does the gap in family friendly policies drive the family gap a segregation of the labour market into a family friendly and a non family friendly sector has the effect that women self select into the sectors depending on institutional constraints preferences for family friendly working conditions and expected wage differences we find that neglecting the sector dimension tends to understate the effect of birth related interruptions in both sectors the combined effect of a large depreciation effect and no recovery means that females in the non family friendly sector e g private sector are punished severely after childbirth in the family friendly sector e g public sector we find complete catch up

the economics of iron deficiency abstract this paper examines the evidence for a causal relationship between iron deficiency and a variety of functional consequences with economic implications motor and mental impairment in children and low work productivity in adults to the extent that we can be confident that iron deficiency does cause a consequence with economic implications this effect is quantified in economic terms illustrative calculations for 10 developing countries suggest that the median value of annual physical productivity losses due to iron deficiency is around 2 32 per capita or 0 57 of gdp median total losses physical and cognitive combined are 16 78 per capita 4 05 of gdp using a cost of 1 33 per case of anemia prevented from one of the few effectiveness studies of national fortification allows us to calculate the benefit cost ratio for long term iron fortification programs the median value is 6 1 for the 10 countries examined and rises to 36 1 including the discounted future benefits attributable to cognitive improvements this paper improves on previous work by including a much more thorough survey of the quantitative magnitudes involved and by incorporating effects of iron deficiency on cognition however more research is needed to verify the accuracy of the assumptions needed for this type of analysis

individual risk attitudes measurement determinants and behavioral consequences this paper studies risk attitudes using a large representative survey and a complementary experiment conducted with a representative subject pool in subjects homes using a question asking people about their willingness to take risks in general we find that gender age height and parental background have an economically significant impact on willingness to take risks the experiment confirms the behavioral validity of this measure using paid lottery choices turning to other questions about risk attitudes in specific contexts we find similar results on the determinants of risk attitudes and also shed light on the deeper question of stability of risk attitudes across contexts we conduct a horse race of the ability of different measures to explain risky behaviors such as holdings stocks occupational choice and smoking the question about risk taking in general generates the best all round predictor of risky behavior

education and contraceptive choice a conditional demand framework a multiperiod model of fertility and contraceptive choice which considers unobserved differential preferences for the timing of births is formulated conventional and conditional demand equations for contraceptives are derived from the model and the relationships in each between female education birth intentions and the level of contraceptive efficiency are compared demand equations derived from the model conditioned on birth intentions were shown to be superior to conventional demand equations in testing some of the assumptions pertaining to the technology of contraceptives embedded in the utility maximization framework a weak test of the hypothesis that education lowers the fixed costs of information associated with new technologies as exemplified by the oral contraceptive was shown to be obtainable only from consistent estimates of conditional contraceptive choice demand parameters as a consequence of the dual technological attributes of contraceptive methods if education affects both the costs of children and preference orderings over the spacing of births the education contraceptive use association conditional on the number of intended children cannot be used to make welfare comparisons across households the log linear model in which contraceptives were categorized on the basis of their cost characteristics and simulatenous equations techniques were used to obtain estimates of the conditional demand equations for contraceptives based on data from the national fertility survey 1970 estimates indicated that the education of the wife among households with identical fertility plans was significantly and positively associated with the adoption of the newer birth control methods in 1970 with quantitiative affects significantly greater than those indicated in reduced form and inconsistently estimated conditional equations appearing in a priori studies the results support the hypothesis that the relative magnitudes of fixed and variable contraceptive costs influence contraceptive decisions with the value of the wifes time an important component of the former and suggest that women with higher levels of education are more likely to use traditional contraceptive methods

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

the progress of school education in india this paper provides an overview of school education in india first it places india s educational achievements in international perspective particularly against countries with which it is now increasingly compared especially china second the paper examines schooling access in terms of enrolment and school attendance rates and schooling quality in terms of literacy rates learning achievement levels school resources and teacher inputs third the paper investigates the role of private schooling in india examining the extent of growth of private schooling and surveying evidence on the relative effectiveness and unit costs of private and public schools last the paper discusses some major public education initiatives the concluding section suggests a future research agenda and appeals for rigorous evaluation of the impacts and costs of the numerous existing educational interventions in order to learn about their relative cost effectiveness for evidence based policy making

determinants of child mortality health and nutrition in a developing country abstract child health and nutrition status are important determinants of adult productivities and earnings and thus are an important channel of intergenerational socioeconomic mobility building upon economic models of household behavior we investigate the determinants of child mortality and health and nutrition status in regions defined by the degree of urbanization in the developing country of nicaragua and offer some policy suggestions our estimates suggest that determinants differ significantly across regions income is not an important factor there is an inverse relation with number of siblings and there are positive associations with calorie intake schooling except in the relatively low income rural areas the availability of refrigeration and the quality of sewage systems

