition on inflation explicitly designed to stop bubbles

disability gender and the labour market in wales jones m k latreille p l and sloane p j 2006 disability gender and the labour market in wales regional studies 40 823 845 wales exhibits high rates of disability and inactivity and a higher incidence of mental health problems than other parts of britain using data from the welsh local labour force survey 2001 the results indicate that the low participation rate of the disabled in wales is partly attributable to their having fewer qualifications marginal effects suggest education could be a potent remedy for improving their labour market status in terms of the pay differential between disabled and non disabled individuals it would appear that disabled women in wales suffer disproportionately to disabled men only in the case of women is there evidence consistent with the presence of discrimination but this estimate is relatively small jones m k latreille p l et sloane p j 2006 l invalidite le genre et le marche du travail au pays de galles regional studies 40 823 845 le pa

does education raise productivity or just reflect it education has an important effect on wages but it not clear whether this is because education raises productivity or because education is simply a signal of ability we implement a number of existing tests for discriminating between these two explanations and find that they do not support the signalling hypothesis however we have severe reservations about these results and we propose an alternative test based on changes in education incentives caused by changes in the minimum school leaving age in the 1970s using this idea we find that uk data appear to strongly support the human capital explanation an important issue in the economics of education is that an individual s education has an effect on wages paid in the labour market for example blundell et al 2003 uses detailed education and subsequent earnings information for a cohort of male individuals born in 1958 to estimate that the returns to a uk degree typically of 3 year duration relative to graduating from high school at 18 with 2 a level qualifications a necessary but not sufficient condition for admission to university is a 24 wage premium human capital explanations pioneered by becker 1962 and schultz 1963 suggest that the correlation between education and wages is due to education enhancing productivity however earnings may rise in response to education not because of any effect on productivity but simply because education may act as a signal of productivity employers believing that education is correlated with productivity will screen workers for their education and pay higher wages to the more educated the employers beliefs will be confirmed by their experience if it is the case that high productivity individuals signal this by choosing high levels of education it will be optimal for individuals to behave in this way if the cost of acquiring education is less for high productivity individuals than it is for low productivity individuals thus under reasonable conditions the market will be characterised by a separating equilibrium where higher productivity individuals choose higher levels of education than lower productivity workers and earn correspondingly higher wages the theory is largely due to spence 1973 1979 and the subsequent empirical literature was reviewed by groot and oosterbeek 1994 riley 2001 provides an excellent modern survey chevalier harmon and walker are fellows of iza in bonn and are affiliated with the institute for the study of social change issc in dublin this paper is part of the issc policy evaluation programme chevalier and walker are also affiliated with the centre for the economics of education at the london school of economics lse the support of all of these bodies for facilitating our collaboration is acknowledged harmon is grateful to university college london for their hospitality during his nuffield foundation new career development fellowship in the social sciences comments from steve machin and three anonymous referees greatly improved the exposition of this paper we are also grateful to richard blundell and to seminar participants at the lse and the tinbergen institute in amsterdam for their comments and to vincent o sullivan for excellent research assistance the usual disclaimer applies

a procedure for testing the signalling hypothesis abstract this paper develops a procedure for testing the signalling hypothesis as advanced by spence et al the approach used is to examine directly the question of whether employers use education for purely informational purposes in their hiring decisions an application of the method to a recruitment by the swedish auto manufacturer volvo is presented

rational and self fulfilling balance of payments crises speculative attacks on a pegged exchange rate must sometimes occur ifasset price paths are to be free of abnormal profit opportunities suchattacks are fully rational as they reflect the market s response to aregime breakdown that is inevitable the authors shows that under someexpectations about policy balance of payments crises can also be purely self fulfilling events in such cases even a permanently viableregime may collapse and the economy will possess multiple equilibriacorresponding to different subjective assessments of the probability ofa crisis the behavior of the domestic interest rate will naturally reflect the possibility of a speculative attack copyright 1986 by american economic association

