booms busts and babies health we study the relationship between the unemployment rate at the time of a baby s conception and parental characteristics parental behaviors and babies health babies conceived in times of high unemployment have a reduced incidence of low and very low birth weight fewer congenital malformations and lower post neonatal mortality these health improvements are attributable both to selection changes in the type of mothers that conceive during recessions and to improvements in health behavior during recessions black mothers tend to be higher socio economic status as measured by education and marital status in times of high unemployment whereas white mothers are less educated

is education always reducing fertility evidence from compulsory schooling reforms we study the relationship between education and fertility exploiting compulsory schooling reforms in england and continental europe implemented between 1936 and 1975 we assess the causal effect of education on the number of biological children and the incidence of childlessness while we find a negative relationship between education and fertility in england this result can not be confirmed for continental europe the additional education generated by schooling expansions on the continent did not lead to a decrease in the number of biological children nor to an increase in childlessness these findings are robust to a number of sensitivity and falsification checks author s abstract

vanishing children from high unemployment to low fertility in developed countries during the last four decades the average total fertility rate in oecd countries witnessed a dramatic fall from 2 9 in 1960 to 2 0 in 1975 and then to 1 6 in the late 1990s reaching 1 25 in southern europe with the exception of the united states all advanced countries now have fertility rates well below the replacement rate of 2 1 in the absence of either sharp changes in fertility behavior or large inflows of immigrants their populations are set to shrink particularly in europe still within this generalized fall cross national differences in fertility behavior have remained significant by 2000 fertility rates ranged from 2 1 in the united states and over 1 8 in france and norway to less than 1 3 in greece italy and spain most standard accounts attribute the fall in fertility rates to a shift in personal preferences over the size of the family due to either changes in religious beliefs or growing female participation in the labor market yet even though the ideal number of children for men and women 20 34 years old has declined it is fairly similar across the european union at around the replacement level of 2 1 eurostat 2001 hence the sources of cross national variation in fertility behavior must lie somewhere else as women have joined the labor force fertility rates have adjusted as a function of the institutional structures that shape the job market and determine its long run unemployment rate exploiting the considerable variation of fertility rates and employment conditions across industrial countries this paper shows that the current demographic transition is ultimately associated with the constraints of the labor market where fertility decisions are taken

the effect of female education on fertility and infant health evidence from school entry policies using exact date of birth this paper uses age at school entry policies to identify the effect of female education on fertility and infant health we focus on sharp contrasts in schooling fertility and infant health between women born just before and after the school entry date school entry policies affect female education and the quality of a woman s mate and have generally small but possibly heterogeneous effects on fertility and infant health we argue that school entry policies manipulate primarily the education of young women at risk of dropping out of school

does increasing women s schooling raise the schooling of the next generation the positive cross sectional relationship between the schooling of mothers and their children is substantially biased upward due to correlations between schooling and heritable ability as well as assortative mating an increase in the schooling of women would not have beneficial effects in terms of the schooling of children increased maternal schooling leads to reduced home time for mothers anticipating the consequences of investing in women s schooling requires attention to the role that schooling plays in the marriage market as well as to opportunities in the labor market for women

treatment effect heterogeneity in theory and practice instrumental variables iv methods identify internally valid causal effects for individuals whose treatment status is manipulable by the instrument at hand inference for other populations requires homogeneity assumptions this paper outlines a theoretical framework that nests causal homogeneity assumptions these ideas are illustrated using sibling sex composition to estimate the effect of childbearing on economic and marital outcomes the application is motivated by american welfare reform the empirical results generally support the notion of reduced labour supply and increased poverty as a consequence of childbearing but evidence on the impact of childbearing on marital stability and welfare use is more tenuous

