the effect of income on child development this study presents estimates of the effect of parental income on children s cognitive social and emotional development the effect of current income is small especially when income is treated as endogenous the effect of permanent income is substantially larger but relatively small when compared to the magnitude of recent policy induced changes in income family background characteristics play a more important role than income in determining child outcomes policies that affect family income will have little direct impact on child development unless they result in very large and permanent changes in income

where do markets come from production markets have two sides producers are a fully connected clique transacting with buyers as a separate but aggregated clique each producer is a distinctive firm with a distinctive product each side continually monitors reactions of the other through the medium of a joint social construction the schedule of terms of trade each producer is guided in choice of volume by the tangible outcomes of other producers not by speculation on hypothetical reactions of buyers to its actions each producer acts purely on self interest based on observed actions of all others summarized through a feedback process the summary is the terms of trade schedule which reduces to constant price only in limiting cases the market emerges as a structure of roles with a differentiated niche for each firm explicit formulae both for firms and for market aggregates are obtained by comparative statics methods for one family of assumptions about cost structures and about buyers evaluations of differentiated products not just any set of firms can sustain terms of trade with any set of buyers there prove to be three main kinds of markets and three sorts of market failure within a parameter space that is specified in detail one sort of market paradox has a madison avenue flavor another is more conventional grind and a third crowded is a new form not included in any existing theory of markets current american industrial markets are drawn on for 20 illustrations of which three are presented in some detail inequality in firms market shares measured by gini coefficients is discussed

household choices and child development the growth in labor market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the mother s absence from home on child outcomes recent data show that mother s time spent with children has declined in the last decade while the indicators of children s cognitive and noncognitive outcomes have worsened the objective of our research is to estimate a model of the cognitive development process of children nested within an otherwise standard model of household life cycle behavior the model generates endogenous dynamic interrelationships between the child quality and employment processes in the household which are found to be consistent with patterns observed in the data the estimated model is used to explore the eects of schooling subsidies and employment restrictions on household welfare and child development

review on malaysia s national energy developments key policies agencies programmes and international involvements this paper aims to present a review on malaysia s national energy developments by looking at various angles in terms of renewable energy and energy efficiency energy demand and consumption by sectors are presented as well as the fuel mix in electricity generation key energy policies implemented from the incorporation of malaysia s national oil company petronas in 1974 until the national green technology policy 2009 and a future policy will be addressed the roles of key players as well as important agencies in energy development are briefly presented key programmes in energy development such as malaysian industrial energy efficiency improvement project small renewable energy power programme and building energy efficiency programme are discussed as well as successful initiatives from the programmes malaysia s international involvements towards reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon emissions especially montreal protocol and kyoto protocol are highlighted as a conclusion malaysia is aware of its role in formulating its national energy development policies sensitive towards the country s development towards the environment and utilization of energy resources as well as conscientious and responsive towards the call for sustainable development in promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency

assessing the short term revenue impacts of residential pv systems on electricity customers retailers and network service providers abstract falling costs and supportive government policies have seen remarkable growth in residential photovoltaic systems in jurisdictions around the world while there have been detailed studies of the financial attractiveness of pv for home owners under different policy and retail market arrangements there has been less consideration of the impacts of such systems on some other key industry participants in this paper we undertake an investigation of the annual short term revenue impacts of pv systems for those households installing them for their electricity retailers and network service providers nsps and for all electricity customers more in general in the australian state of nsw we use actual half hourly pv generation and electricity consumption for 80 households in sydney to estimate the real world impacts of a range of former current and possible future pv policy and retail tariff arrangements including gross and net feed in tariffs fit we found that the short term revenue impacts differ significantly for different commercial arrangements and are highly variable and largely driven by the pv performance and its match with household consumption patterns results highlight that current net metering policies in australia with low net fit rates may provide only moderate revenue incentives to households yet quite adverse revenue impacts on nsps and retailers depending on the level of pv export while nsp short term revenue losses will likely involve increasing electricity tariffs in the longer term losses for retailers may add risks to the profitability of household customers with pv the challenge for policy makers is to facilitate socially valuable pv deployment whilst appropriately managing the impacts on all key electricity industry stakeholders

externalities property rights and the allocation of resources in major league baseball most economists who have analyzed professional baseball have concluded that two distinctive features of its labor market the reserve clause and player draft influence the distribution of wealth between players and owners but do not affect the allocation of playing talent among teams such conclusions which are strongly at variance with laymen s views of such matters are derived from theoretical considerations rather than empirical examinations our paper examines data from the two decades of major league history and concludes that on the basis of that data the empirical generalizations of previous economists do not appear to be justified

migration trends and earnings of free agents in major league baseball 1976 1979 this paper is an empirical investigation of the effect of team characteristics on the migration pattern of free agents in major league baseball during the period 1976 1979 the results indicate that high quality free agents tend to leave winning teams and move to teams in cities with large or rapidly growing populations the compensation paid to free agents is shown to depend on these team characteristics as well as the players personal characteristics and market conditions

