information school choice and academic achievement evidence from two experiments we examine a natural experiment and a field experiment that provided direct information on school test scores to lower income families in a public school choice plan receiving information significantly increases the fraction of parents choosing higher performing schools parents with high scoring alternatives nearby were more likely to choose nonguaranteed schools with higher test scores using random variation from each experiment we find that attending a higher scoring school increases student test scores the results imply that school choice will most effectively increase academic achievement for disadvantaged students when parents have easy access to test score information and good options from which to choose

the perceived returns to education and the demand for schooling economists emphasize the link between market returns to education and investments in schooling though many studies estimate these returns with earnings data it is the perceived returns that affect schooling decisions and these perceptions may be inaccurate using survey data for eighth grade boys in the dominican republic we find that the perceived returns to secondary school are extremely low despite high measured returns students at randomly selected schools given information on the higher measured returns completed on average 0 20 0 35 more years of school over the next four years than those who were not

volatility agricultural risk and household poverty micro evidence from randomized control trials households in developing countries are often highly exposed to risk and despite households risk strategies negative shocks often result in substantial welfare losses given the possibility that weather risks in particular might be further increasing there is renewed policy attention on improving households risk management strategies this article provides an overview of insights learned from recent randomized control trials on predictions coming out of the theoretical literature on households ex ante risk management it reveals new puzzles and questions regarding households inter temporal decision making under risk and draws lessons for effective policy design

media exposure and internal migration evidence from indonesia abstract this paper investigates the impact of television on internal migration in indonesia we exploit the differential introduction of private television throughout the country and the variation in signal reception due to topography to estimate the causal effect of media exposure our estimates reveal important long and short run effects an increase of one standard deviation in the number of private tv channels received in the area of residence as an adolescent reduces future inter provincial migration by 1 7 2 7 percentage points and all migration inter and intra provincial by 3 9 6 8 percentage points short run effects are similar in magnitude we also show that respondents less exposed to private television are more likely to consider themselves among the poorest groups in society as we discuss in a stylized model of migration choice under imperfect information these findings are consistent with indonesian citizens over estimating the net gains from internal migration when access to television is limited

decomposing intergenerational income elasticity the gender differentiated contribution of capital transmission in rural philippines summary using longitudinal data from rural philippines we decompose intergenerational income elasticity ige into five distinct pathways intergenerational transmissions of health education land and spouse education capital plus residual correlation in productivity intergenerational human capital transmissions from mothers are stronger than those from fathers maternal education is the parental capital most strongly associated with ige while naive ige estimates are indistinguishable for sons and daughters the pathways that generate these results differ strikingly for sons ige is entirely explained by parent to child capital transmission by contrast strong income correlation exists between daughters and parents even after controlling for parent and child capital endowments

nutrition information and household behavior experimental evidence from malawi incorrect knowledge of the health production function may lead to inefficient household choices and thereby to the production of suboptimal levels of health this paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural malawi that over a six month period provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition without supplying any monetary or in kind resources a simple model first investigates theoretically how nutrition and other household choices including labor supply may change in response to the improved nutrition knowledge observed in the intervention areas we then show empirically that the intervention improved child nutrition household food consumption and consequently health we find evidence that labor supply increased which might have contributed to partially fund the increase in food consumption this paper is the first to study whether non health choices particularly parental labor supply might be affected by parents knowledge of the child health production function

measuring subjective expectations in developing countries a critical review and new evidence the majority of economic decisions taken by individuals are forward looking and thus involve their expectations of future outcomes understanding the expectations that individuals have is thus of crucial importance to designing and evaluating policies in health education finance migration social protection and many other areas however the majority of developing country surveys are static in nature and do not contain information on the subjective expectations of individuals possible reasons given for not collecting this information include fears that poor illiterate individuals do not understand probability concepts that it takes far too much time to ask such questions or that the answers add little value this paper provides a critical review and new analysis of subjective expectations data from developing countries and refutes each of these concerns the authors find that people in developing countries can generally understand and answer probabilistic questions such questions are not prohibitive in time to ask and the expectations are useful predictors of future behavior and economic decisions the paper discusses the different methods being tried for eliciting such information the key methodological issues involved and the open research questions the available evidence suggests that collecting expectations data is both feasible and valuable suggesting that it should be incorporated into more developing country surveys