can learnability save new keynesian models abstract mccallum 2009 argues that learnability can save new keynesian models from indeterminacies he claims the unique bounded equilibrium is learnable and the explosive equilibria are not however he assumes that agents can directly observe the monetary policy shock reversing this assumption i find the opposite the bounded equilibrium is not learnable and the unbounded equilibria are learnable more generally i argue that a threat by the fed to move to an unlearnable equilibrium for all but one value of inflation is a poor foundation for choosing the bounded equilibrium of a new keynesian model

currency crises with the threat of an interest rate defence while virtually all currency crisis models recognise that the decision to abandon a peg depends on how tenaciously policy makers defend it this is seldom modelled explicitly we add the threat of an interest rate defence to the global game model of morris and shin american economic review 88 1998 with an endogenous defence actions of speculators may become strategic substitutes instead of the usual complements nevertheless our generalised model remains tractable and has a unique threshold equilibrium it provides additional insights for instance the threat of an interest rate defence makes speculation riskier and this may be sufficient to keep speculators out when fundamentals are still relatively strong

the effect of education on crime evidence from prison inmates arrests and self reports we estimate the effect of high school graduation on participation in criminal activity accounting for endogeneity of schooling we begin by analyzing the effect of high school graduation on incarceration using census data instrumental variable estimates using changes in state compulsory attendance laws as an instrument for high school graduation uncover a significant reduction in incarceration for both blacks and whites when estimating the impact of high school graduation only ols and iv estimators estimate different weighted sums of the impact of each schooling progression on the probability of incarceration we clarify the relationship between ols and iv estimates and show that the weights placed on the impact of each schooling progression can explain differences in the estimates overall the estimates suggest that completing high school reduces the probability of incarceration by about 76 percentage points for whites and 3 4 percentage points for blacks we corroborate these findings using fbi data on arrests that distinguish among different types of crimes the biggest impacts of graduation are associated with murder assault and motor vehicle theft we also examine the effect of drop out on self reported crime in the nlsy and find that our estimates for imprisonment and arrest are caused by changes in criminal behavior and not educational differences in the probability of arrest or incarceration conditional on crime we estimate that the externality of education is about 14 26 of the private return to schooling suggesting that a significant part of the social return to education comes in the form of externalities from crime reduction

changes in compulsory schooling education and the distribution of wages in europe using data from 12 european countries and the variation across countries and over time in the changes of minimum school leaving age we study the effects of the quantity of education on the distribution of earnings we find that compulsory school reforms significantly affect educational attainment especially among individuals belonging to the lowest quantiles of the distribution of ability there is also evidence that additional education reduces conditional wage inequality and that education and ability are substitutes in the earnings function

coordination failures and the lender of last resort was bagehot right after all the classical doctrine of the lender of last resort lolr elaborated by bagehot 1873 asserts that the central bank should lend to illiquid but solvent banks under certain conditions several authors have argued that this view is now obsolete in modern interbank markets a solvent bank cannot be illiquid this paper provides a possible theoretical foundation for rescuing bagehot s view our theory does not rely on the multiplicity of equilibria that arises in classical models of bank runs we built a model of banks liquidity crises that possesses a unique bayesian equilibrium in this equilibrium there is a positive probability that a solvent bank cannot find liquidity assistance in the market we derive policy implications about banking regulation solvency and liquidity ratios and interventions of the lender of last resort furthermore we find that public bailout and private bail in involvement are complementary in implementing the incentive efficient solution and that bagehot s lender of last resort facility must work together with institutions providing prompt corrective action and orderly failure resolution finally we derive similar implications for an international lender of last resort ilolr jel g21 g28

the college wage premium and the expansion of higher education in the uk this paper reports estimates of the uk college premium for young graduates across successive cohorts from large cross section datasets for the uk pooled from 1994 to 2006 a period when the higher education participation rate increased dramatically the growth in relative labour demand suggests that graduate supply considerably outstripped demand which ought to imply a fall in the premium we find no significant fall for men and even a large but insignificant rise for women quantile regression results reveal a fall in the premium only for men in the bottom quartile of the distribution of unobserved skills