mother s education and the intergenerational transmission of human capital evidence from college openings we examine the effect of maternal education on birth outcomes using vital statistics natality data from 1970 to 1999 we also assess the importance of four channels through which maternal education may improve birth outcomes use of prenatal care smoking marriage and fertility in an effort to account for the endogeneity of education attainment we use data about the availability of colleges in the womans country in her 17th year as an instrument for maternal education we find that higher maternal education improves infant health as measured by birth weight and gestational age it also increases the probability that a new mother is married reduces parity increases use of prenatal care and reduces smoking suggesting that may be important pathways for the ultimate effect on health our results add to the growing body of literature which suggests that estimates of the returns to education which focus only on increases in wages understate the total return

the causal effect of education on body mass evidence from europe we adopt a multi country setup to show that years of schooling have a causal protective effect on the body mass index of females living in nine european countries no such effect is found for males the protective effect for european females is not negligible but is smaller than one recently found for the united states and stronger among overweight females we discuss possible mechanisms justifying both the protective role of education and the gender difference in this role we argue that the effects of additional schooling on income the probability of employment and the frequency of vigorous physical activities both on and off the job may help explain our results

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

the retirement consumption puzzle evidence from a regression discontinuity approach in this paper we investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in italy we use micro data on food and total non durable household spending covering the period 1993 2004 and evaluate the change in consumption that accompanies retirement by exploiting the exogenous variability in pension eligibility to correct for the endogenous nature of the retirement decision we take a regression discontinuity design approach and make the identifying assumption that consumption would be the same around the threshold for pension eligibility if individuals would not retire we check in our data that a non negligible fraction of individuals retire as soon as they become eligible and estimate at 9 8 the part of the non durable consumption drop that is associated with retirement induced by eligibility we show that such fall is not driven by liquidity problems for the less well off in the population and can be accounted for by drops in goods that are work related expenses or leisure substitutes however we also show that retirement induces a significant drop in the number of grown children living with their parents and this can account for most of the retirement consumption drop

free primary education fertility and women s access to the labor market evidence from ethiopia this article investigates the causal relationship between women s schooling and fertility by exploiting variation generated by the removal of school fees in ethiopia the increase in schooling caused by the reform is identified using both geographic variation in the intensity of its impact and temporal variation generated by the timing of the implementation the model finds that the removal of school fees led to an increase in schooling for ethiopian women and that each additional year of schooling led to a reduction in fertility an investigation of the underlying mechanisms linking schooling and fertility finds that the decline in fertility is associated with an increase in labor market opportunity and a reduction in women s ideal number of children

is extending compulsory schooling alone enough to raise earnings evidence from french and british compulsory schooling laws in this paper i compare two reforms that raised the minimum school leaving age to 16 in france 1967 and in england and wales 1972 using a regression discontinuity design i find that while the reform in england and wales led to a 6 7 percent increase in hourly wages per additional year of compulsory schooling the impact of the change to french law was close to zero the results suggest that the major difference between the two reforms was that the fraction of individuals holding no qualifications dropped sharply after the introduction of the new minimum school leaving age in england and wales whereas it remained unchanged in france

education and fertility evidence from a natural experiment declining fertility is often attributed to the increased education of women it is difficult to establish a causal link because both fertility and education have changed secularly in this paper we study the connection between fertility and education using educational reform as an instrument to control for selection our results indicate that increasing education leads to postponement of first births away from teenage motherhood and towards women having their first birth in their 20s as well as for a smaller group up to the age of 35 40 we find no evidence however that more education results in more women remaining childless or having fewer children

on the efficiency of environmental instruments in a spatial economy this paper develops an efficiency criterion to evaluate environmental policy instruments in a spatial economy we call an environmental policy regime at the regional level efficient if it guarantees not only an efficient distribution of emission permits within a region but also an efficient locational pattern of mobile firms across the regions of a federation using marketable pollution rights or emission taxes efficiency in this broad sense can only be achieved if revenues of regional environmental agencies are not transferred to regional firms direct controls neither support an efficient allocation of emission rights within a region nor locational efficiency of firms

the expansion and convergence of compulsory schooling in western europe 1950 2000 this paper examines the expansion of compulsory schooling in fifteen western european countries over 1950 2000 we show that a convergence process has occurred across these countries since 1950 we argue that the major driver of this phenomenon is the existence of decreasing aggregate returns to education that have limited the extension of compulsory schooling then we test whether convergence holds when confronted with other explanations described in the literature conditional convergence does hold and we find that openness has been another significant determinant of compulsory years of schooling reflecting the need of a skilled labour force in an increasingly globalized world