students perceptions of teacher biases experimental economics in schools we put forward a new experimental economics design with monetary incentives to estimate students perceptions of grading discrimination we use this design in a large field experiment which involved 1 200 british students in grade 8 classrooms across 29 schools in this design students are given an endowment they can invest on a task where payoff depends on performance the task is a written verbal test which is graded non anonymously by their teacher in a random half of the classrooms and graded anonymously by an external examiner in the other random half of the classrooms we find significant evidence that students choices reflect perceptions of biases in teachers grading practices our results show systematic gender interaction effects male students invest less with female teachers than with male teachers while female students invest more with male teachers than with female teachers interestingly female students perceptions are not in line with actual discrimination teachers tend to give better grades to students of their own gender results do not suggest that ethnicity and socioeconomic status play a role

education choices and returns to schooling mothers and youths subjective expectations and their role by gender abstract in this paper we investigate the role of expected returns to schooling and of perceived risks of unemployment and earnings as determinants of schooling decisions moreover our data also allow us to analyze whether youths and or mothers expectations predict schooling decisions and whether this depends on the age and gender of the youth in particular we use mexican data that contain labor market expectations of mothers and youths we find that expected returns and risk perceptions are important determinants of schooling decisions the latter in particular from the perspective of the mother boys expectations predict the decision to enter college but not to enter high school while girls own expectations do not predict either of the two educational decisions mothers expectations are particularly strong predictors of their daughters decisions

education choices and returns on the labor and marriage markets evidence from data on subjective expectations in this paper we analyze the role of expected labor and marriage market returns as determinants of the college enrollment decisions of mexican high school graduates moreover we investigate whether the relative weights of these factors differ by gender we use data on individuals expectations regarding future labor market outcomes which we directly elicited from the youths and two different measures of marriage market returns first marriage market returns are proxied by the net supply of potential partners in the youths local marriage markets second we use data which elicits youths beliefs about their future spouse s earnings conditional on their own education level we find that labor market as well as marriage market returns are important determinants of the college enrollment decision however boys and girls preferences differ in terms of the relative role of the two determinants in that the relative weight of labor market versus marriage market returns is larger for boys than for girls

thinking fast and slow some field experiments to reduce crime and dropout in chicago we present the results of three large scale randomized controlled trials rcts carried out in chicago testing interventions to reduce crime and dropout by changing the decision making of economically disadvantaged youth we study a program called becoming a man bam developed by the nonprofit youth guidance in two rcts implemented in 2009 2010 and 2013 2015 in the two studies participation in the program reduced total arrests during the intervention period by 28 35 reduced violent crime arrests by 45 50 improved school engagement and in the first study where we have follow up data increased graduation rates by 12 19 the third rct tested a program with partially overlapping components carried out in the cook county juvenile temporary detention center jtdc which reduced readmission rates to the facility by 21 these large behavioral responses combined with modest program costs imply benefit cost ratios for these interventions from 5 to 1 up to 30 to 1 or more our data on mechanisms are not ideal but we find no positive evidence that these effects are due to changes in emotional intelligence or social skills self control or grit or a generic mentoring effect we find suggestive support for the hypothesis that the programs work by helping youth slow down and reflect on whether their automatic thoughts and behaviors are well suited to the situation they are in or whether the situation could be construed differently jel codes c91 c93 d03 d1 i24 i3 i32 k42

intended college attendance evidence from an experiment on college returns and costs abstract we conduct an information experiment about college returns and costs embedded within a representative survey of us household heads baseline perceptions of college costs and benefits are substantially biased with larger biases among lower income and non college households respondents are randomly exposed to objective information about average college returns or costs we find a significant impact of the returns experiment persisting in a follow up survey two months later intended college attendance expectations increase by about 0 2 of the standard deviation in the baseline likelihood and gaps by household income or parents education decline by 20 30 we find no impact of the cost information treatment further analysis supports the information s salience as opposed to information based updating as the main channel through which the returns intervention impacts intentions

the labour market impact of body weight in china a semiparametric analysis while a positive wage effect of body mass index bmi is widely observed in low income developing countries a negative wage effect of bmi is often observed in high income developed countries to fill the gap between these previous findings we investigate the relationship between body weight and wages in transition economies we focus on china whose rapid economic growth of the 1990s was followed by a rapid increase in overweight and obesity while still experiencing significant food insecurity and underweight we first use several parametric regression strategies to obtain a consistent estimate of the wage effects of weight second we adopt a semiparametric partially linear model that allows for endogeneity of weight parametric regressions provide mixed results and the sign and magnitude of their estimates are sensitive to the choice of samples and regression strategies semiparametric estimates provide evidence of a wage penalty for very heavy and thin persons among both men and women the wage pena

