measuring the impacts of teachers reply abstract rothstein 2017 successfully replicates chetty friedman and rockoff s 2014a b henceforth cfr s results using data from north carolina but raises concerns about cfr s methods we show that rothstein s methodological critiques are invalid by presenting simulations and supplementary empirical evidence which show that i his preferred imputation of missing data generates bias ii his placebo test rejects valid research designs and iii his method of controlling for covariates yields inconsistent estimates of teachers long term effects consistent with the conclusions of bacher hicks kane and staiger 2016 using data from los angeles we conclude that rothstein s replication study ultimately reinforces cfr s methods and results jel h75 i21 j45

multiple experiments for the causal link between the quantity and quality of children this article presents evidence on the child quantity child quality trade off using quasi experimental variation due to twin births and preferences for a mixed sibling sex composition as well as ethnic differences in the effects of these variables our sample includes groups with very high fertility an innovation in our econometric approach is the juxtaposition of results from multiple instrumental variables strategies capturing the effects of fertility over different ranges for different sorts of people to increase precision we develop an estimator that combines different instrument sets across partially overlapping parity specific subsamples our results are remarkably consistent in showing no evidence of a quantity quality trade off

risk sharing by households within and across regions and industries abstract cochrane 1991 journal of political economy 99 957 976 and mace 1991 journal of political economy 99 928 956 test if risk sharing across households is complete in the sense that household consumption moves one for one with aggregate consumption in their studies the source of income risk is idiosyncratic and agents can share risk across the entire economy using a sample of households from the panel study on income dynamics psid we explore whether households share the risk associated with their industries and regions across households in other regions and industries we find that a large fraction of risk faced by households is not shared across regions and industries

cheap children and the persistence of poverty this paper develops a theory of fertility that offers an explanation for the persistence of poverty within and across countries if educated individuals have a comparative advantage in raising educated children then parental fertility choice is shown to give rise to a poverty trap in which the poor choose high fertility rates with low investment in child quality moreover the impact of child quality choice on economic performance is amplified by the diluting effect of higher fertility on physical capital accumulation the theory proposes insights regarding the effects of inequality globalisation and life expectancy on economic growth and demographic transitions this paper develops a theory of fertility and child educational choice that offers an explanation for the persistence of poverty within and across countries the joint determination of the quality education and quantity of children in a household is studied under the key assumption that individuals productivity as teachers increases with their own human capital in contrast the minimum time cost associated with raising a child regardless of the child s quality the quantity cost is not affected by parental education as a result the price of child quantity relative to the price of child quality increases with individuals wages in particular for low wage individuals for whom the opportunity cost of time is low children of minimal quality are cheap this assumption therefore generates a comparative advantage for the poor in child quantity whereas high wage educated individuals have a comparative advantage in raising quality children consistent with the well known evidence poor households thus choose relatively high fertility rates with relatively low investment in their offspring s education and therefore their offspring are poor as well in contrast high income families choose low fertility rates with high investment in education and therefore high income persists in the dynasty evidence from the us provided by hanushek 1992 suggests that a trade off between quantity and quality of children does indeed exist hanushek argues that movements in family size could explain over half the variance in some test scores and that the elasticity of achievements with respect to the number of children in the family is 0 03 implying that the annual achievement growth of each child in a family will fall about 2 when a second child is added and about 0 5 when a sixth child is added 1

socially optimal social security and education subsidization in a dynastic model with human capital externalities fertility and endogenous growth abstract this paper considers socially optimal government policies in a dynastic family model with physical capital human capital endogenous fertility and positive spillovers from average human capital such spillovers reduce human capital investment but raise fertility from their social optimum we first characterize the social optimum with a non convex feasible set due to the quantity quality tradeoff concerning children we then show that social security and education subsidization together financed by labor income taxes can fully eliminate the efficiency losses of the spillovers and achieve the social optimum under plausible conditions however none of the policies can do so alone

comparison of integrated assessment models carbon price impacts on u s energy abstract integrated assessment models iams are increasingly used to evaluate carbon policy impacts on energy structure but different models can yield considerably different results this paper seeks to frame model results for policymakers and other consumers of model outputs in this analysis we compare three models gcam merge and eppa we apply diagnostic carbon price scenarios such as ramps and shocks to identify key differences in model behavior that drive inter model variability in projected policy impacts on the u s energy system we report model results using several economic parameterizations and find that variation in carbon emissions across models results primarily from differences in carbon intensity of energy supply these differences arise because models include different low carbon energy technology options and vary widely in how flexible the electricity supply sector is at adapting to a change in policy the timing of emissions abatement is also strongly influenced by whether the model is a simulation or an inter temporal optimization scheme and the amount of foresight exhibited in the model our analysis demonstrates the usefulness of novel iam diagnostic indicators and clarifies model features that are highly relevant for consumers of model results

education and ethnicity in canada an intergenerational perspective ethnic and intergenerational aspects of human capital investment are explored levels of and cross sectional returns to education across ethnic groups in canada are estimated and large differences observed for men a positive correlation exists between ethnic group average years of education and its return we also find large negative correlations between ethnic group average educational outcomes and the previous generation s fertility suggesting a role for home production as a complement to formal education and supporting models of child quantity quality trade offs very slow intergenerational convergence in ethnic group level educational and labor market outcomes is also observed

leveraging lotteries for school value added testing and estimation conventional value added models vams compare average test scores across schools after regression adjusting for students demographic characteristics and previous scores this article tests for vam bias using a procedure that asks whether vam estimates accurately predict the achievement consequences of random assignment to specific schools test results from admissions lotteries in boston suggest conventional vam estimates are biased a finding that motivates the development of a hierarchical model describing the joint distribution of school value added bias and lottery compliance we use this model to assess the substantive importance of bias in conventional vam estimates and to construct hybrid value added estimates that optimally combine ordinary least squares and lottery based estimates of vam parameters the hybrid estimation strategy provides a general recipe for combining nonexperimental and quasi experimental estimates while still biased hybrid school value added estimates have lower mean squared error than conventional vam estimates simulations calibrated to the boston data show that bias notwithstanding policy decisions based on conventional vams that control for lagged achievement are likely to generate substantial achievement gains hybrid estimates that incorporate lotteries yield further gains