price and authority in inter profit center transactions price and authority have traditionally been regarded as alternative social mechanisms for allocating resources however actual transactions whether inter or intrafirm can be evaluated in terms of the extent to which they combine both of these mechanisms an especially revealing example of this is the exchange of goods between two profit centers in the multi profit center firm three of the most common arrangements or transfer pricing polices for effecting these transactions are examined here exchange autonomy transfers depend primarily on price with no or minimal use of authority mandated full cost transfers involve a substantial exercise of authority relative to the use of price mandated market based transfers use both authority and price in important ways for all three policies the transaction costs of these internal transactions may exceed these costs on external transactions

the intergenerational earnings and income mobility of canadian men evidence from longitudinal income tax data our objective is to obtain an accurate estimate of the degree of intergenerational income mobility in canada we use income tax information on about 400 000 father son pairs and find intergenerational earnings elasticities to be about 0 2 earnings mobility tends to be slightly greater than income mobility but nonparametric techniques uncover significant nonlinearities in both of these relationships intergenerational earnings mobility is greater at the lower end of the income distribution than at the upper end and displays an inverted v shape elsewhere intergenerational income mobility follows roughly the same pattern but is much lower at the very top of the income distribution

parental earnings and children s well being an analysis of the survey of income and program participation matched to social security administration earnings data i introduction in the aftermath of the great recession approximately one in five children in the united states lives in poverty making children the poorest age group in the united states children s defense fund 2010 land 2010 comprehensive measures of child well being have also begun to decline after showing steady improvement for most of the past 20 years given this backdrop efforts to improve the material conditions of children are likely to remain a salient issue for policymakers for many years an obvious target for policymakers is to improve the economic situation of parents indeed a vast literature in the social sciences has studied the association between parental income and children s outcomes to establish the importance of parental economic resources on children s well being one limitation of many of these studies is the lack of availability of parental income or earnings histories over long periods of time it is well established that the bias in using single year measures of parental income to proxy for long run income can be sizable and can vary by parental age solon 1992 mazumder 2005 haider and solon 2006 indeed a number of studies have shown that the estimated associations between parental income and child well being grow larger as parent income is measured over progressively longer time periods miller and korenman 1994 blau 1999 we further extend these findings using a unique dataset that includes a rich set of measures of child well being that is also linked to administrative data containing long term parental earnings histories for much larger samples of families than has typically been available specifically our dataset pools families from the 1984 1990 1993 1996 2001 and 2004 panels of the survey of income and program participation sipp each of these sipp samples were matched to earnings histories contained in social security administration ssa records we use the administrative data to construct long term time averages of parents earnings we use these time averages of parent earnings to estimate the association between parent earnings and childhood well being we use sipp topical modules on children s well being functional limitations and disability health status and utilization of health care and extended measures of well being to obtain a broad set of measures related to childhood health and well being we find that across virtually all of our indicators of childhood well being longer time averages lead to substantially larger estimates in some cases the associations more than double compared to using a single year of earnings in certain instances the estimates are only statistically significant when using the longer time averages among our substantive findings we show that a doubling of a 7 year average of earnings is associated with a 48 drop in the mean probability of a teenager reporting poor health a 39 drop in the mean probability of repeating a grade an 18 drop in the mean probability of being suspended a 75 percentage point drop in the mean probability of having insufficient food and a 6 percentage point increase in the mean number of times a child saw a doctor notably these estimates are 25 120 larger than those based on using a single year of earnings relative to the earlier studies that have shown similar patterns we use much larger samples and do not rely on self reported earnings we also exploit the very long earnings histories available in the ssa data to examine how the timing of parent earnings received during particular periods of the child s life is associated with adolescent health status the likelihood of enrolling in college and adult earnings we find suggestive evidence that for college enrollment and adult earnings parental earnings received during the school going years have a stronger association than earnings received earlier or later in the child s life we think that this is an important area for future research to further explore

does family income matter for schooling outcomes using adoptees as a natural experiment one would expect that family income is an important positive factor in children s school attainment however evidence is often tainted by the lack of control for parental ability since at least a portion of ability is transferred genetically to children this paper uses a sample of adopted children and offers genetically unbiased estimates we further correct for biases arising from unobserved parenting qualities and from parents differentiation between their own birth and adopted children family income still has a significant effect it implies that high ability children in low income families face binding credit constraints that society may wish to relieve

embracing new agriculture commodity through integration of java tea as high value herbal crops in solar pv farms abstract integration of agriculture and renewable energy resources rer is currently a hot topic discussed worldwide based on the need for green energy and sustainable economy the decreasing trend of global market value for the traditional agricultural commodity such as rubber and palm oil really affected the gross national income gni and thus the government of malaysia outlined a number of strategic thrusts to boost economic growth herbal products have been given sufficient rooms for extension as the first approved entry point projects epp1 driver of sustainability orthosiphon stamineus also known as java tea is among the five commercialize high value herbal crops hvhc and chosen to be deployed under pv arrays based on its sustainability and potential market value the financial analysis is based on 3 months harvesting cycle with reference to the harvesting coefficience p c and realistic cash flow the internal rate of return irr is valued at 15 74 that benchmarks positive net return for herbal producers the cash functions based on return on investment roi can be achieved after 10 months cycle of production with net present value npv of rm8 863 59 this initiative flows in line with the cleaner production cp concept of efficient usage of natural resources to minimize waste and pollution the concept of agro technology integration is presented with strong financial return for the unused space under pv arrays configured for large scale pv farms