women empowerment and economic development women empowerment and economic development are closely related in one direction development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women in the other direction empowering women may benefit development does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion this paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment development nexus and argues that the interrelationships are probably too weak to be self sustaining and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women

shocking behavior random wealth in antebellum georgia and human capital across generations does the lack of wealth constrain parents investments in the human capital of their descendants we conduct a nearly fifty year followup of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of substantial wealth to families we track descendants of participants in georgia s cherokee land lottery of 1832 in which nearly every adult white male in georgia took part winners received close to the median level of wealth a large financial windfall orthogonal to participants underlying characteristics that might have also affected their children s human capital although winners had slightly more children than non winners they did not send them to school more sons of winners have no better adult outcomes wealth income literacy than the sons of non winners and winners grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non winners grandchildren this suggests only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines

the new economic case for migration restrictions an assessment abstract migration barriers tend to reduce global production by impeding efficient spatial reallocation of labor recent research argues for a countervailing effect of barriers tending to raise global production by preventing the spread of impoverishing institutions from poor to rich countries while evidence of this mechanism is scarce it is theoretically plausible at high migration rates we propose and calibrate a simple model of dynamically efficient migration when migrants spread economic institutions between countries the net effect of migration depends on three parameters transmission the degree to which origin country total factor productivity is embodied in migrants assimilation the degree to which migrants productivity determinants become like natives over time in the host country and congestion the degree to which transmission and assimilation change at higher migrant stocks on current evidence about the magnitudes of these parameters dynamically efficient policy would not imply open borders but would imply relaxation of current restrictions

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

fertility restrictions and life cycle outcomes evidence from the one child policy in china this study considers the experience of china s one child policy to examine how fertility restrictions affect economic and social outcomes over a lifetime using variations in these penalties across

microeconomic approaches to development schooling learning and growth within the field of economic development over the past 15 years or so particularly significant advances have been made in what can be loosely called micro development an area defined principally by the units that are examined not by a particular methodological approach the units may be indi viduals households networks banks government agencies and so on as opposed to countries within this area economists use a wide variety of empirical methods informed to different degrees by economic models they use data from developed and

what s your child worth an analysis of expected dowry payments in rural india abstract this paper introduces a new primary dataset on dowry payments in rural india a novel feature of the data is that in addition to eliciting actual dowry payments we also asked rural indian households how much dowry they expected to pay receive for each of their currently unmarried children these expectations are presumably the basis of household decision making as opposed to actual dowries paid and received with respect to decisions such as human capital investments saving and consumption etc we find that the distribution of dowry forecasts appears to be consistent with the distribution of actual dowry payments suggesting that dowry perceptions may be quite accurate our analysis of dowry forecasts further indicates that i individual specific attributes are significantly more important than household income and wealth in terms of explaining the magnitude of dowry payments and ii bride quality is also a significant determinant of dowry which provides a corrective to the emphasis on groom quality in the literature

rewarding schooling success and perceived returns to education evidence from india this paper tests two specific mechanisms through which individuals can form expectations about returns to investments in education recognition for schooling performance and exposure to successful students through family or social networks using a regression discontinuity design we study the impact of two fellowship programs recognizing educational performance in secondary schools in india we find that the fellowship award is associated with a significant increase in the perceived value of education by both increasing the perceived mean of earnings 0 74 standard deviations sd and decreasing the perceived variance in earnings 1 03 sd associated with additional years of schooling the effects spill over only selectively to social and family networks peers exposed to successful students do not update their beliefs but parents of fellows report higher perceived returns to education peers of fellows are however more informed about fellowship opportunities and report a higher intention to apply for the fellowship thus contributing to the persistence of the potential impact of the fellowship across different cohorts

parental beliefs about returns to educational investments the later the better in this paper we study parental beliefs about the returns to parental investments made during different periods of childhood using two independent samples we document that parents perceive the returns to different late investments to be higher than the returns to early investments and that they perceive investments in different time periods as substitutes rather than complements we show that parental beliefs about the returns to investments vary substantially across the population and that individual beliefs are predictive of actual investment decisions moreover we document that parental beliefs about the productivity of investments differ significantly across socioeconomic groups perceived returns to early parental investments are positively associated with household income thereby potentially contributing to the intergenerational persistence in earnings

college choice as a collective decision although the choice between colleges can be thought of as being made collectively by a family models of educational choice almost universally portray the decision as made by the student alone using a novel experimental method for identifying collective decision functions i find that students have more influence than parents over the decision but not exclusive control students care more than parents about classroom experience and future earnings ignoring the dual agent nature of the decision can weaken predictions and lead to poorly targeted policy designs jel i21 j24 d13