school district and housing price responses to fiscal stress labels evidence from ohio abstract this paper examines the effect of the ohio fiscal stress labeling system on school district outcomes and housing prices under this policy financially troubled districts are labeled and required to implement financial recovery plans in response to these plans districts increase local tax revenues and decrease capital and operating expenditures although these recovery plans lead to better long term financial health for school districts there appear to be some negative impacts on welfare in these districts during the duration of the label i find that residential home sale prices fall following fiscal stress label receipt but rise again once the label is removed these districts also undergo substantial restructuring including reductions in enrollments teachers and schools which coincide with a transitory reduction in math proficiency rates following label receipt

teacher characteristics and academic achievement identifying the impact of teacher characteristics on academic achievement has been a salient and reoccurring topic in education we employ a twin by year identification strategy using matched teach

pulled away or pushed out explaining the decline of teacher aptitude in the united states logic suggests that a teacher s value added is related to her academic aptitude it is therefore troubling that teachers aptitude has declined significantly in the united states since 1960 as demonstrated by sean corcoran et al 2002 combining longitudinal surveys they find a marked fall in teachers propensity to be in the top achievement quartile there are two main hypotheses for the decline in teacher aptitude first greater pay parity with males in nonteaching occupations may have drawn able women out of teaching second unionization may have compressed pay benefits and nonmonetary returns to aptitude in teaching and thereby pushed out high aptitude people in short there is a pull hypothesis pay parity in alternative opportunities and a push hypothesis pay compression in teaching the hypotheses are not mutually exclusive we need not choose between them instead we try to apportion blame to do this we need variation in the timing and size of the pull and push factors fortunately such variation exists among u s states our econometric identification relies on variation in labor markets and unionization laws among states at a point in time and within each state over time

occupational variation in quantity quality trade off in a brawn based economy the paper revisits the theory of the quantity quality trade off and demonstrates that the relationship between quantity and health of children is subject to occupational variation in physical energ

intra school competition and student achievement within the economics of education literature numerous studies have investigated the relationship between educational market competition and educational achievement educational market competition has been defined as either the availability of vouchers within a community or the number of schools or school districts within the relevant market structure while these studies have shown that increases in inter district competition result in increased student achievement no studies to our knowledge have yet investigated the effect of intra school competition on student achievement within this study a measure of intra school competition is developed and the findings indicate that increased intra school competition leads to increased student achievement

the impacts of family size on investment in child quality using multiple births as an exogenous shift in family size i investigate the impact of the number of children on child investment and child well being using data from the 1980 us census five percent public use micro sample 2sls results demonstrate that parents facing a change in family size reallocate resources in a way consistent with becker s quantity quality model a larger family generated by twins in a later birth reduces the likelihood that older children attend private school reduces the mother s labor force participation and increases the likelihood that parents divorce the impact of family size on a measure of child outcome such as grade retention is less clear the results indicate that for both measures of child investment and child well being the 2sls estimates are statistically distinguishable from ols estimates indicating an omitted variables bias in the single equation model

measuring the impacts of teachers comment chetty friedman and rockoff 2014a b study value added va measures of teacher effectiveness cfr 2014a exploits teacher switching as a quasi experiment concluding that student sorting creates negligible bias in va scores cfr 2014b finds va scores are useful proxies for teachers effects on students long run outcomes i successfully reproduce each in north carolina data but i find that the quasi experiment is invalid as teacher switching is correlated with changes in student preparedness adjusting for this i find moderate bias in va scores perhaps 10 35 percent as large in variance terms as teachers causal effects long run results are sensitive to controls and cannot support strong conclusions

advanced solar r d combining economic analysis with expert elicitations to inform climate policy the relationship between r d investments and technical change is inherently uncertain in this paper we combine economics and decision analysis to incorporate the uncertainty of technical change into climate change policy analysis we present the results of an expert elicitation on the prospects for technical change in advanced solar photovoltaics we then use the results of the expert elicitations as inputs to the minicam integrated assessment model to derive probabilistic information about the impacts of r d investments on the costs of emissions abatement

the trade off between child quantity and quality an empirical investigation of trade offs between number of children and their scholastic performance confirms that family size directly affects children s achievement though parents show no favori

industry input in policy making evidence from medicare in setting prices for physician services medicare solicits input from a committee that evaluates proposals from industry the committee itself comprises members from industry we investigate whether this arrangement leads to regulatory capture with prices biased toward industry interests we find that increasing a measure of affiliation between the committee and proposers by one standard deviation increases prices by 10 we then evaluate whether employing a biased committee as an intermediary may nonetheless be desirable if greater affiliation allows the committee to extract information needed for regulation we find industry proposers more affiliated with the committee produce less hard evidence in their proposals however on soft information we find evidence of a trade off private insurers set prices that more closely track medicare prices generated under higher affiliation

teacher characteristics and their effects on student test scores a systematic review it has become widely accepted that teachers are important in facilitating student learning hundreds of empirical studies have tried to explain differences in student performance by evaluating the impact of particular teacher characteristics yet this topic has not been the subject of a systematic review for more than 10 years even though most of the empirical evidence has emerged over the past decade this study provides an up to date review drawing on empirical findings from several countries and distinguishing between acquired and sociodemographic teacher characteristics this review confirms the existing consensus that subject related degrees and knowledge and not general teacher certifications are positively related to student performance and particularly so for master s degrees in math and science a new insight is that recent findings point out that teacher experience continues to contribute to student test scores throughout a teacher s career instead of merely the first few years an important future research avenue would be to examine which mechanisms can explain these teacher characteristic effects

fiscal decentralisation the knowledge economy and school teachers wages in urban china abstractwe examine how fiscal decentralisation and progress towards the development of a knowledge intensive economy has affected teachers wages in china utilising panel data from 2001 to 2013 we find that fiscal decentralisation has a negative impact on teachers wages and that this effect is magnified through a deepening of the knowledge economy while the knowledge economy itself has no effect on teachers wages the findings suggest that incentives being offered to local administrators need to be revisited if china is convinced of the need to increase teacher quality in ways suited to the knowledge economy which it wishes to construct