a switching regression model for wage determinants in the public and private sectors of a developing country governments in less developed countries face severe budgetary constraints given that public sector employment is a large part of modern sector employment the government wage bill h as come under increased scrutiny the central question is how do gove rnment wages compare with those in the private sector in this paper the authors develop and estimate a model to answer this question an important aspect of this model is the endogenous treatment of sector choice the estimation results full information maximum likelihood sound a strong warning against the use of ordinary least squares est imates that are based on sector specific samples data are from the i vory coast copyright 1988 by mit press

the demand for education for home production this paper analyzes a type of education thus far ignored in the literature non credit adult education to enhance home production skills in the analysis we test whether such education behaves as an investment in home productivity and also compare the differences between demands for home productivity enhancing education and labor market enhancing education results on four adult cohorts indicate that both types of schooling have investment components although there are also significant differences in the two demand functions results also indicate that the two types of education are complementary rather than substitute activities

optimal wage taxation when human capital and employment are endogenous this paper studies how optimal wage tax conclusions from the classic two period life cycle model of human capital accumulation are affected by endogenizing the number of taxpaying workers in the absence of a corrective policy young individuals underinvest in human capital from a social perspective because tax premiums for transfers to nonworkers are not actuarially adjusted downward for human capital attainment a combination of wage taxes and wage subsidies can restore proper price signals numerical simulations suggest that even modest employment elasticities can be sufficient to substantially impact the magnitudes and even the signs of optimal wage tax rates jel h21 h3 j24

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

education and freedom of choice evidence from arranged marriages in vietnam abstractusing household data from vietnam we provide evidence on the effects of education on freedom of spouse choice we use war disruptions and spatial indicators of schooling supply as instruments the point estimates indicate that a year of additional schooling reduces the probability of an arranged marriage by about 14 percentage points for an individual with eight years of schooling we also estimate bounds on the effect of education on arranged marriage when exclusion restrictions are violated locally the lower bound is six to seven percentage points the impact of education is strong for women but significantly weaker for men

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

in aid we trust hearts and minds and the pakistan earthquake of 2005 in 2005 an earthquake in northern pakistan led to a significant inflow of international relief groups four years later trust in europeans and americans was markedly higher among those exposed to the earthquake and the relief that followed these differences reflect the greater provision of foreign aid and foreigner presence in affected villages rather than preexisting population differences or a general impact of disasters on trust we thus demonstrate large scale durable attitudinal change in a representative muslim population trust in westerners among muslims is malleable and not a deeply rooted function of preferences or global as opposed to local policy and actions

violence and risk preference experimental evidence from afghanistan we investigate the relationship between violence and economic risk preferences in afghanistan combining i a two part experimental procedure identifying risk preferences violations of expected utility and specific preferences for certainty ii controlled recollection of fear based on established methods from psychology and iii administrative violence data from precisely geocoded military records we document a specific preference for certainty in violation of expected utility the preference for certainty which we term a certainty premium is exacerbated by the combination of violent exposure and controlled fearful recollections the results have implications for risk taking and are potentially actionable for policymakers and marketers

the impact of primary schooling on economic development a review of the evidence abstract the contribution of primary schooling to economic development is greater than has conventionally been percieved this review of recent research shows that primary schooling increases labour productivity in both urban and rural sectors and that the economic returns to such investment are typically high in addition it reduces fertility improves health and nutrition and promotes other behavioural and attitudinal changes which are helpful to economic development investment strategies which give primary schooling an important place would be more conducive of growth with equity than many alternatives priorities for government and donor policies are indicated as are those for future research

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

the consumption value of schooling an empirical estimate of one aspect the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate by example that human capital is more than just a capital good in the strictest sense of the term certain forms of human capital have consumption value in addition to the value of the increased stream offuture monetary and nonmonetary benefits a methodfor empirically estimating the consumption value of schooling as a vehicle to avoid the vietnam war draft is presented

education and economic performance simplistic theories and their policy consequences a largely unquestioned consensus proclaims that educational policy is an effective tool for delivering prosperity and increasing rates of economic growth this consensus rests on far less secure foundations than is commonly supposed international comparisons confirm that as they become richer people seek ever more education for their children but provide no clear cut evidence of economic benefits accruing to countries which are high spending in education terms analyses which extrapolate from the incomes of educated individuals rest on assumptions about how wages are determined and the extent to which rewards are for skills acquired in schooling which are highly questionable moreover an uncritical belief in educational expansion leads to target driven policies with serious negative effects on educational quality a more realistic view of education s economic impact and a move away from centralized planning for economic ends would actually improve the quality of education copyright 2004 oxford university press