cyclicality mortality and the value of time the case of coffee price fluctuations and child survival in colombia recent studies demonstrate procyclical mortality in wealthy countries but there are reasons to expect a countercyclical relationship in developing nations we investigate how child survival in colombia responds to fluctuations in world arabica coffee prices and document starkly procyclical child deaths in studying this result s behavioral underpinnings we highlight that 1 the leading determinants of child health are inexpensive but require considerable time and 2 as the value of time declines with falling coffee prices so does the relative price of health we find a variety of direct evidence consistent with the primacy of time in child health production

the impact of parental income on early schooling transitions a re examination using data over three generations abstract this paper applies new semi parametric techniques to estimate the effects of parental income on the probability of being held back in elementary school in france we use information on grandparents past socioeconomic status and parents education level to separate the parental income effects from the effects of the unmeasured determinants of children s performance at school that are correlated with parental income when considering the probability of being held back in elementary school we find that the effects of parental poverty are much larger than the effects of a child s sex or age age within his her class or of the parents education level our findings suggest that policy decisions that increase income transfers to relatively poor families have a potentially very large impact on children s early performance at school

the role of child health and economic status in educational health and labour market outcomes in young adulthood the ontario child health study provides the first opportunity in canada to assess directly the relationship between socio economic and health status in childhood and levels of completed schooling health status and labour market success in young adult hood we find that childhood health problems are negatively associated with educational attainment especially the probability of a university degree and the health status of young adults our results also imply that childhood health problems influence adult labour force outcomes especially for males mainly through adult levels of schooling and health jel classification 110

parental compensatory behaviors and early child health outcomes in cebu philippines a dynamic optimization model of parents choosing investments in their children s health motivates an empirical model of parents choices of health inputs for their children and the impacts of these decisions on their children s subsequent health estimates of the child health input demand functions and the child health production functions from the cebu longitudinal health and nutrition survey accord with the prediction that optimizing behavior results in higher levels of aggregate child health observable parental behaviors respond to the physical developmental status of their children these parental responses appear to yield large and statistically significant improvements in children s early physiological outcomes however because some health inputs choices are not observable it is impossible to ascertain whether these measured effects are due solely to variations in the observed input choices

rich dad smart dad decomposing the intergenerational transmission of income we construct a simple model consistent with becker and tomes that decomposes the intergenerational income elasticity into the causal effect of financial resources the mechanistic transmission of human capital and the role that human capital plays in the determination of fathers permanent incomes we show how a particular set of instrumental variables could separately identify the money and human capital transmission effects using data from a 35 percent sample of swedish sons and their fathers we show that only a minority of the intergenerational income elasticity can be plausibly attributed to the causal effect of fathers financial resources

early maternal time investment and early child outcomes using large longitudinal survey data from the uk millennium cohort study this article estimates the relationship between maternal time inputs and early child development we find that maternal time is a quantitatively important determinant of skill formation and that its effect declines with child age there is evidence of long term effects of early maternal time inputs on later outcomes especially in the case of cognitive skill development in the case of non cognitive development the evidence of this long term impact disappears when we account for skill persistence

residential energy efficiency and distributed generation natural partners or competition abstract residential energy efficiency and distributed generation seem to be natural partners in our journey towards a more sustainable energy future a growing range of energy efficient consumer technologies and extraordinary declines in photovoltaics system prices has seen household electricity demand fall whilst a growing proportion of the remaining load is provided by household self generation australia is a particularly interesting example of these developments with around 15 of households now possessing a pv system while per capita household demand has also fallen markedly however existing retail electricity tariffs and regulatory arrangements can create mixed incentives for households contemplating both pv and energy efficiency options and for their network service providers this is certainly the case in australia with net metering arrangements that value self consumption of pv far more than pv exports to the grid there are also complex benefits for the electricity network created by these household energy resources that can be significant in this paper we use real household load and pv data from sydney households to model the potential implications of existing electricity tariff arrangements on the financial attractiveness of pv and energy efficiency we model these options separately and in combination for both households implementing these options and their network service providers our results highlight how inappropriate tariffs may well adversely impact on the value that the combination of energy efficiency and pv offers not only to households but also to their network service providers and suggest ways that such impacts might be ameliorated by acknowledging the benefits that these resources can offer to the electricity network

renewable energy support mechanisms in the gulf cooperation council states analyzing the feasibility of feed in tariffs and auction mechanisms renewable energy will be a crucial ingredient in the transition to a more sustainable future the renewable energy sector requires a variety of financial support mechanisms in order to further consolidate and expand currently the most prominent renewable energy support mechanisms are feed in tariffs and renewable energy auctions although these mechanisms have been used and analyzed extensively in western countries and more recently economies in transition they have rarely been examined in the arab gulf region yet particularly the gulf cooperation council gcc states have undertaken important steps towards renewable energy adoption which could be greatly facilitated with the use of financial support mechanisms this paper analyzes the feasibility of feed in tariffs and renewable energy auctions adoption in gcc based on an extensive meta analysis of the literature on these two mechanisms in both developed and developing countries the paper identifies a set of conditions necessary for success and evaluates the presence of favorable these conditions in the gcc context our findings reveal that while conditions that would ensure political feasibility are largely absent for both types of mechanisms auctions could be a more successful strategy at the moment