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

environmental policy when market structure and plant locations are endogenous abstract a two region two firm model is developed in which firms choose the number and the regional locations of their plants both firms pollute and market structure is endogenous to environmental policy there are increasing returns at the plant level imperfect competition between the home and the foreign firm and transport costs between the two markets at critical levels of environmental policy variables small policy changes cause large discrete jumps in a region s pollution and welfare as a firm closes or opens a plant or shifts production to from a foreign branch plant the implications for optimal environmental policy differ significantly from those suggested by traditional pigouvian marginal analysis

domestic or u s news what drives canadian financial markets i introduction canada as a small open economy depends to a large extent on global economic developments trade and capital flow linkages to its major trading partners as well as the foreign interest rate level are important for the canadian economy in our sample period about two thirds of total portfolio investments in canada are made by u s investors the trade share with the united states is also quite large 77 in 1998 68 in 2006 in 95 of all currency transactions involving canadian dollars these are converted into u s dollars and vice versa 1 these figures indicate that economic developments in the united states and its monetary policy mp should play an important role particularly in the development of the canadian economy and its financial markets there has even been discussion of creating a monetary union between canada and the united states or unilaterally adopting a u s dollar peg for instance buiter 1999 concludes that economic arguments favor a full formally symmetric monetary union therefore when studying canadian financial markets one needs to consider economic events occurring in the united states gravelle and moessner 2001 state that throughout the 1990s canadian market participants tended to put greater emphasis on u s macroeconomic data releases than on canadian ones thus one should expect u s macroeconomic news and mp to have a significant impact on canadian financial markets in addition it is important to study mp communication in a broad sense and not only target rate changes as market participants but also adjust to news conveyed in speeches and testimony by federal open market committee fomc members as u s financial markets react to informal channels of mp we expect canadian markets will too 2 our sample period 1998 2006 includes several formal and informal changes in canadian mp ever since september 1998 the bank of canada boc has intervened in the foreign exchange market only under exceptional circumstances in september 2000 it introduced fixed announcement dates fads previously target rate changes could effectively occur on any business day 3 with the introduction of fads the boc became more independent from the federal reserve bank fed the boc does not explicitly refer to any prior decisions by the fed in its post meeting statements after may 2000 for instance between april 2002 and september 2004 the boc target rate deviates substantially from the federal funds target rate see figure a1 in the appendix this is the first paper to study the effects of formal and informal communication by the boc as well as by the fed on canadian financial markets using a novel set of data in this paper we address four research questions 1 do u s and canadian central bank communication including target rate changes and macroeconomic news have an impact on canadian financial market returns 2 which type of news u s or canadian is more relevant 3 does the introduction of the fad system change agents sensitivity to canadian news in particular is there a stronger reaction to canadian news in the april 2002 to september 2004 subsample a period during which the course of boc mp was different from that of the fed compared to reactions in other periods this is of particular interest as the boc followed the u s interest rate path closely even after introduction of the fad system 4 does u s and canadian news exert an influence on financial market volatility the remainder of this paper is organized as follows in the next section we summarize previous work in this area and outline the contributions of this paper section iii describes the construction of the news dummies and explains our data set section iv introduces the econometric methodology section v reports our empirical results for bond market returns section vi focuses on stock and foreign exchange market returns

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

forced to be rich returns to compulsory schooling in britain do students benefit from compulsory schooling in an important article oreopoulos 2006 studied the 1947 british compulsory schooling law change and found large returns to schooling of about 15 using the general household survey ghs re analysing this dataset we find much smaller returns of about 3 on average with no evidence of any positive return for women and a return for men of 4 7 additionally we utilise the new earnings survey panel data set nespd that has earnings information superior to that in the ghs and find similar estimates zero returns for women and returns of 3 to 4 for men