storm damage and risk preferences panel evidence from germany individuals risk preferences may change after experiencing external socio economic or natural shocks theoretical predictions and empirical studies suggest that risk taking may increase or decrease after experiencing shocks so far the empirical evidence is sparse especially when it comes to developed countries we contribute to this literature by investigating whether experiencing financial and health related damage caused by storms affects risk preferences of individuals in germany using unique panel data we find that household heads were more risk seeking after they experienced storm damage we do not find evidence of exposure to storm per se regardless of damage experience which suggests that household heads have to suffer damage for their risk preferences to be affected these results are robust across a battery of alternative model specifications and alternative storm damage measures magnitude of financial damage we rule out other potential explanations such as health related and economic shocks the self reported storm damage data is broadly confirmed by regional storm damage data provided by the insurance industry while we cannot identify the channels through which experiencing storm damage affects risk preferences from our data we suggest and discuss some potential channels the results may have important policy implications as risk preferences affect for instance individuals savings and investment behaviour adoption of self protection and self insurance strategies and technology adoption

who is behavioral cognitive ability and anomalous preferences in this paper we ask whether variation in preference anomalies is related to variation in cognitive ability evidence from a new laboratory study of chilean high school students with similar schooling backgrounds shows that small stakes risk aversion and short run discounting are less common among those with higher standardized test scores the relationship with test scores survives controls for parental education and wealth we find some evidence that elementary school gpa is predictive of preferences measured at the end of high school two laboratory interventions provide suggestive evidence of a possible causal impact of cognitive resources on expressed preferences jel j24 d14 c91

public inputs and child schooling in brazil household data from a one percent sample of the 1970 brazilian census are used to analyze the effect of public inputs i e the supply of schooling on children s school attainment in brazil the household data are combined with measures of school availability and quality derived directly from the same census data the measures are based on the number and education of schoolteachers in each of 169 different areas of the country elasticities of demand with respect to these public inputs are estimated these elasticities are high in both rural and urban areas in urban areas the positive effect of public inputs is greater for children from households with poorer and less educated parents in rural areas the positive effect of public inputs is greater if anything for children from households that are relatively better off at least compared to other rural households

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

returns to education a further international update and implications this paper updates evidence on the returns to investment in education by adding estimates for new countries and refining existing estimates to bring the total number of country cases to over 60 the new cross country evidence confirms and reinforces earlier patterns namely that returns are highest for primary education the general curricula the education of women and countries with the lowest per capita income the findings have important implications for directing future investment in education which for efficiency and equity purposes should concentrate on these priority areas

the demand for semi pro league football in malaysia 1989 91 a panel data approach this article arguments the literature on the demand for professional team sports by estimating a demand function for attendance at home matches in the malaysian semi pro football league mspfl between 1989 and 1991 a single equation demand attendance function based on a pooled cross section and time series panel data set of 399 games is estimated by ordinary least squares a fixed effects dummy variable covariance model and an error components model our findings confirm the importance of market size and championship prospects for the home team but not the visiting team as well as divisional status and star players the first match of the season and derby matches also increased attendance

a human capital model of the effects of ability and family background on optimal schooling levels this paper develops a theoretical model of optimal schooling levels where ability and family background are the central explanatory variables we derive schooling demand and supply functions based on individual wealth maximization using nlsy79 data we stratify our sample into one year fte work experience cohorts for 1985 1989 mincer s 1974 overtaking cohort the years of work experience at which individuals observed earnings approximately equal what they would have been based on schooling and ability alone corresponds to 13 fte years of work experience yielding on average a rate of return of 9 6 percent and an average optimal 11 4 years of schooling

is school the best route to skills returns to vocational school and vocational skills in egypt this paper tests the assumption that formal education is the best route to job skills the returns to formal vocational secondary schooling are compared to the returns to acquiring skills outside the education system such as undertaking an apprenticeship for male wage workers in egypt a unique longitudinal dataset with information on schooling and skills allows for causal inference about returns by comparing siblings for recent cohorts the estimated returns to formal vocational secondary education are the same as attaining no formal education however the returns to skills obtained outside of formal education are substantial

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

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

the demand for league football a demand equation is estimated for total football league attendances for the period 1948 49 to 1979 80 plausible values are obtained for the elasticities of demand with respect to income and to a price variable which includes the cost of travel to the stadium the values imply that football spectating is an inferior good with a low price elasticity equations are also estimated for the league s separate divisions the implications of the results for the football league clubs are discussed

early childhood nutrition and academic achievement a longitudinal analysis abstract many policymakers propose early childhood nutrition programs as a way to increase students academic achievement this paper investigates the nutrition learning nexus using a unique longitudinal data set that follows a large sample of filipino children from birth until the end of their primary education we find that better nourished children perform significantly better in school partly because they enter school earlier and thus have more time to learn but mostly because of greater learning productivity per year of schooling our cost benefit analysis suggests that a dollar invested in an early childhood nutrition program in a developing country could potentially return at least three dollars worth of gains in academic achievement and perhaps much more