economic status and health in childhood the origins of the gradient the well known positive association between health and income in adulthood has antecedents in childhood not only is children s health positively related to household income but the relationship between household income and children s health becomes more pronounced as children age part of the relationship can be explained by the arrival and impact of chronic conditions children from lower income households with chronic conditions have worse health than do those from higher income households the adverse health effects of lower income accumulate over children s lives part of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status may work through the impact of parents income on children s health

feed in tariff outlook in malaysia this paper aims to present the feed in tariff fit outlook in malaysia which is in the process of being enacted through a renewable energy re policy by the government of malaysia gom a brief in policies leading towards the re policy and the potential of each re sources under fit mechanism have been discussed the successful utilisation of re source in electricity generation and the fit implementation globally are positive indicators to implement fit in malaysia potentials of fit on biomass biogas and solid waste energy are currently very promising in malaysia but it is solar energy which is predicted to be the main re of the future surpassing all other res

publics knowledge attitudes and behavioral toward the use of solar energy in yemen power sector abstract this paper presents the information of the public s views on the solar energy use in yemen it examines the public knowledge of attitudes and behavioral intentions that include the variables willingness to pay willingness to change and willingness to invest and then compare them a personal interview with 348 urban household and 258 rural household was performed the descriptive statistics chi square for independence odds ratios mann whitney and kruskal wallis tests were the statistical tools employed in the analysis the results showed that the citizens in both areas have a moderate level of knowledge about renewable energy resources the benefits and drawbacks of solar energy use in the power sector and the solar power technologies despite that they have highly positive attitudes towards the use of renewable energy particularly solar energy and its technologies they also accept to engage in the renewable energy activities which aim to improve the quality of the electrical service provided in the country the findings also indicate 66 55 7 and 78 4 of urban citizens are willing to pay to change and to invest compared to 70 55 4 and 75 6 of rural citizens the place of residence factor affected significantly the citizens knowledge level about renewable energy wind biomass and geothermal energy renewable energy resources the drawbacks of solar energy use in the power sector and the solar power technologies it also affected significantly the citizens attitudes towards the use of solar power technologies at home the implications for the policymakers are that elevating the knowledge and awareness of the citizens by formal and informal education and enacting effective supportive policies assists in encouraging the citizens to use renewable energies in their daily lives would lead to achieve the country s renewable energy targets for 2025

does aid matter measuring the effect of student aid on college attendance and completion does student aid increase college attendance or simply subsidize costs for infra marginal students settling the question empirically is a challenge because aid is correlated with many characteristics that influence educational investment decisions a shift in financial aid policy that affects some youth but not others can provide an identifying source of variation in aid in 1982 congress eliminated the social security student benefit program which at its peak provided grants totaling 3 7 billion a year to one out of ten college students using the death of a parent as a proxy for social security beneficiary status i find that offering 1 000 1998 of grant aid increases educational attainment by about 0 16 years and the probability of attending college by four percentage points the elasticities of attendance and completed years of college with respect to schooling costs are 0 7 to 0 8 the evidence suggests that aid has a threshold effect a student who has crossed the hurdle of college entry with the assistance of aid is more likely to continue schooling later in life than one who has never attempted college this is consistent with a model in which there are fixed costs of college entry finally a cost benefit analysis indicates that the aid program examined by this paper was a cost effective use of government resources this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

regression toward mediocrity in economic stature this paper provides estimates of the correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons intergenerational data from the national longitudinal survey are used earlier studies conducted for the united states report elasticities of children s earnings with respect to parent s earnings of 0 2 or less suggesting extensive integenerational mobility these estimates however are biased downward by error contaminated measures of lifetime economic status estimates presented in this paper correct for the problem of measurement error and find the intergenerational correlation in income to be on the order of 0 4 this suggests considerably less intergenerational mobility than previously believed jel j62

intergenerational income mobility in the united states social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the united states but remarkably little empirical evidence is available the few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error unrepresentative samples or both new estimates based on intergenerational data from the panel study of income dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long run income is at least 0 4 indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research copyright 1992 by american economic association

the impact of cost on the choice of university evidence from ontario this paper provides the first canadian study of the link between cost to the student and the choice of university over the past two decades there has been a substantial increase in the differences among ontario universities in net cost defined as tuition and fees minus the expected value to an academically strong student of a guaranteed merit scholarship our estimates generally indicate no relationship between net cost and the overall share of strong applicants that a university is able to attract an increase in net cost is associated with an increase in the ratio of strong students from high income neighbourhoods to strong students from middle income and low income neighbourhoods in arts and science programs but not in commerce and engineering finally more advantaged students are more likely to attend university but merit aid is not of disproportionate benefit to those from more economically advantaged backgrounds given registration jel classification health education and welfare impact du cout sur le choix de l universite resultats pour l ontario ce texte presente la premiere etude canadienne sur le lien entre le cout pour l etudiant et le choix d une universite au cours des dernieres decennies il y a eu accroissement substantiel dans les differentiels de couts nets pour les universites de l ontario par couts net on entend les frais de scolarite et autres frais afferents moins la valeur anticipee pour un etudiant academiquement fort d une bourse au merite nos evaluations montrent qu en general il n y a pas de relation entre le cout net et la portion des bons candidats qu une universite est capable d attirer un accroissement du cout net est associea un accroissement du ratio des bons etudiants en provenance de quartiers a hauts revenus par rapport aux bons etudiants en provenance de quartiers a revenus moyens ou faibles pour les programmes en arts et en science ce n est pas le cas pour les programmes en commerce ou en genie enfin les etudiants plus avantages economiquement sont davantage susceptibles d aller a l universite mais les bourses au merite ne beneficient pas de maniere disproportionnee a ceux qui proviennent de milieux plus favorises si l on s en tient aux etudiants qui s inscrivent