interpreting tests of school vam validity abstract we develop over identification tests that use admissions lotteries to assess the predictive value of regression based value added models vams these tests have degrees of freedom equal to the number of quasi experiments available to estimate school effects by contrast previously implemented vam validation strategies look at a single restriction only sometimes said to measure forecast bias tests of forecast bias may be misleading when the test statistic is constructed from many lotteries or quasi experiments some of which have weak first stage effects on school attendance the theory developed here is applied to data from the charlotte mecklenberg school district analyzed by deming 2014

greek membership and academic performance evidence from student level data abstractcompared to other inputs of the education production function less is known about the effect of social and non classroom choices this study examines whether joining fraternities and sororities improves academic performance in order to account for the self selection bias of greek membership i exploit plausibly exogenous cross class variation in greek student composition at the course instructor level my estimate shows that a 10 percentage point increase in greek student composition translates to a 0 02 standard deviation increase in course grade for greek students relative to non greek students i further find that this effect is driven largely by low achieving and middle achieving white greek members

task specific experience and task specific talent decomposing the productivity of high school teachers abstract we use administrative panel data to decompose worker performance into components relating to general talent task specific talent general experience and task specific experience we consider the context of high school teachers in which tasks consist of teaching particular subjects in particular tracks using the timing of changes in the subjects and difficulty levels to which teachers are assigned to provide identifying variation we show that a substantial part of the productivity gains to teacher experience are actually subject specific similarly while three quarters of the variance in the permanent component of productivity among teachers is portable across subjects and levels there exist non trivial subject specific and level specific components counterfactual simulations suggest that maximizing the test score contribution of task specific experience and task specific talent can increase student performance by as much as 04 test score standard deviations relative to random assignment of teachers to classrooms

measuring investment in education historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital as extensive research demonstrates education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and secondary schools this inefficiency in public schools implies that spending and resource measures do not accurately capture variations in school quality this finding then has clear implications for both education policy and economic research because school inputs are poor policy instruments an alternative policy focus that appears much more productive is performance incentives related to student achievement

the effect of evaluation on teacher performance observable teacher characteristics like graduate education and experience beyond the first few years are not typically correlated with increased productivity many researchers and policymakers have suggested that under these conditions the only way to adjust the teacher distribution for the better is to gather information on individual productivity through evaluation and then dismiss low performers this paper offers evidence that evaluation can shift the teacher effectiveness distribution through a different mechanism by improving teacher skill effort or both in ways that persist long run we study a sample of mid career math teachers in the cincinnati public schools cps who were assigned to evaluation in a manner that permits a quasi experimental analysis all teachers in our sample were evaluated by a year long classroom observation based program the treatment between 2003 2004 and 2009 2010 the timing of each teacher s specific evaluation year was determined years earlier by a district planning process to this setting we add measures of student achievement which were not part of the evaluation and use the within teacher over time variation to compare teacher performance before during and after their evaluation year we find that teachers are more productive during the school year when they are being evaluated but even more productive in the years after evaluation a student taught by a teacher after that teacher has been through the cincinnati evaluation will score about 10 percent of a standard deviation higher in math than a similar student taught by the same teacher before the teacher was evaluated under our identification strategy these estimates may be biased by patterns of student assignment that favor previously evaluated teachers or by preexisting positive

chronic disease burden and the interaction of education fertility and growth abstract this study considers the eradication of hookworm disease from the american south circa 1910 as a test of the quantity quality q q framework of fertility eradication was principally a shock to the price of quality because of three factors hookworm i depresses the return to human capital investment ii had a very low case fatality rate and iii had negligible prevalence among adults consistent with the q q model we find a significant decline in fertility associated with eradication

match quality worker productivity and worker mobility direct evidence from teachers i investigate the importance of the match between teachers and schools for student achievement i show that teacher effectiveness increases after a move to a different school and estimate teacher school match effects match quality explains away a quarter of and has two thirds the explanatory power of teacher quality match quality is negatively correlated with school switching is unrelated to exit and increases with experience this paper provides the first estimates of worker firm match quality using output data as opposed to inferring productivity from wages or employment durations the results suggest that workers seek high quality matches for reasons other than higher pay

pay for percentile we propose an incentive scheme for educators that links compensation to the ranks of their students within comparison sets under certain conditions this scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort moreover because this scheme employs only ordinal information it allows education authorities to employ completely new assessments at each testing date without ever having to equate various assessments this removes incentives for teachers to teach to a particular assessment form and eliminates opportunities to influence reward pay by corrupting assessment scales education authorities can employ separate no stakes assessment systems to track trends in scaled measures of student achievement jel i21 i28 j33 j45

birth order and risky adolescent behavior i introduction there is a widespread belief that birth order is an important determinant of personality intelligence and economic success this belief is supported by a number of recently published popular books each with its own approach to the topic leman 2001 16 18 for instance argues that firstborns are more highly motivated to achieve than later borns and as a consequence often fill positions of high authority or achievement in contrast wallace 1999 18 worries that firstborns go through life feeling like they cannot measure up to the high standards their parents expected lacking in confidence they might drop out and refuse to compete altogether 1 although there is an intuitive appeal to some of these theories the weight of evidence suggests that birth order effects of this nature either do not exist or are difficult to measure using the standard approaches of social scientists a large number of empirical studies have examined the effect of birth order on test scores education and earnings see olneck and bills 1979 blake 1981 hauser and sewell 1983 behrman and taubman 1986 kessler 1991 and hanushek 1992 taken together their results suggest that after properly controlling for family size birth order explains little variation in these conventional measures of success another more recent strand of research in this area examines whether the sex composition of an individual s siblings affects academic achievement as measured by years of education in a well known article butcher and case 1994 present evidence that females raised with brothers go on to receive more education on average than that of females raised with at least one sister however even this relatively modest albeit unexpected finding has been called into question by subsequent studies note kaestner 1997 and hauser and kuo 1998 using data on adolescents aged 12 through 17 we investigate the relationship between birth order and a number of behaviors that have been for the most part ignored in this literature these behaviors include the probability that an individual smoked cigarettes used substances such as marijuana or alcohol engaged in sexual activity or committed any one of a series of crimes in contrast to what most empirical studies have found we find strong evidence that birth order is related to many of the outcomes under study we also show that at least one birth order difference can last into early adulthood if not beyond although it is difficult to isolate the precise routes through which birth order affects the behavior of adolescents our results are consistent with the idea that peer influences play an important role ii why birth order effects might exist researchers working in this area have long speculated that birth order might be related to child outcomes through parental investments in their offspring becker and tomes 1976 posit a model in which parents devote more financial resources to children with lower innate ability 2 if as suggested by behrman and taubman 1986 and kessler 1991 genetic endowments favor earlier born children this model would predict offsetting financial investments in later borns under the assumption of imperfect capital markets birdsall 1991 predicts greater expenditures on later born children as family income rises and older siblings become financially independent but the author also notes that firstborns do not initially have to compete for their parents time and attention in a frequently cited piece in the psychology literature zajonc 1976 likewise emphasizes the early period in a firstborn s cognitive development when parental attention is undivided 3 in fact most researchers working on birth order issues have assumed that children are particularly sensitive to parental time investments and the home environment at young ages 4 however certain nonmonetary parental inputs such as monitoring and supervision may become increasingly important as a child matures especially in the determination of risky or delinquent behaviors