school subsidies for the poor evaluating the mexican progresa poverty program abstract this paper evaluates how the progresa program which provides poor mothers in rural mexico with education grants has affected enrollment poor children who reside in communities randomly selected to participate in the initial phase of the progresa are compared to those who reside in other control communities pre program comparisons check the randomized design and double difference estimators of the program s effect on the treated are calculated by grade and sex probit models are also estimated for the probability that a child is enrolled controlling for additional characteristics of the child their parents local schools and community and for sample attrition to evaluate the sensitivity of the program estimates these estimates of program short run effects on enrollment are extrapolated to the lifetime schooling and the earnings of adults to approximate the internal rate of return on the public schooling subsidies as they increase expected private wages

group decision making with uncertain outcomes unpacking child parent choice of the high school track predicting group decisions under uncertainty requires disentangling individual members utilities over the consequences of choice their expectations for uncertain outcomes and their choice process as a group i estimate simple bayesian models of child parent choice of high school track with subjective risk and unilateral or bilateral nonstrategic decisions by combining families actual choices with novel survey information about children s and parents subjective probabilities over choice consequences their individually preferred choices and their decision roles a set of policy counterfactuals confirms the importance of introducing the beliefs and decision roles of individual members in models and policy analysis of group decisions

public education spending and private substitution in urban china abstract this paper documents robust evidence that increases in public spending on basic education are associated with significant reductions in household private tutoring spending in urban china this reduction comes primarily from the top and bottom income households suggesting multi dimensional demands for private tutoring it concentrates on households with an only boy and is larger for middle school than primary school children increases in public education spending are associated with significant reduction in school tuition which is homogeneous across households of different income levels changes in household spending on textbooks in response to more public education spending are modest but statistically insignificant

the role of information and social interactions in retirement plan decisions evidence from a randomized experiment this paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees decisions to enroll in a tax deferred account tda retirement plan within a large university the experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benee ts information fair organized by the university by promising a monetary reward for attendance the experiment multiplied by more than e ve the attendance rate of these treated individuals relative to controls and tripled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated tda enrollment e ve and eleven months after the fair was signie cantly higher in departments where some individuals were treated than in departments where nobody was treated however the effect on tda enrollment is almost as large for individuals in treated departments who did not receive the encouragement as for those who did we provide three interpretations differential treatment effects social network effects and motivational reward effects to account for these results

what you don t know can t help you pension knowledge and retirement decision making abstract this paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature while most people know little about their own pension plans retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives we combine administrative and self reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self reported pension data in determining retirement behavior well informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual ill informed individuals seem to respond systematically to their own misperceptions of pension incentives

agricultural spillover effects of cash transfers what does lewie have to say lewie simulations suggest that there are positive production spillovers fromsctprograms in nominal terms total production multipliers are always significantly greater than zero and income multipliers are always greater than one however real impacts depend on supply elasticities and market closure assumptions to date studies do not point to inflationary impacts of scts opm 2012a opm 2012b although the evidence on price effects is very limited this suggests that simulation 2 best characterizes the production impacts of scts which target poor economies with under utilized factors this simulation reveals a minimal inflationary impact and real production value added multipliers of 1 58 ksh per shilling transferred a key finding of lewie is that the production impacts are concentrated in nonbeneficiary households this is not surprising given the program s eligibility criteria which target the most asset and labor constrained households rcts focusing on treated households are likely to miss many or most of the productive impacts of social cash transfer programs this finding reaffirms the importance of a local economy wide approach if we wish to capture the transfers full impact finally our findings underline the importance of local supply constraints in shaping the impacts of transfer programs in the high unemployment environment characterizing rural kenya we believe it unlikely that there are significant labor constraints on production nevertheless production constraints limit program benefits particularly in nonbeneficiary households which are far and away the main source of new supply when production bottlenecks generate inflation transfers may even negatively affect some households interventions focusing on local production constraints in nonbeneficiary as well as beneficiary households may be needed to unlock the productive potential of scts

poverty and the political economy of public education spending evidence from brazil a large body of literature has emphasized the elite capture of democratic institutions as the explanation for the low levels of spending on public education in many low income democracies this paper provides an alternative to that longstanding hypothesis motivated by new cross country facts and evidence from brazilian municipalities we hypothesize that many democratic developing countries might invest less in public education spending because poor decisive voters prefer the government to allocate resources elsewhere one possible explanation is that low income voters could instead favor redistributive programs that increase their incomes in the short run such as cash transfers to test for this possibility we design and implement an experimental survey and an incentivized choice experiment in brazil the findings from both interventions support our hypothesis