beauty vs brains early labor market outcomes of high school graduates this paper examines the wage returns to attractiveness for young high school graduates findings show that wage returns to attractiveness are large relative to ability and beauty and ability are complements at high attractiveness ratings but substitutes at low ratings

socioeconomic status and child health why is the relationship stronger for older children case lubotsky and paxson 2001 show that the well known relationship between socio economic status ses and health exists in childhood and grows more pronounced with age however in cross sectional data it is difficult to distinguish between two possible explanations the first is that low ses children are less able to respond to a given health shock the second is that low ses children experience more shocks we show using panel data on canadian children that 1 the gradient we estimate in the cross section is very similar to that estimated previously using u s children 2 both high and low ses children recover from past health shocks to about the same degree and 3 that the relationship between ses and health grows stronger over time mainly because low ses children receive more negative health shocks in addition we examine the effect of health shocks on math and reading scores we find that health shocks affect test scores and future health in very similar ways our results suggest that public policy aimed at reducing ses related health differentials in children should focus on reducing the incidence of health shocks as well as on reducing disparities in access to palliative care

child care choices and children s cognitive achievement the case of single mothers we evaluate the effect of child care versus maternal time inputs on child cognitive development using single mothers from the nlsy79 to deal with nonrandom selection of children into child care we exploit the exogenous variation in welfare policy rules facing single mothers in particular the 1996 welfare reform and earlier state level policy changes generated substantial increases in their work child care use we construct a comprehensive set of welfare policy variables and use them as instruments to estimate child cognitive ability production functions in our baseline specification we estimate that a year of child care reduces child test scores by 2 1

child labor and schooling responses to access to microcredit in rural bangladesh microcredit has been shown to be effective in reducing poverty in many developing countries however less is known about its effect on human capital formation in this paper we develop a model examining the relation between microcredit and child labour we then empirically examine the impact of access to microcredit on children s education and child labour using a new and large data set from rural bangladesh we address the selection bias using the instrumental variable method where the instrument relies on an exogenous variation in treatment intensity among households in different villages the results show that household participation in a microcredit program may increase child labour and reduce school enrolment the adverse effects are more pronounced for girls than boys younger children are more adversely affected than their older siblings and the children of poorer and less educated households are affected most adversely our findings remain robust to different specifications and methods and when corrected for various sources of selection bias

multiple output child health production functions the impact of time varying and time invariant inputs author affiliation mark d agee department of economics pennsylvania state university altoona pa 16601 usa mda4 psu edu corresponding authorscott e atkinson department of economics university of georgia athens ga 30602 usa atknsn uga eduthomas d crocker department of economics and finance university of wyoming laramie wy 82071 usa tcrocker uwyo edu acknowledgment comments and suggestions from two anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged the u s environmental protection agency financially supported this research effort through grant number r82871601 however the research has not been subjected to the agency s required peer and policy review and therefore does not necessarily reflect the views of the agency 1 introductionin this paper we attempt to broaden and to redirect the standard theoretical and empirical approach in economics to the household production of human health especially child health the last decade has witnessed increased concern with the impact of public policies and private investments on child health perhaps motivated by an increased concern for equity and an enhanced recognition that human capital formation in children contributes significantly to society s future well being children live in households with parents or adults who combine their skills with good as well as bad inputs that produce good as well as bad child health outcomes physical behavioral and cognitive a good input could be the time spent reading to a child while a bad input could be parental smoking near a child a good outcome could be higher reading skills while a bad outcome could be a child s ill health three features distinguish our modeling approach to the household production of child outcomes first we argue that multiple good and bad inputs can affect multiple measures of good and bad outcomes for children ignoring this by estimating single equation relationships produces omitted variable bias and fails to model the tradeoffs among inputs and outcomes to examine jointness among several good and bad outcomes as well as inputs and allow for heterogeneity among households in the productivity of observed child inputs we specify and estimate an output based directional distance function chambers chung and fare 1998 for a balanced panel of households with coresident children this function allows us to estimate the maximum expansion of goods and the contraction of bads subject to a given level of observed inputs for a household using the underlying joint technology second we argue that households will produce child health with varying degrees of effectiveness the best practice household is defined as that household that cannot make further increases in all good dimensions of child health and reductions in all bad dimensions by some additive amount using a given level of observed inputs this household practices its child care on the production frontier households within this frontier make less efficient use of personal and marketed child care inputs thus we estimate the technical efficiency for household units in producing multiple outputs from multiple inputs finally although we have panel data and compute a fixed effects estimator we recover the effects of time invariant variables such as sex race and parent attributes on goods and bads in a second stage regression we adjust their estimated standard errors and correct for the bias caused by weak instruments in the first stage using a jackknife technique the next section presents background for our hypotheses of i jointness in the household production of child health outcomes and ii the presence of technical inefficiency among households in the production process in section 3 we discuss properties of the directional distance function and the calculation of partial effects results are presented in section 4 and conclusions follow in section 5

does parents money matter abstract this paper asks whether parents income per se has a positive impact on children s abilities previous research has established that income is positively correlated across generations this does not prove that parents money matters however since income is presumably correlated with ability this paper estimates the impact of parents income by focusing on income variation due to factors union industry and job loss that arguably represent luck i find that changes in parents income due to luck have a negligible impact on children s human capital for most families although parents money does matter for families whose father has low education