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

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

to bail out or to bail in answers from an agent based model since the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis almost half a trillion euros have been spent to financially assist eu member states in taxpayer funded bail outs these crisis resolutions are often accompanied by austerity programs causing political and social friction on both domestic and international levels the question of how to resolve failing financial institutions and how this depends on economic preconditions is therefore a pressing and controversial issue of vast political importance in this work we employ an agent based model to study the economic and financial ramifications of three highly relevant crisis resolution mechanisms to establish the validity of the model we show that it reproduces a series of key stylized facts of the financial and real economy the distressed institution can either be closed via a purchase assumption transaction it can be bailed out using taxpayer money or it may be bailed in in a debt to equity conversion we find that for an economy characterized by low unemployment and high productivity the optimal crisis resolution with respect to financial stability and economic productivity is to close the distressed institution for economies in recession with high unemployment the bail in tool provides the most efficient crisis resolution mechanism under no circumstances do taxpayer funded bail out schemes outperform bail ins with private sector involvement

contagion and bank failures during the great depression the june 1932 chicago banking panic the authors examine the social costs of asymmetric information induced bank panics in an environment without government deposit insurance their case study is the chicago bank panic of june 1932 the authors compare the ex ante characteristics of panic failures and panic survivors despite temporary confusion about bank asset quality on the part of depositors during the panic which was associated with widespread depositor runs and bank stock price declines the panic did not produce significant social costs in terms of failures among solvent banks copyright 1997 by american economic association

the screening hypothesis an application of the wiles test according to wiles 1974 the screening and human capital theories of the return to education may be discriminated between by determining whether qualified individuals earn more by working in areas where their skills are relevant than they earn in other areas failure to do so is presumed to constitute evidence against human capital theory this paper applies the wiles test to a census of recent economics and science graduates from australian universities only for male science graduates is any evidence found in favour of human capital theory

vive la revolution long term educational returns of 1968 to the angry students the famous events of may 1968 starting with student riots threw france into a state of turmoil as a result normal examination procedures were abandoned and the pass rate for various qualifications increased enormously the lowering of thresholds at critical stages of the education system enabled a proportion of students to pursue more years of higher education than would otherwise have been possible for those on the margin of passing their examinations additional years of higher education increased future wages and occupational levels interestingly the effect is also transmitted across generations and is reflected in the educational performance of children

high school completion and future youth unemployment new evidence from high school and beyond in this paper i provide new evidence from high school and beyond hsb on the effects of compulsory attendance on high school completion and future youth unemployment i develop bayesian estimation approaches to the simultaneous equation model with ordered probit and two limit censored regression and the bivariate duration model accounting for the heterogeneity in returns to education and the nonlinearity in the effects of compulsory attendance i find substantial variability in returns to education across schools and evidence of diminishing marginal effects of compulsory attendance on high school completion the simulation results suggest that increasing the compulsory attendance age raises the probability of completing high school and reduces the proportion of time the individuals are unemployed these effects are much more pronounced for disadvantaged students but less pronounced for advantaged students suggesting the potential effects of compulsory attendance on reducing the inequality in education and employment copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

bailouts and bank runs theory and evidence from tarp during the recent financial crisis there were bank runs right after government bailout announcements this paper develops a global game model of information based bank runs to analyze how the announcement of bailouts affects investors bank run incentives the equilibrium probability of bank runs is uniquely determined i conclude that before the announcement the existence of such bailout policy reduces investors bank run incentives but after the announcement investors may run on the bank since such an announcement reflects the government s information about the bad bank asset the empirical evidence from tarp is consistent with my theory

crises and prices information aggregation multiplicity and volatility crises are volatile times when endogenous sources of information are closely monitored we study the role of information in crises by introducing a financial market in a coordination game with imperfect information the asset price aggregates dispersed private information acting as a public noisy signal in contrast to the case with exogenous information our main result is that uniqueness may not obtain as a perturbation from perfect information multiplicity is ensured with small noise in addition we show that a multiplicity may emerge in the financial price itself b less noise may contribute toward nonfundamental volatility even when the equilibrium is unique and c similar results obtain for a model where individuals observe one another s actions highlighting the importance of endogenous information more generally