a stakeholder approach to the ethicality of bric firm managers use of favors this article investigates the use of favors by managers of bric firms to accomplish business goals the ethicality of which should be determined by the moral reasoning in these countries rather than from a developed country perspective we define a favor as an exchange of outcomes between individuals typically utilizing one s connections that is based on a commonly understood cultural tradition with reciprocity by the receiver typically not being immediate and its value being less than what would constitute bribery within that cultural context this exchange normally takes place between and among members of networks and may involve a network outsider contacted by a network insider on behalf of another insider we see the giver and receiver of the favor as well as network insiders and outsiders as stakeholders additionally society could also be considered to be a stakeholder since the practice of using favors generally inhibits the development of legitimate strong formal institutions since the use of favors in emerging economies is rooted in cultural traditions that we view as informal institutions furthermore we assert that the practice of using favors can lead to bribery which harms society as a stakeholder both morally and economically we posit that bric country managers behaviors stem from informal culturally based practices jeito in brazil blat sviazi in russia jaan pehchaan in india and guanxi in china we utilize institutional theory to explain why favors are relied upon and isct to support the argument that the use of favors in environments like the brics is generally considered ethical

school vouchers a survey of the economics literature we review the theoretical computational and empirical research on school vouchers with a focus on the latter our assessment is that the evidence to date is not sufficient to warrant recommending that vouchers be adopted on a widespread basis however multiple positive findings support continued exploration specifically the empirical research on small scale programs does not suggest that awarding students a voucher is a systematically reliable way to improve educational outcomes and some detrimental effects have been found nevertheless in some settings or for some subgroups or outcomes vouchers can have a substantial positive effect on those who use them studies of large scale voucher programs find student sorting as a result of their implementation although of varying magnitude evidence on both small scale and large scale programs suggests that competition induced by vouchers leads public schools to improve moreover research is making progress on understanding how vouchers may be designed to limit adverse effects from sorting while preserving positive effects related to competition finally our sense is that work originating in a single case e g a given country or in a single research approach e g experimental designs will not provide a full understanding of voucher effects fairly wide ranging empirical and theoretical work will be necessary to make progress

does the market value value added evidence from housing prices after a public release of school and teacher value added value added data are an increasingly common evaluation tool for schools and teachers many school districts have adopted these methods and released the results publicly in this paper we study the release of value added data in los angeles by the los angeles times newspaper to identify how measured value added is capitalized into housing prices this analysis is the first in the us school valuation literature to examine property value responses to a value added information shock which is of interest as this measure is less correlated with demographics than typical school quality measures unique to this setting as well is the release of both school and teacher level value added data which allows us to examine how property values respond to both types of information using a difference indifferences methodology surrounding the release we find that neither school nor teacher value added scores are capitalized into home prices our results suggest that despite the contentiousness following these data releases homeowners do not consider value added models as currently constructed to be a relevant school quality measure on the margin

growth and competition in renewable energy industries insights from an integrated assessment model with strategic firms abstract this article describes the development implementation and application of an integrated assessment modeling framework featuring renewable technology markets with producers engaged in cournot competition scenario results reveal how climate policy and inter firm learning spillovers interact with market structure to affect wind and solar pv prices adoption producer profits and carbon emissions competitive markets yield consistently lower markups than concentrated markets leading to significantly more adoption and lower emissions widespread solar pv adoption is a key component of the largest emissions reductions but this requires substantial price reductions that only occur if the solar pv market is competitive and learning spills over across producers whether a leading firm has a profit incentive to facilitate or obstruct learning spillovers depends on the availability of cost competitive substitute technologies if such a substitute exists the firm prefers strong spillovers that help its industry compete against the substitute if not the firm prefers weak spillovers that prevent competitors in its industry from seizing market share the relationship between price and cumulative capacity is endogenous in the modeling framework regression analysis of scenario results yields price learning rates which are similar to unit production cost learning rates in competitive markets but substantially lower even negative in concentrated markets

information non financial incentives and student achievement evidence from a text messaging experiment abstract this paper describes a field experiment in oklahoma city public schools in which students were provided with free cellular phones and daily information about the link between human capital and future outcomes via text message in one treatment and minutes to talk and text as an incentive in a second treatment students reported beliefs about the relationship between education and outcomes were influenced by the information treatment however there were no measurable changes in student effort attendance suspensions or state test scores though there is evidence that scores on college entrance exams four years later increased the patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which students have present bias or lack knowledge of the educational production function though other explanations are possible

national institutional structures transaction cost economizing and competitive advantage the case of japan japan s economic success since world war ii has been striking modern japan was the first major industrial economy to emerge from outside the western tradition economically devastated in 1945 by 1990 japan had the world s second largest economy and a gdp per head 20 percent greater than that of the united states in this paper it is argued that one reason for japan s success is that the costs of achieving cooperation and specialization are lower in japan than in the west cooperation and specialization have been acknowledged to have a beneficial impact upon productivity ever since adam smith wrote about cooperative specialization in the context of the division of labor modern economic theory however suggest that in a world of self interested individuals the costs of achieving cooperation and specialization are substantial in this paper it is argued that the cultural value system that japan has inherited from its preindustrial past and particularly the tokugawa period helps facilitate cooperation b