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

assimilation or contrast status inequality judgment of product quality and product choices in markets much of organizational status research has been conducted at the micro level by examining the effect of individual status positions to answer calls for more status research at the macro level this study extends psychological research on assimilation and contrast effects to examine how status inequality as a distributional property influences product choices in markets in the context of u s college bowls a specific type of organization within u s collegiate athletics this study analyzes how the status inequality among bowls influences bowls stadium attendance which reflects the judgment of bowls by football fans as the key buyers the analyses yield evidence consistent with assimilation and contrast effects below the middle level of status inequality the relationship between status inequality and stadium attendance is positive for low status bowls but negative for high status bowls above the middle level of status inequality the relationships are reversed the effect of status inequality is a

tuition fees and social segregation lessons from a natural experiment at the university of paris 9 dauphine using a natural experiment a sharp rise in tuition fees in some of the programmes at the university of paris 9 dauphine we study the impact of tuition fees on students pathways and outcomes we apply an optimal matching method to the national database of students registrations sise to define a typology of pathways we then use a nonordered multinomial logit model to evaluate the impact of the rise in tuition fees on the types of pathways selected by the university we show that there is a significant impact on these pathways the increase in tuition fees reduces geographic and social mobility thereby accentuating the phenomena of social segregation furthermore contrary to what some of the studies assert the rise does not appear to encourage greater effort we find no impact on the graduation success rate

inequality among equals embedding market and authority in league sports in league sports the regulatory authority of leagues is thought to counter market pressures that would otherwise concentrate player talent in smsas with the largest market potential the presumed opposition between authority and markets is not supported by league histories in the four major team sports these histories show that contrary to expectations market potential has the greatest influence on winning when league authority is formally strongest market potential has no influence on performance when league authority is opposed by antitrust law player unions rival leagues or league members to explain this anomaly authority and market relations must both be seen as embedded within the multiplex relations among team owners these relations changed dramatically with the rise of national audiences in the past three decades inequality among equals replaced inequality among unequals as the support of a rootless national audience replaced rooted and unequal local audiences altering the opportunity

solar photovoltaic in malaysia the way forward abstract this paper examines solar photovoltaic pv in malaysia first it analyzes the current energy demand in malaysia and discusses some of the national policies and the installations of solar pv in urban and rural areas in the country next the general feed in tariff fit scheme is explained indicating its potential as one of the investment options for malaysians finally the loan financing option for solar pv is presented providing examples that have been implemented in other countries as well as explaining the green technology financing scheme gtfs for companies and the proposed soft loan scheme for individual households in malaysia it also analyses the impact of the proposed interest rate to household consumers in malaysia in terms of total profit net present value and internal rate of return it is found that the fit scheme could potentially help in increasing renewable energy penetration particularly for solar pv to provide upfront capital for solar pv installation it is shown that the gtfs is a good financial source for companies while for individual home owners a soft loan facility from banking institutions is a feasible source if the interest rate is 5 or less

how large are the effects from changes in family environment a study of korean american adoptees i analyze a new set of data on korean american adoptees who were quasi randomly assigned to adoptive families i find large effects on adoptees education income and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics outcomes such as drinking smoking and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment using the standard behavioral genetics variance decomposition i find that shared family environment explains 14 percent of the variation in educational attainment 35 percent ofthe variation in college selectivity and 33 percent of the variation in drinking behavior

parental job loss and children s school performance using norwegian register data we estimate how children s school performance is affected by their parents exposure to plant closure our estimates suggest that paternal job loss has a negative effect on children s school performance in contrast maternal job loss is associated with a non significant increase in school performance importantly the negative effect of paternal job loss appears largely unrelated to its effect on father s income father s employment status a shift in maternal time towards employment marital dissolution and residential relocation a disparate effect of job loss across fathers and mothers is however consistent with recent empirical studies documenting that the mental distress experienced by displaced workers is generally more severe for men than women

an evaluation of the installation of solar photovoltaic in residential houses in malaysia past present and future abstract this paper examines solar energy development in malaysia particularly in relation to the installation of solar photovoltaic pv in residential houses it analyzes the past activities related to solar energy in malaysia in terms of research and developments r ds the implementations used as well as the national policies for the past 20 years which have pushed the installation of pv in the country the feed in tariff fit scheme is discussed showing comparative cost benefit analysis between the pv installation in houses in the united kingdom uk and malaysia and with other investment schemes available in malaysia to investigate the awareness of renewable energy policies and incentives a preliminary survey of the public opinion in malaysia has been carried out and an evaluation of public willingness to invest in the fit scheme by installing the pv on their houses is presented the cost benefit analysis shows that the proposed fit programme is capable of generating good return on investment as compared to the one in the uk but the return is lower than other investment tools the survey suggests that most malaysians are unaware of the government s incentives and policies towards renewable energies and are not willing to invest in the fit scheme