ability tracking school competition and the distribution of educational benefits abstract to study the effects of ability grouping on school competition we develop a theoretical and computational model of tracking in public and private schools we examine tracking s consequences for the allocation of students of differing abilities and income within and between public and private schools private schools tend to attract the most able and wealthiest students and rarely track in equilibrium public sector schools can maximize attendance by tracking students public schools retain a greater proportion of higher ability students by tracking but lose more wealthy lower ability students to the private sector consequently socioeconomic status is a predictor of track assignment in public schools for the entire population public sector tracking has small aggregate effects on achievement and welfare but results in significant redistribution from lower to higher ability students

gender and ethnicity differentials in school attainment and labor market earnings in ecuador summary indigenous people in ecuador are most likely to be disadvantaged and live in poverty this paper reports on the findings of an econometric analysis which explores the extent to which lower educational attainment and labor market discrimination contribute to these disparities the analysis utilizes a proportional hazard regression model to examine which factors raise the probability of early school departure it also employs a classic regression model to explore the relationship between low educational attainment and earnings together with an oaxaca decomposition which parses out the extent to which earning differentials can be attributed to differences in human capital or to discrimination

variation in risk seeking behaviour following large losses a natural experiment this study explores people s risk taking behaviour after having suffered large real world losses following a natural disaster using the margins of the 2011 australian floods brisbane as a natural experimental setting we find that homeowners who were victims of the floods and face large losses in property values are 50 more likely to opt for a risky gamble a scratch card giving a small chance of a large gain 500 000 than for a sure amount of comparable value 10 this finding is consistent with prospect theory predictions regarding the adoption of a risk seeking attitude after a loss

are educated workers really more productive abstract this paper presents a new method for examining the productive nature of education it outlines an econometric model which simultaneously estimates an earnings function and a production function for workers and the firms where they are employed this approach permits a direct comparison to be made between the relative wage and relative productivity of workers with different levels of education using a unique data set from ghana two primary questions are addressed 1 are educated workers more productive than workers with no formal education and 2 do earnings differentials between workers with different levels of education reflect genuine productivity differentials the results suggest that education is positively correlated with productivity in ghanaian manufacturing and that firms pay workers according to their productivity

the contribution of weather variability to economic sectors every day people make economic decisions based on the weather affecting sales of companies in a wide range of economic sectors in many cases the impact of weather on sales is not constant from

the economic consequences of brain drain of the best and brightest microeconomic evidence from five countries this article presents results of innovative surveys that tracked academic high achievers from five countries to wherever they moved in the world to directly measure at the micro level the channels through which high skilled emigration affects sending countries there are high levels of emigration and of return and the income gains to the best and brightest from migrating are an order of magnitude greater than any other effect most high skilled migrants from poorer countries remit but involvement in trade and foreign direct investment is rare fiscal costs vary widely but are much less than the benefits to the migrants themselves two narratives drive discussions of the development impact of high skilled migration the first is the idea of a brain drain whereby the departure of doctors teachers engineers scientists and other highly skilled workers decimates the human capital and fiscal revenues of sending countries bhagwati and hamada 1974 such fears lead to calls for policies to restrict the flow of highly skilled workers such as demands that developed countries stop recruiting doctors from developing nations and efforts by developing nations to restrict the ease of their highly skilled individuals migrating 1 contrasting with this is the view of a highly educated diaspora as a potent force for developing the local economy through remittances trade foreign direct investment fdi and knowledge transfers with the experience of india and china in setting up technology firms as a result of diaspora working in silicon valley a prominent example saxenian 2002 economists have also emphasised that the possibility of migrating may spur human capital accumulation potentially leading to a net increase in the education levels of those in the home country 2

human capital and economic development abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model of fertility and human capital investment with young adult mortality because young adult mortality is negatively related to average young adult human capital human capital accumulation lowers mortality inducing demographic transition and industrial revolution data confirm that young adult mortality is related negatively to schooling and the rate of return to schooling and positively to fertility the data indicate a negative relationship between tfp growth and schooling accumulation the model fits the data on country populations per capita incomes human capital total fertility rates infant mortality life expectancy and conditional life expectancy

human capital accumulation and the expansion of women s economic rights abstractbetween 1850 and 1920 most u s states enacted laws expanding the rights of married women to own and control their separate property and to own their market earnings the economic approach to property rights implies that as married women gain economic rights the incentive to invest in girls human capital will rise this prediction is tested by examining the impact of these legal changes on girls school attendance rates relative to boys state level census data are used to examine the effects of these changes on school attendance among all school aged children integrated public use microdata series data are used to examine their effect on school attendance among children ages 15 19 who are just beyond compulsory schooling ages consistent with hypothesized effects the empirical analysis shows that expanding women s economic rights resulted in higher relative rates of school attendance by girls and had the largest effect on the 15 19 age group

paying for good neighbours estimating the value of an implied educated community by definition spillovers across households in residential communities mean that people incur costs from living in neighbourhoods where a high proportion of households suffer deprivation regardless of their own economic circumstances to verify the existence of intracommunity spillovers this paper shows that home owners in england and wales are prepared to pay a substantial premium to avoid educationally poor neighbourhoods an increase of 1 per cent in the proportion of higher educated residents in a community relative to the regional mean increases prices by 0 24 per cent one interpretation of this educational elasticity is that it estimates the social benefits of education in the local community a hedonic approach is used paying careful attention to the endogeneity of neighbourhood characteristics in a property price model