productivity returns to experience in the teacher labor market methodological challenges and new evidence on long term career improvement abstract we present new evidence on the relationship between teacher productivity and job experience econometric challenges require identifying assumptions to model the within teacher returns to experience with teacher fixed effects we describe the identifying assumptions used in past models and in a new approach that we propose and we demonstrate how violations of these assumptions can lead to substantial bias consistent with past research we find that teachers experience rapid productivity improvement early in their careers however we also find evidence of returns to experience later in the career indicating that teachers continue to build human capital beyond these first years

teacher quality in educational production tracking decay and student achievement growing concerns over the inadequate achievement of u s students have led to proposals to reward good teachers and penalize or fire bad ones the leading method for assessing teacher quality is value added modeling vam which decomposes students test scores into components attributed to student heterogeneity and to teacher quality implicit in the vam approach are strong assumptions about the nature of the educational production function and the assignment of students to classrooms in this paper i develop falsification tests for three widely used vam specifications based on the idea that future teachers cannot influence students past achievement in da ta from north carolina each of the vams exclusion restrictions are dramatically viola ted in particular these models indicate large effects of 5th grade teachers on 4th grade t est score gains i also find that conventional measures of individual teachers value added fade out very quickly and are at best weakly related to long run effects i discuss implic ations for the use of vams as personnel tools

the demand for teacher characteristics in the market for child care evidence from a field experiment abstract this paper sheds light on two key issues regarding the demand for teacher characteristics in the market for center based child care first we study the extent to which teacher qualifications often considered important inputs to classroom quality are valued by providers during the hiring process we then examine the impact of state regulations on hiring decisions to do so a resume audit study was administered in which job seeker characteristics were randomly assigned to resumes that were submitted in response to real child care job postings in 14 u s cities our results indicate that center based providers may not hire the most qualified applicants for example we find that although providers have a strong preference for individuals with previous work experience in early childhood education ece those with more ece experience are less likely to receive an interview than those with less experience we also find that individuals with bachelor s degrees in ece are no more likely to receive an interview than their counterparts at the associate s level our analysis of state regulations shows that they strongly influence teacher hiring decisions we find that providers advertised job requirements are largely in compliance with the state standards for teachers experience and education in addition providers are substantially more likely to interview job seekers who meet these requirements given that most providers voluntarily exceed the state regulations a tentative conclusion is that such rules have a limited effect on child care supply and prices

measuring the impacts of teachers i evaluating bias in teacher value added estimates are teachers impacts on students test scores value added a good measure of their quality one reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value added va measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers causal impacts on student achievement we test for bias in va using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi experimental design based on changes in teaching sta using school district and tax records for more than one million children we nd that va models which control for a student s prior test scores exhibit little bias in forecasting teachers impacts on student achievement although teachers have substantial impacts

exploring investment potential in a context of nuclear phase out uncertainty perfect vs imperfect electricity markets abstract in view of the ongoing nuclear power debate in europe we analyze how uncertainty about a nuclear phase out affects investment capacity decisions by belgian electricity suppliers depending on the type of market structure considered to achieve this goal we build a structural model and solve it by using game theoretic and optimization approaches in order to consider the different types of market structure namely oligopoly simplified to a duopoly in this case and the two extremes of the competition spectrum i e monopoly and perfect competition we show that higher levels of investment in new electricity generation capacity are reached with decreasing probability of nuclear license extension and or with higher levels of competition in the market moreover investments in perfectly competitive markets are less influenced by changes in the probability of future nuclear license extension resulting in a more stable long term investment climate however the consideration of possible changes in market structure and gradual nuclear phase out is crucial in order to not overestimate investment potential in belgium

class size education and wages we use micro data for england and wales to examine the effects of class size on the decision to stay on in full time schooling at 16 and on wages later in life we find that class size has a sizeable and significant effect on the decision to stay on this finding is very robust wage equations show the effect of staying on is significantly positive for wages combining this with the effect of class size on the staying on decision reveals that class size significantly affects future wages reduced form models lead to much less accurate and insignificant estimates

optimal pricing policy in the presence of experience effects i introduction in this paper we analyze the problem of optimal intertemporal pricing for a monopolist when cur rent and past output affect future cost and or demand conditions through experience in production and or in consumption learning by doing the experience curve contagion habit formation bandwagon and snob effects are all examples of terminologies used to describe such situations we call these experience effects for convenience and explore profit maximizing pricing behavior when such effects exist in the traditional profit maximization model a firm chooses the price output combination so as to maximize short run i e current profits the familiar mc mr equality given that price is higher than average variable cost and a nonbind ing capacity constraint is a necessary condition for price takers as well as price makers this as sumes that the current pricing decision has no bearing on the future so that long run profit is maximized by a series of short run maximizing

the value of children inter generational support fertility and human capital abstract this paper offers robust empirical evidence of a darwinian pro natalist mechanism parents can improve their old age support with an additional child using the incidence of first born twins as an instrument for fertility outcomes i find that chinese senior parents with more children receive more financial transfers and are more likely to co reside with an adult child they are also less likely to work past retirement age the estimated effects are large despite the evidence that adult children from larger families are less educated and earn significantly less interestingly the effect of an increase in the number of children on old age support does not depend on the child s gender

examination performance in scottish secondary schools an ordered logit approach this paper analyses the determinants of educational outcomes for scottish secondary schools using an ordered logit model with data on school examination performance for pupils in the last year of compulsory education separate equations are estimated for 1993 1994 and 1998 1999 the empirical results in line with previous british studies underline the importance of family peer group and school influences in determining educational outcomes they cast doubt however on suggestions that there is an optimal size of school

structural change and the fertility transition this paper provides new insights into the relationship between structural change and the fertility transition we exploit the spread of an agricultural pest in the american south in the 1890s as pl

using performance on the job to inform teacher tenure decisions the notion that some high stakes need to be attached to direct measures of teachers class room performance as a control for quality in the work force is an idea gaining traction in public education one such proposal prescribes low ering the barriers to entry into teaching while simultaneously being more selective about which teachers are retained when they become eligible for tenure robert gordon thomas j kane and douglas o staiger 2006 eric a hanushek 2009

teachers pay for performance in the long run the dynamic pattern of treatment effects on students educational and labour market outcomes in adulthood this paper examines the dynamic effects of a teachers pay for performance experiment on long term outcomes at adulthood the program led to a gradual increase in university education of the treated high school students reaching an increase of 0 25 years of schooling by age 28 30 the effects on employment and earnings were initially negative coinciding with a higher rate of enrollment in university but became positive and significant with time these gains are largely mediated by the positive effect of the program on several high school outcomes including quantitative and qualitative gains in the high stakes matriculation exams