inter generational effect of parental time and its policy implications abstract motivated by the empirical fact that parents with more human capital spend more time teaching and taking care of their children we develop and estimate a theoretical model in which altruistic parents pass their human capital on in two ways goods investment and time investment based on the estimated model we quantitatively assess how the two types of investment affect wage inequality and inter generational mobility using the model to study the impacts of a public policy that taxes income to finance public schooling we find significantly different policy effects in our model than in a model where time investment does not respond endogenously to the policy

tuition fees and equality of university enrolment abstract the relationship between tuition fee changes and the university enrolment of youth by parental income group in canada is investigated comparisons between youth from canadian provinces that increased tuition fees sharply in the 1990s and youth from provinces that instituted fee freezes were integral to identifying the relationship tuition fee increases coincided with reductions in the university enrolment of low income youth but with significantly smaller changes in the university enrolment of other youth the relationships between government funding of universities and cohort size and university enrolments are also analyzed

cohort crowding how resources affect collegiate attainment abstract analyses of college attainment typically focus on factors affecting enrollment demand including the financial attractiveness of a college education and the availability of financial aid while implicitly assuming that resources available per student on the supply side of the market are elastically supplied the higher education market in the united states is dominated by public and non profit production and colleges and universities receive considerable subsidies from state federal and private sources because consumers pay only a fraction of the cost of production changes in demand are unlikely to be accommodated fully by colleges and universities without commensurate increases in non tuition revenue for this reason public investment in higher education plays a crucial role in determining the degrees produced and the supply of college educated workers to the labor market using data covering the last half of the twentieth century we find strong evidence that large cohorts within states have relatively low undergraduate degree attainment reflecting less than perfect elasticity of supply in the higher education market that large cohorts receive lower public subsidies per student in higher education explains this result indicating that resources have large effects on degree production our results suggest that reduced resources per student following from rising cohort size and lower state expenditures are likely to have significant negative effects on the supply of college educated workers entering the labor market

the impact of housing assistance on child outcomes evidence from a randomized housing lottery one long standing motivation for low income housing programs is the possibility that housing affordability and housing conditions generate externalities including on children s behavior and long term life outcomes we take advantage of a randomized housing voucher lottery in chicago in 1997 to examine the longterm impact of housing assistance on a wide variety of child outcomes including schooling health and criminal involvement in contrast to most prior work focusing on families in public housing we focus on families living in unsubsidized private housing at baseline for whom voucher receipt generates large changes in both housing and nonhousing consumption we find that the receipt of housing assistance has little if any impact on neighborhood or school quality or on a wide

the demand for quality in child care we estimate a model of demand for quality related attributes of child care group size staff child ratio and provider training the model is estimated jointly with equations for mode expenditure on and hours of care and the mother s labor supply the results show that a lower price of child care in a particular mode leads to substitution toward that mode and an increase in the use of paid child care a decrease in the price of care causes an increase in hours of care demanded and a decrease in the demand for qualityrelated attributes income effects on demand for quality are small

intergenerational effects of welfare reform on educational attainment abstractthis paper estimates the impact of the fundamental welfare reforms of the 1990s on the educational attainment of children in low income families using administrative records and individual survey data spanning the early 1990s to the mid 2000s we find large positive effects of welfare reform income gaps in school enrollment and dropout rates narrow by more than 20 percent unlike the significant and growing relative gains in the years following state welfare reforms we find no evidence of relative gains for low income adolescents in the years preceding the reforms these findings are robust under alternative definitions of the treatment and control groups and after controlling for contemporaneous economic and policy changes

family income and child outcomes in canada a positive relationship between income and child outcomes has been observed in data from numerous countries a key question concerns the extent to which this association represents a causal relationship as opposed to unobserved heterogeneity we use data from the national longitudinal survey of children and youth to implement a series of empirical strategies for estimating the existence and size of the effect of income on three measures of cognition our results indicate that the effect of income on these outcomes may well be positive but that it is likely to be smaller than conventional estimates jel classification i10 revenu des familles et comportement des enfants au canada il existe une relation positive entre le revenu des familles et les comportements des enfants dans les releves statistiques de nombreux pays une question centrale demeure jusqu a quel point est ce que cette correlation represente une relation causale par opposition a du bruit les auteurs utilisent l enquete longitudinale nationale sur les enfants et les jeunes elnej pour mettre en place une serie de strategies empiriques pour calibrer l existence et la taille de l effet de revenu sur trois mesures de cognition les resultats montrent que l effet de revenu sur ces comportements peut fort bien etre positif mais qu il est vraisemblablement plus faible que ce que suggerent les evaluations conventionnelles

the intergenerational effects of worker displacement this article uses variation induced by firm closures to explore the intergenerational effects of worker displacement using a canadian panel of administrative data that follows more than 39 000 father son pairs from 1978 to 1999 we find that children whose fathers were displaced have annual earnings about 9 lower than similar children whose fathers did not experience an employment shock they are also more likely to receive unemployment insurance and social assistance the estimates are driven by the experiences of children whose family income was at the bottom of the income distribution