health and wage a simultaneous equation model with multiple discrete indicators in this article we propose all econometric approach for estimating the simultaneouls effects of health and wages in a structural equations framework in the theoretical works of grossmana 1972a 1972b health is viewed as anl elldogen1oulsly determined capital stock the demand for health should rise with the wage rate as the rate of return to health investment increases with wage onl the other hand better health should raise market productivity and hence wages since health capital is an abstract theoretical concept it can hardly be measured quantitatively however most population surveys include various health indicators these indicators are usually discrete variables in the empirical work of grossman and benham 1974 these qualitative indicators are treated as continuous variables and two stage least squares estimation techniques are used this specification raises various econometric problems see e g goldberger 1964 pp 248 255 domencich and mcfadden 1975 and nerlove and press 1973 a satisfactory specification should take into account the discrete nature of the indicators our specification generalizes the dummy variables simultaneous equations system of heckman 1978 the measurement models of joreskog and goldberger 1975 and is closely related to the models of muthe n 1976 1979 muthen studies full information maximum likelihood procedures for estimation except for very simple cases this does not generally yield feasible or tractable procedures in this article we introduce a tractable procedure for statistical estimation and testing this specification and the estimation procedure is then applied to study the joint dependence of health and wages another departure of our approach from others is that we will test and correct the possible incompatibility of the various health capital indicators in the population surveys one may have subjective health indicators such as self evaluation of health which may reflect different populations perception of health we propose a statistical procedure for testing measurement compatibility and if required for correcting this problem this article is divided into two parts initially we describe the model specification estimation and statistical tests in a general simultaneous equation model with multiple discrete indicators in the second part of the paper we consider specification of a simultaneous equation model for health and wages the model

parental altruism and child lead exposure inferences from the demand for chelation therapy we use parents decisions to treat their children s body burdens of lead to infer parental ex ante willingness to pay for reduced burdens willingness to pay is estimated with a data set containing 256 observations the data were originally gathered to assess the impact of children s body lead burdens upon their intellectual and behavioral development our results indicate that parental ex ante willingness to pay for a 1 percent reduction in child body lead burden exceeds the estimated ex post savings in medical treatment and compensatory education costs caused by the same reduction

rates of return on physical and human capital in africa s manufacturing sector in this paper two sets of issues are addressed using panel data from the manufacturing sector of five african countries first how high are the returns to human relative to physical capital second what is the relative importance of technology and endowments of human and physical capital in determining differences in earnings and productivity across the countries evidence from earnings functions shows that the private returns to both experience and education rise with the level of education private returns rise from 3 per cent at the primary level to 10 per cent at the secondary level and 35 per cent for tertiary evidence from the production function gives lower returns on education than from the earnings function rates of return on physical capital exceed 20 per cent and greatly exceed the average return on human capital data is available on the stocks of human and physical capital across the countries productivity and earnings differentials are shown to be large between cameroon and ghana these differences are due almost entirely to differences in physical not human capital endowments this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

multidimensional welfare distributions empirical application to household panel data from vietnam this article explores the empirical application of theoretical multidimensional welfare distribution analysis techniques to real household welfare distributions the article operationalizes recent conceptual developments in multidimensional distribution theory and assesses their usefulness for the measurement of multidimensional household inequality the results strongly highlight the importance of bringing nonmonetary aspects of household welfare into the forefront of inequality analysis agreement over the various approaches to the measurement of multidimensional inequality entails however nontrivial decisions that may limit the practical usefulness of these measures we suggest that the use of multidimensional inequality ranges and the application of restrictive dominance criteria to multidimensional welfare distributions may open significant scope for further developments in the empirical analysis of multidimensional inequality

earnings inequality and the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity in sub saharan africa the case of tanzanian manufacturing nordman robilliard and roubaud 2011 conclude that there is a broad consensus regard ing the magnitude and explanation of earnings differentials based on ethnicity and gender in sub saharan africa across the small but grow ing literature however to date none have consid ered the intersectionality of gender and ethnicity as a source of earnings inequality in sub saharan africa as far as we can determine

child farm labor the wealth paradox this article is motivated by the remarkable observation that children of land rich households are often more likely to be in work than the children of land poor households the vast majority of working children in developing economies are in agricultural work predominantly on farms operated by their families land is the most important store of wealth in agrarian societies and it is typically distributed very unequally these facts challenge the common presumption that child labor emerges from the poorest households this article suggests that this apparent paradox can be explained by failures of the markets for labor and land credit market failure will tend to weaken the force of this paradox these effects are modeled and estimates obtained using survey data from rural pakistan and ghana the main result is that the wealth paradox persists for girls in both countries whereas for boys it disappears after conditioning on other covariates