networks in economic development this chapter surveys the implications of some studies in network economics research for economic development we focus on information flow and risk sharing two topics where work in theory empirics and policy analysis have been especially intensive and complementary in analysing information we distinguish models of information diffusion and aggregation highlight how different models imply very different guidance regarding the right way to seed information in discussing risk sharing we look at the key frictions that impede efficient informal insurance and some potential unintended consequences when policymakers intervene to help throughout we stress practical insights that can be used with limited measurement of the details of networks

subjective and projected returns to education abstract there is significant heterogeneity over high school students in the wage and employment rate returns to education i evaluate this heterogeneity using subjective returns derived from a data set of high school juniors and seniors in washington state variation over observables in projected returns estimated using observed data is uncorrelated with variation in subjective returns elicited by directly asking students about their beliefs these results mean that returns estimated using observed data are likely a very weak proxy for student beliefs

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

do it service centers promote school enrollment evidence from india abstract globalization has changed job opportunities in much of the developing world in india outsourcing has created a new class of high skill jobs which have increased overall returns to schooling existing evidence suggests education may broadly respond to this change we use microdata to evaluate the impact of these jobs on local school enrollment in areas outside of major it centers we merge panel data on school enrollment from a comprehensive school level administrative dataset with detailed data on information technology enabled services ites center location and founding dates using school fixed effects we find that introducing a new ites center causes a 5 increase in the number of children enrolled in primary school this effect is localized to within a few kilometers we show the effect is driven by english language schools consistent with the claim that the impacts are due to changes in returns to schooling and is not driven by changes in population or income resulting from the ites center supplementary survey evidence suggests that the localization of the effects is driven by limited information diffusion

dea models for resource reallocation and production input output estimation abstract this paper discusses the inverse data envelopment analysis dea problem with preference cone constraints an inverse dea model can be used for a decision making unit dmu to estimate its input output levels when some or all of its input output entities are revised given its current dea efficiency level the extension of introducing additional preference cones to the previously developed inverse dea model allows the decision makers to incorporate their preferences or important policies over inputs outputs into the production analysis and resource allocation process we provide the properties of the inverse dea problem through a discussion of its related multi objective and weighted sum single objective programming problems numerical examples are presented to illustrate the application procedure of our extended inverse dea model in particular we demonstrate how to apply the model to the case of a local home electrical appliance group company for its resource reallocation decisions

structural estimation of a model of school choices the boston mechanism vs its alternatives we model household choice of schools under the boston mechanism bm and develop a new method applicable to a broad class of mechanisms to fully solve the choice problem even if it is infeasible

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

information and college access evidence from a randomized field experiment information and college access high school students from disadvantaged high schools in toronto were invited to take two surveys about three weeks apart half of the students taking the first survey were also shown a three minute video about the benefits of post secondary education pse and were invited to try out a financial aid calculator most students perceived returns to pse were high even among those not expecting to continue those exposed to the video especially those initially unsure about their own educational attainment reported significantly higher expected returns and lower concerns about costs and expressed a greater likelihood of pse attainment

how responsive is investment in schooling to changes in redistributive policies and in returns this paper uses an unusual pay reform to test the responsiveness of investment in schooling to changes in redistribution schemes that increase the rate of return to education we exploit an episode where different israeli kibbutzim shifted from equal sharing to productivity based wages in different years and find that students in kibbutzim that reformed earlier invested more in high school education and in the long run also in post secondary schooling we further show that the effect is mainly driven by students in kibbutzim that reformed to a larger degree our findings support the prediction that education is highly responsive to changes in the redistribution policy

a land of milk and honey with streets paved with gold do emigrants have over optimistic expectations about incomes abroad millions of people emigrate every year in search of better economic and social opportunities anecdotal evidence suggests that emigrants may have over optimistic expectations about the incomes they can earn abroad resulting in excessive migration pressure and in disappointment among those who do migrate yet there is almost no statistical evidence on how accurately these emigrants predict the incomes that they will earn working abroad in this paper the authors combine a natural emigration experiment with unique survey data on would be emigrants probabilistic expectations about employment and incomes in the migration destination their procedure enables them to obtain moments and quantiles of the subjective distribution of expected earnings in the destination country the authors find a significant underestimation of both unconditional and conditional labor earnings at all points in the distribution this underestimation appears driven in part by potential migrants placing too much weight on the negative employment experiences of some migrants and by inaccurate information flows from extended family who may be trying to moderate remittance demands by understating incomes