government spending and intergenerational mobility abstract the standard model of intergenerational mobility suggests that holding constant endowments investments in children s human capital increases their future income if true the source of the investment should not matter even though almost all research on intergenerational mobility considers only parental investment much government spending is intended to reduce the investment gap between rich and poor children we assess the relationship between government spending and intergenerational economic mobility using data from the panel study of income dynamics and data on state spending from the u s census of governments we find greater intergenerational mobility in high spending states compared to low spending states two additional findings also suggest that government spending increases intergenerational mobility first the difference in mobility between advantaged and disadvantaged children is smaller in high spending compared to low spending states and second expenditures aimed at low income populations increase the future income of low income but not high income children

the effect of overcrowded housing on children s performance at school this paper provides estimates of the causal effect of living in an overcrowded home on performance at school in france our identification strategy relies on the fact that the size and housing conditions of families vary with the sex composition of the siblings in particular large families in which the two youngest children are by descending age a boy and a girl tend to live less often in overcrowded housing than the other families french parents seem to be more reluctant about bringing up their children in the same room when they are not of the same sex especially when the youngest one is a girl we build on these results to develop several econometric analyses of the effect of overcrowding on schooling outcomes using variables describing the sex composition of the siblings as instrumental variables these different strategies reveal that the very strong statistical relationship between housing conditions and academic failure is plausibly one of cause and effect children in large families perform much less well than children in small families but our iv estimates suggest that this is mostly due to the fact that they live in more overcrowded homes

changes in the wage structure family income and children s education abstract we exploit the changes in the distribution of family income to estimate the effect of parental resources on college education our strategy exploits the fact that families at the bottom of the income distribution were much poorer in the 1990s than they were in the 1970s while the opposite is true for families in the top quartile of the distribution our estimates suggest large effects of family income on enrollments for example we find that a 10 percent increase in family income is associated with a 1 4 percent increase in the probability of attending a four year college

does the birth order affect the cognitive development of a child this article investigates the link between position in the birth order and early scholastic ability using matched mother child data from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 cohort nlsy79 i find that being the first born is beneficial even after controlling for nonlinear effects of family size and child characteristics the verbal ability of first borns is about one tenth of a sd higher than for children in the middle of the birth order there is no evidence that last borns fare better than intermediate children the first born advantage is confirmed by estimates from within family variation models and i argue that the findings are consistent with the resource dilution hypothesis

commodity price shocks and child outcomes the 1990 cocoa crisis in cote d ivoire abstract we look at the drastic cut of the administered cocoa producer price in 1990 cote d ivoire and study to which extent cocoa producers children suffered from this severe aggregate shock in terms of school enrollment labor height stature and morbidity using precrisis 1985 88 and postcrisis 1993 data we propose a difference in difference strategy to identify the causal effect of the cocoa shock on child outcomes whereby we compare children of cocoa producing households and children of other farmers living in the same district or the same village this causal effect is shown to be rather strong for the four child outcomes we examine hence human capital investments are definitely procyclical in this context we also provide evidence of gender bias against young girls with respect to education and health care we finally argue that the difference in difference variations can be interpreted as private income effects likely to derive from tight liquidity constraints

the impact of family income on child achievement evidence from the earned income tax credit using an instrumental variables strategy we estimate the causal effect of income on children s math and reading achievement our identification derives from the large nonlinear changes in the earned income tax credit the largest of these changes increased family income by as much as 20 percent or approximately 2 100 between 1993 and 1997 our baseline estimates imply that a 1 000 increase in income raises combined math and reading test scores by 6 percent of a standard deviation in the short run test gains are larger for children from disadvantaged families and robust to a variety of alternative specifications jel h24 h31 i21 i38 j13

health insurance eligibility utilization of medical care and child health two economists applied data from the current population survey and the national health interview survey and state level data on child mortality to a simulation model of utilization of medical care that varies only with the states legislative environment to examine the utilization of medical care and health effects of medicaid eligibility on low income children the models took into consideration the recent expansions of medicaid to low income children 38 of those ineligible for medicaid in 1984 who became eligible due to changes during 1984 1992 were uninsured between 1984 and 1992 expansions of the medicaid program increased the proportion of children eligible for medicaid almost two fold 16 1 vs 31 2 yet coverage rates were always lower than eligibility rates 13 2 vs 16 1 in 1984 and 20 3 vs 31 2 in 1992 and the increase in coverage rates was only about 50 of the increase in eligibility rates during 1984 1992 the probability that a child was eligible for medicaid increased the probability of health insurance coverage by 29 77 when the model considered bias in variables e g a recession in a state the take up rate was only 22 73 nevertheless medicaid markedly increased use of medical care for example eligibility for medicaid increased the likelihood of making a visit to a physicians office in the last two weeks by about 50 it also increased the probability of a child visiting the hospital suggesting inefficiency in the way that providers deliver care to medicaid enrollees medicaid eligibility had a significant effect on reducing child mortality the 15 1 percentage point increase in eligibility during 1984 1992 reduced child mortality by 4 5 when the researchers examined parent assessed subjective health measures medicaid eligibility had no effect on child health medicaid eligibility reduced race and education based disparities in the number of visits and racial differences in mortality yet it may actually intensify current disparities in health care delivery site