literacy sharing assortative mating or what labour market advantages and proximate illiteracy revisited abstract this paper explores the relationship between household literacy and the labour market outcomes of illiterate household members which basu narayan and ravallion 2002 report using household income and expenditure data from bangladesh bnr attribute a considerable wage premium for proximate illiterate women in off farm employment to labour productivity gains from intra household literacy sharing this wage premium also suggests that women may be more efficient recipients of literacy externalities than men we propose that any such relationship might not be due to higher labour productivity but may have other explanations such as systematically different and unobserved attributes of illiterate females married into literate households we also pay attention to the negative selection of illiterate females into non farm wage employment which contrary to received wisdom suggests that household literacy may not be unambiguously progressive for females we propose that the widely reported finding that

labor force participation and earnings determinants for women in the special conditions of developing countries abstract little systematic analysis exists regarding hypothesized special labor market conditions for women in developing countries this study explores such conditions in nicaragua major results are i small children affect participation less than in developed countries due to child care from extended families or while on informal sector jobs and the necessity for poor mothers to work ii schooling and experience have major roles affecting work sector and earnings but the primary school return is half that cited by the world bank iii other human capital variables particularly nutrition have some impact

africa s education enigma the nigerian story abstract in the last two decades the social and economic benefits of formal education in sub saharan africa have been debated anecdotal evidence points to low returns to education in africa unfortunately there is limited econometric evidence to support these claims at the micro level in this study i focus on nigeria a country that holds 1 5 of africa s population i use instruments based on the exogenous timing of the implementation and withdrawal of free primary education across regions in this country to consistently estimate the returns to education in the late 1990s the results show the average returns to education are particularly low in the 90s in contrast to conventional wisdom for developing countries 2 8 for every extra year of schooling between 1997 and 1999 surprisingly i find no significant differences between ols and iv estimates of returns to education when necessary controls are included in the wage equation the low returns to education results shed new light on both the changes in demand for education in nigeria and the increased emigration rates from african countries that characterized the 90s

the relevance of standard estimates of rates of return to schooling for education policy a critical assessment abstract this paper examines the accuracy and usefulness of estimated rates of return to schooling based on the standard human capital model of becker and mincer regarding accuracy it investigates whether failure to account for differences in ability and school quality lead to significant biases estimates using ghanaian data confirm this possibility even when accurate estimated rates of return to additional years of schooling may have limited policy implications more useful for governments are rates of return to investments in school quality the paper uses data on cognitive skills to estimate rates of return to three types of school quality improvements

risk aversion wealth and background risk we use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay for a risky security we relate this measure to consumer s endowments and attributes and to measures of background risk and liquidity constraints we find that risk aversion is a decreasing function of the endowment thus rejecting cara preferences we estimate the elasticity of risk aversion to consumption at about 0 7 below the unitary value predicted by crra utility we also find that households attributes are of little help in predicting their degree of risk aversion which is characterized by massive unexplained heterogeneity we show that the consumer s environment affects risk aversion individuals who are more likely to face income uncertainty or to become liquidity constrained exhibit a higher degree of absolute risk aversion consistent with recent theories of attitudes toward risk in the presence of uninsurable risks jel d1 d8

women work and weil being in the middle east an outline of the relevant literature there is now an extensive literature on the role of women in economic development and the impact of development on their lives this article concentrates on the economic literature and discusses its importance for policies aimed at working women in the middle east it identifies the important strands and places the discussion within the wider context of women in the labour market in both developing and developed countries the general conclusion is that we are very far from having sufficient knowledge to implement effective policy or even to evaluate existing policies

does the labour market explain lower female schooling in india labour market discrimination against women and parental discrimination against daughters are two of the most commonly cited explanations of the gender gap in education in developing countries this study empirically tests the labour market explanation for india using recent household survey data the results reveal substantial omitted family background bias in the estimates of rates of return to education the findings suggest that as well as overall labour market discrimination girls face poorer economic incentives to invest in schooling than boys because they reap lower labour market returns to education than boys

social learning neighborhood effects and investment in human capital evidence from green revolution india abstract this paper empirically identifies social learning and neighborhood effects in schooling investments in a new technology regime social learning implies that learning is most efficient when observed heterogeneity in schooling is greatest the estimates of learning investment rule from farm household panel data at the onset of the green revolution in india show that i agents learn about schooling returns from income realizations of their neighbors and ii the speed of learning is high when the variation of schooling is large thus schooling distribution of the parents generation in a community has externalities to schooling investments in children simulations show that the variations in schooling within and across communities generate variations in child enrollment rate and average household income