children as income producing assets the case of teen illegitimacy and government transfers this paper develops a classical model of the teen fertility decision in the presence of public income transfers the theoretical model predicts that welfare payments will encourage fertility holding constant other economic opportunities and that better economic opportunities will discourage fertility considering the possible simultaneity of illegitimacy rates and benefit levels due to the collective choice process the authors confirm the theoretical models predictions with state level data from 1980 through 1990 the authors find that including fixed effects in the regression to control for unobserved differences between states does not sufficiently control for endogeneity after controlling for endogeneity real welfare benefits are strongly and robustly related to teen illegitimacy the point estimates of the elasticity with respect to changes in the illegitimacy rate are around 1 3 for white teens and 2 1 for black teens real wages for women with a high school education or less are negatively related to teen illegitimacy for white teens with an elasticity of around 0 4 finally male wages appear to have little effect on the illegitimacy rate for white teens but appear negatively correlated with the illegitimacy rate for black teens in some model specifications authors

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

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

how does your kindergarten classroom affect your earnings evidence from project star in project star 11 571 students in tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade this article evaluates the long term impacts of star by linking the experimental data to administrative records we first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27 college attendance home ownership and retirement savings we then document four sets of experimental impacts first students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes class size does not have a significant effect on earnings at age 27 but this effect is imprecisely estimated second students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings third an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classrooms in grades k 3 as measured by classmates end of class test scores have higher earnings college attendance rates and other outcomes finally the effects of class quality fade out on test scores in later grades but gains in noncognitive measures persist

evaluating public programs with close substitutes the case of head start this paper empirically evaluates the cost effectiveness of head start the largest early childhood education program in the united states using data from the randomized head start impact study hsis we show that head start draws a substantial share of its participants from competing preschool programs that receive public funds this both attenuates measured experimental impacts on test scores and reduces the program s net social costs a cost benefit analysis demonstrates that accounting for the public savings associated with reduced enrollment in other subsidized preschools can reverse negative assessments of the program s social rate of return estimates from a semi parametric selection model indicate that head start is about as effective at raising test scores as competing preschools and that its impacts are greater on children from families unlikely to participate in the program efforts to expand head start to new populations are therefore likely to boost the program s social rate of return provided that the proposed technology for increasing enrollment is not too costly

the impacts of teacher working conditions and human capital on student achievement evidence from brazilian longitudinal data abstractwe use a new longitudinal matched student teacher data from brazil to examine the impacts of teacher human capital and working conditions on student learning controlling for student teache

ranking firms using revealed preference this article estimates workers preferences for firms by studying the structure of employer to employer transitions in u s administrative data the article uses a tool from numerical linear algebra to measure the central tendency of worker flows which is closely related to the ranking of firms revealed by workers choices there is evidence for compensating differentials when workers systematically move to lower paying firms in a way that cannot be accounted for by layoffs or differences in recruiting intensity the estimates suggest that compensating differentials account for over half of the firm component of the variance of earnings

the dynamics of teacher quality abstract an extensive literature finds that while teachers vary considerably in initial quality there are limited teacher quality dynamics except for the first few years of teaching teacher quality does not improve over the course of a teacher s career this study evaluates the importance of various modeling restrictions to the key findings of this literature using data covering all 5th grade public school teachers from the state of north carolina i replicate the findings of the previous literature using their restrictive experience assumptions however using an unrestricted experience model i find that for mathematics achievement there are high returns to later career teaching experience about twice as much dispersion in initial teacher quality as previously estimated and a pattern of negative selection where high quality teachers are more likely to exit

the twin instrument fertility and human capital investment twin births are often used as an instrument to address selection of women into fertility however recent work shows selection of women into twin birth such that while ols estimates tend to be downward biased twin iv estimates will tend to be upward biased this is pertinent given the emerging consensus that fertility has limited impacts on women s labour supply or on investments in children using data for developing countries and the united states to estimate the trade off between fertility and children s human capital we demonstrate the nature and size of the bias in the twin iv estimator and estimate bounds on the true parameter

a review of the stern review on the economics of climate change how much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming the stern review argues that the damages from climate change are large and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions an examination of the review s radical revision of the economics of climate change finds however that it depends decisively on the assumption of a near zero time discount rate combined with a specific utility function the review s unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of assumptions that are consistent with today s marketplace real interest rates and savings rates

pension spiking free riding and the effects of pension reform on teachers earnings in many states local school districts are responsible for setting the earnings that determines the size of pensions but are not required to make contributions to cover the resulting state pension fund liabilities in this paper i document evidence that this intergovernmental incentive inherent in public sector defined benefit pension systems distorts the amount and timing of income for public school teachers i use the introduction of a policy that required experience rating on earnings increases above a certain limit in a differences in differences framework to identify whether districts are willing to pay the full costs of their earnings promises because of the design of the policy overall earnings of teachers near retirement did not change instead districts that previously provided one time pay increases shifted to smaller increments spread out over several years in addition some districts that did not practice pension spiking prior to the reform appear to begin providing payments up to the new lower limit perhaps due to increased salience of the fiscal incentive therefore the policy was ineffective at decreasing pension costs

women s work sibling competition and children s school performance this research offers an interpretation of the relationship between fertility child spacing family resources and market work by mothers and the subsequent cognitive skills of grade schoolers as reported by their teachers first an approach to fertility as the outcome of a deliberate choice process is developed and then empirical evidence from a small panel of u s households first interviewed in 1975 76 when they had preschool children is presented in a 1981 82 reinterview a supplementary project was that of obtaining teacher ratings of school performance of individual children large family size as measured by the number of siblings of given age and sex in the household during preschool years in 1975 76 has an important negative impact on the child s subsequent grade school performance boy siblings in nearby age ranges have the most negative impact on performance while teenage siblings of either sex have no systematic adverse effect parental resources as measured by income education child care time and a mother s reduced market time are associated with greater cognitive skills and can offset the apparent disadvantage of having siblings in nearby age intervals there appears to be a significant tradeoff between a market career and a home career for women women who have more children spaced over wider age intervals and who devote more time to child care and less to market work presumably get more benefits from their home career in the form of enhanced child development on the other hand full time market work i e hours in the labor market for pay is important for earnings growth of the mother mary corcoran greg duncan and michael ponza 1983 and family income has a favorable effect on school performance so the apparent choices facing women are more equivocal

using lagged outcomes to evaluate bias in value added models abstract value added va models measure agents productivity based on the outcomes they produce the utility of va models for performance evaluation depends on the extent to which va estimates are

measuring the impacts of teachers ii teacher value added and student outcomes in adulthood abstract are teachers impacts on students test scores value added a good measure of their quality this question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value ad

does helping john help sue evidence of spillovers in education does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillover effects of teaching and shows that ignoring these spillovers underestimates a teacher s value by at least 30 percent because the spillovers also affect teacher value added estimates i develop a method of moments estimator of teacher value added and show that accounting for the spillovers does not have a large impact on the ranking of teachers in new york city i conclude by showing that the spillovers occur within groups of students who share the same race and gender which suggests that social networks play a critical role in disseminating the effect

ability transmission endogenous fertility and educational subsidy in this study we attempt to investigate how educational subsidy childcare allowance and family allowance affect economic growth and income distribution on the basis of simulation models which incorporate intergenerational ability transmission and endogenous fertility the simulation results show that financial support for higher education can both increase economic growth and reduce income inequality especially if the abilities of parent and child are closely correlated in contrast with educational subsidy raising childcare allowance or family allowance has limited impacts on growth and income inequality

the quality and distribution of teachers under the no child left behind act the heart of accountability under the no child left behind nclb act is an attempt to change the existing incentives in schools with the ultimate objective that all students meet a proficiency standard existing research indicates that nothing is more important to high achieve ment as having effective teachers implying that the impact of new incentives on teachers will be central to any consideration of the accountability statutes tracing the impacts of nclb on the stock and distribution of teachers is none theless a difficult and uncertain task the belief that the quality of teachers matters a great deal to the quality of education received by students has actually proven hard to substantiate and the reasons for this difficulty are key to assessing the impacts of no child left behind a substantial body of research going back to the coleman et al 1966 report has attempted to link commonly used measures of teacher quality such as experience degree level and state teacher certification to student outcomes surprisingly except for perhaps the first few years of classroom experience no robust connection has appeared for example hanushek and rivkin 2006 review various studies attempting to identify characteristics of effective teachers one

opportunity wages classroom characteristics and teacher mobility this article analyzes the impact of classroom characteristics and opportunity wages on four possible labor market choices of teachers in florida remaining at their present school switching schools within a school district changing school districts and leaving teaching discrete time multinomial logit hazard model estimates indicate that classroom characteristics play a larger role than school average student characteristics in determining teacher mobility opportunity wages based on past teacher movements to other competing districts and professions are found to pull teachers away from their initial placements once opportunity wages and working conditions are considered teachers own salaries are found to exert little impact on teacher mobility within the profession although they reduce attrition out of the profession policy simulations indicate that targeted salary increases based on teacher specific working conditions are important to retain teachers at a given school

corruption fertility and human capital abstract we build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity child quality trade off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital by integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous growth corruption and fertility choices we show that the negative relation between fertility and economic development may also be affected by differences in the magnitude of bureaucratic corruption

the early bird gets the worm birth order effects in a dynamic family model the great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life s essential unfairness nancy mitford http www quotegarden com family html i introduction birth order effects well established in both the academic and the popular psychology literature have received considerable attention in recent empirical economics studies for example ejrnaes and portner 2004 black devereux and salvanes 2005 conley and glauber 2006 and kantarevic and mechoulan 2006 find significant differences between firstborn and later born children in outcomes such as educational attainment and or earnings price 2008 finds differences in inputs in general the firstborn in the family is advantaged hanushek 1992 suggests that these differences arise because children of different birth order within the same family are born into different intellectual environments with later borns entering less stimulating environments price 2008 looks at quality time that parents spend with each child in multiple child families and finds that children of higher birth order receive less quality time with parents at any given age than do children of lower birth order at the same age zajonc 1976 suggests that older siblings partly replace parents in providing some of this quality time this benefits the firstborns because they have the opportunity to be teachers from an early age theoretical economic models of the family are typically atemporal when it comes to the decision of how much of the family s resources to devote to children and hence birth order effects do not emerge endogenously our article fills an important gap in the theoretical literature on families with children by explicit consideration of the temporal production of both the child s well being and its human capital and the influence of birth order on the production conditions for children who are close in age we show cases in which the firstborn receives more resources overall than the second so the second born never has higher utility than the firstborn at any stage proposition 1 in this case we can make clear predictions about outcomes as well as inputs and we would expect tests to reveal higher scores of the firstborn regardless of the age at which they are administered in other cases the mix of resources devoted to children differs with birth order with ambiguous predictions for outcomes at some ages propositions 2a and 3 or all ages see e g propositions 2b and 5 we investigate the trade off parents make between spending time with children and working for income to purchase consumption goods for family members we consider a three stage model of parental decision making a family has two children who are born sequentially older children have different needs than younger ones so the sequential nature of child rearing matters each child spends two periods with their parents the firstborn is a single child in its first period of life and an older sibling in its second and the second born is a younger sibling in its first period and the sole child in the household in its second thus each child spends one period with parents and a sibling and one period alone with its parents the children differ with respect to the sequencing of these two phases in the second period the presence of two children of different ages and with different needs but both requiring some supervision time raises the issue of economies of scope in childcare 1 is a given amount of parental childcare as productive if shared by two children rather than devoted to one there is little direct evidence on the nature of the home production function for child quality but mocan 1997 found evidence suggesting the existence of both scale and scope economies in the production functions for day care centers in the main body of the article we assume economies of scope for parents 2 parents care about both the contemporaneous utility of each child and their well being as adults we assume no societal or personal biases in favor of either child

the cultural roots of guanxi an exploratory study this paper first describes the cultural roots and characteristics of guanxi in chinese society it then goes on to test some propositions about the perceived relationship between these characteristics and i hofstede s conceptualisation of collectivism and power distance and ii the content and quality of formal institutions the sampling frame used consisted of three groups of students viz chinese singaporeans non chinese singaporeans and mainland chinese studying in tertiary institutions in singapore our findings suggest that while the perceptions of guanxi were positively and significantly related to hofstede s culturally related variables this was not so in the case of formal institutions this latter result suggests that in east asian countries guanxi may well be regarded as at least a partial substitute for formal institutions

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

a time to make laws and a time to fundraise on the relation between salaries and time use for state politicians we study the relationship between the level of compensation and time use for us state legislators using survey data on time use we show that higher salary is robustly associated with legislators spending more time on fundraising in contrast higher salary is also robustly associated with less time spent on legislative activities and has no clear relation to time spent on constituent services the fundraising results are particularly strong for legislators who do not intend to run for higher office our results are consistent with an interpretation that higher salary raises the value of office and politicians respond with more fundraising because increased fundraising raises the chance of getting re elected more than does increased legislative activity back of the envelope calculations suggest that a 30 000 increase in salary is associated with politicians annually devoting 13 more hours to fundraising and 18 fewer hours to legislative activity resume un temps pour faire les lois et un autre pour lever des fonds etude du rapport entre le salaire et l emploi du temps des legislateurs d etat dans cet article nous examinons le lien entre le niveau de remuneration et l emploi du temps des legislateurs d etat aux etats unis en nous appuyant sur plusieurs donnees d enquetes relatives a la gestion du temps nous montrons que plus leur salaire est eleve plus les legislateurs ont tendance a consacrer du temps a lever des fonds le temps devolu aux activites legislatives ayant quant a lui tendance a diminuer sans lien evident avec le temps passe en circonscription au service des citoyens les resultats relatifs aux levees de fonds sont particulierement forts des lors que les legislateurs ne briguent pas de plus hautes fonctions et sont conformes a l interpretation selon laquelle un salaire eleve accroit l interet pour une fonction et puisque l augmentation des activites de financement ne se traduit pas par davantage d activites legislatives mais par des chances de reelection accrues les politiciens multiplient les levees de fonds des calculs rapides et approximatifs suggerent qu une hausse du salaire des politiciens de 30 000 par an representerait 13 heures de collecte de fonds en plus mais 18 heures d activites legislatives en moins annuellement

using school choice lotteries to test measures of school effectiveness abstract value added models vams are increasingly used to measure school effectiveness yet random variation in school attendance is necessary to test the validity of vams and to guide the selection of models for measuring causal effects of schools in this paper i use random assignment from a public school choice lottery to test the predictive power of vam specifications in vams with minimal controls and two or more years of prior data i fail to reject the hypothesis that school effects are unbiased overall many commonly used vams are accurate predictors of student achievement gains

alternative approaches to evaluation in empirical microeconomics four alternative but related approaches to empirical evaluation of policy interventions are studied social experiments natural experiments matching methods and instrumental variables in each case the necessary assumptions and the data requirements are considered for estimation of a number of key parameters of interest these key parameters include the average treatment effect the treatment on the treated and the local average treatment effect some issues of implementation and interpretation are discussed drawing on the labour market programme evaluation literature

a review of the stern review on the economics of climate change the stern review calls for immediate decisive action to stabilize greenhouse gases because the benefits of strong early action on climate change outweighs the costs the economic analysis supporting this conclusion consists mostly of two basic strands the first strand is a formal aggregative model that relies for its conclusions primari ly upon imposing a very low discount rate concerning this discount rate aspect i am skeptical of the review s formal analysis but this essay points out that we are actual ly a lot less sure about what interest rate should be used for discounting climate change than is commonly acknowledged the review s second basic strand is a more intuitive argument that it might be very important to avoid possibly large uncertain ties that are difficult to quantify concerning this uncertainty aspect i argue that it might be recast into sound analytical reasoning that might justify some of the review s conclusions the basic issue here is that spending money to slow global warming should perhaps not be conceptualized primarily as being about consump tion smoothing as much as being about how much insurance to buy to offset the small change of a ruinous catastrophe that is difficult to compensate by ordinary savings

property rights for the poor effects of land titling secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development the evaluation of the causal effects of property rights however is a difficult task as their allocation is typically endogenous to overcome this identification problem we exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles in 1981 squatters occupied a piece of land in a poor suburban area of buenos aires in 1984 a law was passed expropriating the former owners land to entitle the occupants some original owners accepted the government compensation while others disputed the compensation payment in the slow argentine courts these different decisions by the former owners generated an exogenous allocation of property rights across squatters using data from two surveys performed in 2003 and 2007 we find that entitled families substantially increased housing investment reduced household size and enhanced the education of their children relative to the control group these effects however did not take place through improvements in access to credit our results suggest that land titling can be an important tool for poverty reduction albeit not through the shortcut of credit access but through the slow channel of increased physical and human capital investment which should help to reduce poverty in future generations

taxation and the allocation of talent taxation affects the allocation of talented individuals across professions by blunting material incentives and thus magnifying nonpecuniary incentives of pursuing a calling estimates from the literature suggest that high paying professions have negative externalities whereas low paying professions have positive externalities a calibrated model therefore prescribes negative marginal tax rates on middle class incomes and positive rates on the rich the welfare gains from implementing such a policy are small and are dwarfed by the gains from profession specific taxes and subsidies these results depend crucially on externality estimates and labor substitution patterns across professions both of which are very uncertain given existing empirical evidence

does it pay to pay teachers more evidence from texas abstract this study presents robust evidence on the relationship between teacher pay and turnover using detailed panel data from texas while controlling for changes in district and local labor market characteristics i estimate an overall turnover elasticity of 1 4 and show that the effect is largest for inexperienced teachers declines with experience and disappears around 19 years of experience combining these results with what we know about the relationship between teacher value added and experience i show that paying teachers more improves student achievement through higher retention rates the results also suggest that adopting a flat salary schedule may be a cheap way to improve student performance i find no evidence that pay effects vary by the teacher s gender or subject taught

generalizations about using value added measures of teacher quality the extensive investigation of the contribution of teachers to student achievement produces two generally accepted results first there is sub stantial variation in teacher quality as measured by the value added to achievement or future aca demic attainment or earnings second variables often used to determine entry into the profession and salaries including post graduate schooling experience and licensing examination scores appear to explain little of the variation in teacher quality so measured with the exception of early experience together these findings underscore explicitly that observed teacher characteristics do not represent teacher quality