time to change what to sow risk preferences and technology adoption decisions of cotton farmers in china this paper examines the role of individual risk attitudes in the decision to adopt a new form of agricultural biotechnology in china i conducted a survey and a field experiment to elicit the risk preferences of chinese farmers who faced the decision of whether to adopt genetically modified bt cotton a decade ago in my analysis i expand the measurement of risk preferences beyond expected utility theory to incorporate prospect theory i find that farmers who are more risk averse or more loss averse adopt bt cotton later farmers who overweight small probabilities adopt bt cotton earlier

cost and income based measures of human capital human capital is increasingly believed to play an important role in the growth process however adequately measuring its stock remains controversial in this paper three general approaches to measurement are identified cost based income based and educational stock based this survey focuses on the first two approaches and provides a critical review of the theories and their applications to data from a range of countries particular emphasis is placed upon the work of jorgenson and fraumeni 1989 1992 and some new results for new zealand based upon their approach are also presented

college football attendance a panel study of the football bowl subdivision panel data with an instrumented real ticket price are used to estimate a regular season game day attendance and per cent of capacity regression equations better team performance whether short term season wins intermediate term bowls games in last 10 years or long term lifetime winning percentage higher undergraduate enrolment traditional rivalries and video coverage increase per cent of capacity used poor weather more rain or cloud cover higher travel costs and larger local population decrease it fan interest wanes as a season progresses but this is offset as a team wins more games games played near a national football league stadium those with conference opponents non fbs opponents and non bcs opponents have lower stadium utilization the substantive results of the analysis do not change when attendance is used as the dependent variable rather than per cent of capacity

household income and child schooling in vietnam the stronger are the associations between household income and child schooling the lower is intergenerational social mobility and the less equal is opportunity this study estimates the associations between household income and children s school success in vietnam the estimates indicate that these associations are considerable this article also investigates some ways in which policies relate to household incomes school fees are progressive but school fees are only about one third of what households pay directly to schools and are a much smaller proportion of a household s total school related expenditures total household expenditures paid directly to schools increase with household income less proportionately than do school fees alone so the overall structure of such payments is less progressive than is the structure of school fees because school enrollment is positively related to household income moreover the structure of school fees is less progressive for the entire population than for the selected subset that has children enrolled in school further the two school quality measures that have the strongest positive association with children s school success are much more available to higher income households meaning that higher income households have greater school expenditures in part because they are obtaining higher quality schooling and not because charges for the same quality schooling are progressive across income classes

winning games versus winning championships the economics of fan interest and team performance championship prospects as distinct from game winning prospects may contribute to a fan s interest in a particular sports team if so then both season length and the structure of championship playoffs help determine the equilibrium allocation of playing skills across the teams of a league evidence from a regression analysis of team attendance in baseball indicates that ticket demand depends in part on perceived flag winning prospects several patterns in the winning percentages of league leaders in the major u s team sports are consistent with the perspective that championship considerations influence the allocation of playing skills

tying odysseus to the mast evidence from a commitment savings product in the philippines we designed a commitment savings product for a philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology the savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism we conducted a baseline survey on 1777 existing or former clients of a bank one month later we offered the commitment product to a randomly chosen subset of 710 clients 202 28 4 percent accepted the offer and opened the account in the baseline survey we asked hypothetical time discounting questions women who exhibited a lower discount rate for future relative to current trade offs and hence potentially have a preference for commitment were indeed significantly more likely to open the commitment savings account after twelve months average savings balances increased by 81 percentage points for those clients assigned to the treatment group relative to those assigned to the control group we conclude that the savings response represents a lasting change in savings and not merely a short term response to a new product

education employment and earnings of secondary school and university leavers in tanzania evidence from a tracer study this study uses a tracer survey of secondary school completers in tanzania to analyse the impact of educational qualifications on labour market earnings we show that the rates of return to the highest educational qualifications for wage employees are not negligible and at the margin provide an investment incentive however we find little evidence of human capital effects in the earnings determination process for the self employment sector introducing controls for father s educational background and a set of school fixed effects designed to proxy for school quality and potential labour market network effects reduces the estimated rates of return to educational qualifications a comparison of our results with the available evidence from other countries in the region suggest that despite an extremely small secondary and university education system the private rates of return to education in the tanzanian wage employment sector are comparatively low

the effects of education and family planning programs on fertility in indonesia abstract numerous studies indicate that female education is a major determinant of fertility and that the estimated effects are large relative to other variables including family planning program variables there are however two serious deficiencies in the research relating educational attainment to fertility that could give rise to invalid inferences first many public programs including health and family planning programs may influence a woman s decisions about education and these indirect programmatic effects might be large second nearly all existing studies of the impacts of education on fertility assume that a woman s educational attainment is exogenous education could be serving as a proxy for such unobservable determinants as ability motivation and parental background as these factors most likely are important determinants of a woman s educational attainment we use the 1993 indonesian family life survey to compare the estimated impacts of education on fertility from a simple model tha

data watch the world bank s living standards measurement study household surveys since 1985 the world bank has been collecting household survey data in developing countries that provide a rich source of information for assessing household welfare understanding household behavior and evaluating the impact of government policies this article describes these household surveys known as living standards measurement study lsms surveys and explains how to obtain their data lsms surveys have been implemented in over twenty developing countries and have been used to analyze poverty labor markets health and education pricing policies determinants of school performance savings and consumption smoothing health and nutrition policies and gender and fertility issues

attendance at australian rules football a panel study the demand for australian rules football is examined using data on attendance at individual matches played between 1981 and 1986 an estimation methodology which is appropriate for a dynamic model with panel data is adopted and it is found that attendance at football is price inelastic and an inferior good the effect of habit in consumption behaviour stadium size uncertainty of outcome and team success are also shown to be important determinants of attendance

schooling and earnings distributions with endogenous labour force participation marital status and family size this paper investigates the impact of various schooling investment strategies on family and per capita earnings within a framework that integrates effects on earnings family size marital status and labour force participation data are from a 1977 1978 survey of urban nicaraguan women aged 15 45 excerpt

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

earnings schooling ability and cognitive skills conventional estimates now available for a large number of countries generally indicate that the social returns to education are positive large and competitive with returns to investment in physical capital that such estimates are good guides for public resource allocation has however been questioned the heart of the problem lies in the interpretation of the positive relationship between the education and the earnings of workers whether as the conventional estimates assume the coefficient of the education variable in the earnings function measures the effect on the productivity of workers of human capital acquired in school it has been hypothesized that education in part or instead represents screening for native ability and motivation or credentialism and that as a consequence conventional measures of the social benefit of education are substantially upward biased 2 in this paper we attempt to distinguish the influence on earnings of cognitive achievement native ability and years of education as a means of adjudicating the human capital screening and credentialist hypotheses our econometric analysis is based on two rigorously comparable micro data sets from kenya and tanzania generated by surveys of the urban wage labor force specifically for this study these data sets contain the usual variables found in earnings function estimates of the benefits of schooling individual earnings years of education and years of employment experience in addition they contain two variables measures of the worker s cognitive skills and of his or her reasoning ability not previously found in studies of developing countries and only rarely found in studies of the education earnings relationship in developed countries 3 with these variables we can estimate the direct effects on earnings of cognitive skills ability and years of schooling by using them to estimate educational production functions and educational attainment functions and linking these functions with the earnings function in a recursive framework we can also assess the various indirect effects on earnings of ability and years of schooling having data sets from two countries very similar with respect to size resource endowments structure of production and employment and level of development means that not only can we subject our results to the usual statistical tests but we can also assess their replicability both kenya and tanzania have nearly achieved the objective of universal primary education while university enrollments remain at less than 1 percent of the relevant age group the important policy issues re boissiere development research department the world bank 1818 h street washington d c 20433 knight institute of economics and statistics oxford university sabot williams college williamstown ma 01267 we are grateful to the educational testing service of princeton for the design of tests used in this study and to j armitage j behrman j hausman d hendry d jamison and an anonymous referee for their insights and advice helpful comments were also received from participants in seminars at oxford and yale universities the views presented here are our own they should not be interpreted as reflecting those of the world bank george psacharopoulos 1973 1981 contains a listing of 44 countries in which rate of return studies had been conducted and of the estimates obtained 2for instance kenneth arrow 1973 mark blaug 1976 samuel bowles and herbert gintis 1976 john riley 1979 michael spence 1976 and lester thurow 1975 3for attempts to control for ability and or for cognitive achievement in studies for the united states see jere behrman et al 1980 gary chamberlain and zvi griliches 1977 griliches and william mason 1972 michael olneck 1977 paul taubman and terence wales 1974 taubman 1975 and david wise 1975 see also the survey articles by griliches 1977 1979 in most instances the data refer to special subgroups in the population and clear distinction cannot be made between natural ability and cognitive skills acquired in school

priceless the nonpecuniary benefits of schooling copyright 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 by the american economic association permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of american economic association publications for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation including the name of the author copyrights for components of this work owned by others than aea must be honored abstracting with credit is permitted the author has the right to republish post on servers redistribute to lists and use any component of this work in other works for others to do so requires prior specific permission and or a fee permissions may be requested from the american economic association administrative office by going to the contact us form and choosing copyright permissions request from the menu copyright 2016 aea

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

non farm income gender and inequality evidence from rural ghana and uganda abstract this paper examines how the distribution of earnings in rural ghana and uganda differs by income type and by gender we find that non farm earnings contribute to rising inequality but that lower income groups also benefit due to strong overall growth in non farm earnings the inequality inducing effect is driven by self employment income wage income on the other hand reduces inequality the tendency of non farm income to contribute to inequality is greater among female headed households for whom self employment is important and non farm opportunities more constrained determinants of non farm income are estimated and appear to be strongly related to location education age and distance to market estimates of the linkages to agriculture in ghana are weaker than expected showing the non farm sector to be functioning more as an alternative activity to agriculture than as a complement

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded