changing inequality in markets for workplace amenities among u s industries where earnings rose relatively from 1979 1995 injury rates declined relatively obversely during the 1960s narrowing interindustry wage differentials were associated with an increase in the relative risk of injury in high wage industries evidence from the nlsy suggests similar results among full time workers between 1988 and 1996 between 1973 and 1991 the disamenity of evening night work was increasingly borne by low wage male workers changing earnings inequality has understated changing inequality in the returns to work assuming skill neutral changes in the cost of reducing these disamenities estimates of the implied income elasticities of demand for amenities are well above unity

the role of application assistance and information in college decisions results from the h r block fafsa experiment growing concerns about low awareness and take up rates for government support programs like college financial aid have spurred calls to simplify the application process and enhance visibility we present results from a randomized field experiment in which low income individuals receiving tax preparation help were also offered immediate assistance and a streamlined process to complete the free application for federal student aid fafsa for themselves or their children treated participants were also provided with aid estimates that were compared against tuition cost amounts for nearby colleges the combined assistance and information treatment substantially increased fafsa submissions and ultimately the likelihood of college attendance persistence and aid receipt in particular high school seniors whose parents received the treatment were 8 percentage points more likely to have completed two years of college going from 28 to 36 during the first three years following the experiment families who received aid information but no assistance with the fafsa did not experience improved outcomes the findings suggest many other opportunities for using personal assistance to increase participation in programs that require filling out forms to become eligible jel codes i2 h4 j24 copyright 2012 oxford university press

maternal education home environments and the development of children and adolescents we study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children s cognitive achievement behavioral problems grade repetition and obesity we address endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting with variation in schooling costs when the mother grew up using matched data from the female participants of the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 nlsy79 and their children we can control for mother s ability and family background factors our results show substantial intergenerational returns to education for children aged 7 8 for example our iv results indicate that an additional year of mother s schooling increases the child s performance on a standardized math test by almost 0 1 of a standard deviation and reduces the incidence of behavioral problems our data set allows us to study a large array of channels which may transmit the effect of maternal education to the child including family environment and parental investments at different ages of the child we find that income effects delayed childbearing and assortative mating are likely to be important and we show that maternal education leads to substantial differences in maternal labor supply we investigate heterogeneity in returns and we present results focusing both on very early stages in the child s life as well as adolescent outcomes we present a falsification exercise to support the validity of our instruments and our results are found to be robust in a sensitivity analysis we discuss policy implications and relate our findings to intergenerational mobility

are there civic returns to education abstract the hypothesized effects of educational attainment on adult civic engagement and attitudes provide some of the most important justifications for government intervention in the market for education in this study i present evidence on whether these externalities exist i assess and implement two strategies for identifying the effects of educational attainment one is based on the availability of junior and community colleges the other on changes in teen exposure to child labor laws the results suggest that educational attainment has large and statistically significant effects on subsequent voter participation and support for free speech i also find that additional schooling appears to increase the quality of civic knowledge as measured by the frequency of newspaper readership

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

health behavior health knowledge and schooling the positive correlation between schooling and good health is well documented one explanation is that schooling helps people choose healthier life styles by improving their knowledge of the relationship between health behaviors and health outcomes that is schooling improves the household s allocative efficiency in producing health this empirical study uses direct measures of health knowledge to test this explanation part of the relationship between schooling and the consumption of cigarettes alcohol and exercise is explained by differences in health knowledge however most of schooling s effects on health behavior remain after differences in knowledge are controlled for

social skills from mass higher education rethinking the company based initial training paradigm ulis is an essay in the literal sense that it is tentative i wantto argue in it that we need to rethink the relationship in the uk between education initial vocational training and the functioning of labour markets this is because the reality of dra matic recent and on going changes in post 16 education towards sharply increasingpost 16 stay ing on and university participation rates and in skills requirements of companies in the uk towards broad social and organizational skills bears little relation to the focus of labour market policy and of much academic debate on initial training particularly for 16and 17 year old school leavers the basic mistake in uk policy development has been a failure to understand that the uk does not have the underlying socio eco n mic institutions which both germany and japan have and which are needed for an effective system of company based initial training nor for that matter does the us and it is suggested here that we should look closely at america as an economy with similar underlying socio economic institu tions to our own if we are to understand recent changes in uk education and labour maiket pat te ns what the uk has to learn from the us is the

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

the effect of education on adult mortality and health evidence from britain there is a strong positive and well documented correlation between education and health outcomes in this paper we attempt to understand to what extent this relationship is causal our approach exploits two changes to british compulsory schooling laws that generated sharp across cohort differences in educational attainment using regression discontinuity methods we find the reforms did not affect health although the reforms impacted educational attainment and wages our results suggest caution as to the likely health returns to educational interventions focused on increasing educational attainment among those at risk of dropping out of high school a target of recent health policy efforts jel h52 i12 i21 i28

financial complexity and trade what are the implications on trading activity if investors are not sophisticated enough to understand and evaluate trades that have a complex payoff structure can frictions generated by this type of financial complexity be so severe that they lead to a complete market freeze like that of the recent financial crisis starting from an allocation that is not pareto optimal we find that whether complexity impedes trade depends on how investors perceive risk and uncertainty for smooth convex preferences such as subjective expected utility complexity cannot halt trade even in the extreme case where each investor is so unsophisticated that he can only trade up to one arrow debreu security without being able to combine two or more in order to construct a complex trade however for non smooth preferences which allow for kinked indifference curves such as maxmin expected utility complexity can completely shut down trade

the intergenerational effects of compulsory schooling this article attempts to improve our understanding of the causal processes that contribute to intergenerational immobility by exploiting historical changes in compulsory schooling laws that affected the educational attainment of parents without affecting their innate abilities or endowments we examine the influence of parental compulsory schooling on children s grade for age using the 1960 1970 and 1980 u s censuses our estimates indicate that a 1 year increase in the education of either parent reduces the probability that a child repeats a grade by between 2 and 4 percentage points

what does human capital do a review of goldin and katz s the race between education and technology goldin and katz s the race between education and technology is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the u s labor market over the twentieth century this essay reviews the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of this work and documents the success of goldin and katz s frame work in accounting for numerous broad labor market trends the essay also considers areas where the framework falls short in explaining several key labor market puzzles of recent decades and argues that these shortcomings can potentially be overcome by relaxing the implicit equivalence drawn between workers skills and their job tasks in the conceptual framework on which goldin and katz build the essay argues that allowing for a richer set of interactions between skills and technologies in accomplish ing job tasks both augments and refines the predictions of goldin and katz s approach and suggests an even more important role for human capital in economic growth than indicated by their analysis jel i20 j24 j31 o30

measuring heterogeneity in the returns to education using an education reform abstract in this paper we explore the impact of a mandatory education reform as well as pre reform availability of schools above the mandatory level on educational attainment and returns to education in norway we contribute to the existing literature by focusing on the heterogeneity of the impact of reforms our results indicate that increased compulsory education from seven to nine years increased the general level of education beyond the compulsory education we also find that the effect of family background on educational attainment was weaker after the reform the average treatment effect on returns to education is surprisingly high for education of intermediate duration this means that increasing the general level of education potentially generates high returns in the form of wages we also find that the effect of treatment on the treated on the returns to education is 1 4 percentage points higher than the average treatment effect

the relationship between education and adult mortality in the united states prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health this paper examines whether education has a causal impact on health i follow synthetic cohorts using successive u s censuses to estimate the impact of educational attainment on mortality rates i use compulsory education laws from 1915 to 1939 as instruments for education the results suggest that education has a causal impact on mortality and that this effect is perhaps larger than has been previously estimated in the literature copyright 2005 wiley blackwell

does education improve citizenship evidence from the united states and the united kingdom abstract many studies document an association between schooling and civic participation but none credibly investigate causal links we explore the effect of extra schooling induced through compulsory schooling laws on the likelihood of becoming politically involved in the united states and the united kingdom we find that educational attainment is related to several measures of political interest and involvement in both countries we find a strong and robust relationship between education and voting for the united states but not for the united kingdom our us results approach the uk findings when conditioning on registration possibly indicating that registration rules present a barrier to participation

what will my account really be worth experimental evidence on how retirement income projections affect saving abstract many investment companies have begun providing their defined contribution pension participants with individualized retirement income projections the u s congress is currently considering whether to require them all to do so evidence on the potential impact is scant though a large body of economic research suggests that individuals are not currently making optimal retirement saving decisions through a field experiment we measure how provision of retirement income projections along with enrollment information affects individuals contributions to employer sponsored retirement accounts we find that the intervention boosted annual contributions to employer retirement accounts by 85 equivalent to 3 6 of the average contribution level or 0 15 of average salary relative to those who received no intervention in addition randomly assigned assumptions regarding retirement age investment returns and hypothetical contribution amounts were used to generate the projections and were found to have significant impacts on saving behavior this finding suggests that care is warranted in the design and communication of projections

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

from the cradle to the labor market the effect of birth weight on adult outcomes lower birth weight babies have worse outcomes both short run in terms of one year mortality rates and longer run in terms of educational attainment and earnings however recent research has called into question whether birth weight itself is important or whether it simply reflects other hard to measure characteristics by applying within twin techniques using an unusually rich dataset from norway we examine the effects of birth weight on both short run and long run outcomes for the same cohorts we find that birth weight does matter despite short run twin fixed effects estimates that are much smaller than ols estimates the effects on longer run outcomes such as adult height iq earnings and education are significant and similar in magnitude to ols estimates

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

schooling data technological diffusion and the neoclassical model this research was supported by the spanish ministry of science and technology through cicyt grants sec99 1189 and sec99 0820 and by the spanish ministry of finance and fundacion caixa galicia

educational policies in a long run perspective in this paper we study the effects of educational reforms on school attainment we construct a dataset of relevant reforms that occurred at the national level over the last century and match individual information from 24 european countries to the most likely set up faced when individual educational choices were undertaken our identification strategy relies on temporal and geographical variations in the institutional arrangements controlling for time country fixed effects as well as for country specific time trend by characterizing each group of reforms for their impact on mean years of education educational inequality and intergenerational persistence we show an ideal policy menu which has been available to policymakers we distinguish between groups of policies that are either inclusive or selective depending on their diminishing or augmenting impact on inequality and persistence finally we correlate these reform measures to political coalitions prevailing in parliament finding support for the idea that left wing parties support reforms that are inclusive while right wing parties prefer selective ones michela braga daniele checchi and elena meschi

why the apple doesn t fall far understanding intergenerational transmission of human capital parents with higher education levels have children with higher education levels however is this because parental education actually changes the outcomes of children suggesting an important spillover of education policies or is it merely that more able individuals who have higher education also have more able children this paper proposes to answer this question with a unique dataset from norway using the reform of the education system that was implemented in different municipalities at different times in the 1960s as an instrument for parental education we find little evidence of a causal relationship between parents education and children s education despite significant ols relationships we find 2sls estimates that are consistently lower than the ols estimates with the only statistically significant effect being a positive relationship between mother s education and son s education these findings suggest that the high correlations between parents and children s education are due primarily to family characteristics and inherited ability and not education spillovers

concession stands how mining investments incite protest in africa foreign investment in africa s mineral resources has increased dramatically this paper addresses three questions raised by this trend do commercial mining investments increase the likelihood of social or armed conflict if so when are these disputes most prevalent and finally what mechanisms help explain these conflicts i show first that mining has contrasting effects on social and armed conflict while the probability of protests or riots increases roughly doubling after mining starts there is no increase in rebel activity second i show that the probability of social conflict rises with plausibly exogenous increases in world commodity prices finally i compile additional geo spatial and survey data to explore potential mechanisms including reporting bias environmental harm in migration inequality and governance finding little evidence consistent with these accounts i develop an explanation related to incomplete information a common cause of conflict in industrial and international relations this mechanism rationalizes why mining induces protest why these conflicts are exacerbated by rising prices and why transparency dampens the relationship between prices and protest

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

investment in schooling and the marriage market we present a model in which investment in schooling generates two kinds of returns the labor market return resulting from higher wages and a marriagemarket return defined as the impact of schooling on the marital surplus share one can extract men and women may have different incentives to invest in schooling because of different market wages or household roles this asymmetry can yield a mixed equilibrium with some educated individuals marrying uneducated spouses when the labor market returns to schooling rises home production demands less time and the traditional spousal labor division norms weaken more women may invest in schooling than men

the compelling effects of compulsory schooling evidence from canada abstract compulsory school laws have existed for more than a hundred years and policies to mandate further education continue to be discussed the implications of these laws however are not well understood historical changes to compulsory schooling in canada permit an examination of their effects on would be dropouts under very different circumstances than those during changes in other countries mandating education substantially increased adult income and substantially decreased the likelihood of being below the low income cut off unemployed and in a manual occupation these findings suggest significant gains from this legislation which seem unlikely offset by the costs incurred while having to remain in school jel classification i20 i28

a dynamic analysis of human welfare in a warming planet anthropogenic greenhouse gas ghg emissions have caused atmospheric concentrations with no precedents in the last half a million years inducing serious uncertainties about future climates and their effects on human welfare recent climate science supports the view that the climate stabilization will require very low ghg emissions in the future we ask is a path of low emissions compatible with sustainable levels of human welfare with steady growth in human quality of life addressing these questions requires both defining welfare criteria and empirically estimating the possible paths of the economy we specify and calibrate a dynamic model with four intertemporal links education physical capital knowledge and the environment in line with nordhaus 2008a and with the stern review 2007 we assume that ghg emissions allow increased production while a higher stock of atmospheric carbon decreases production our index of human welfare which we call quality of life quol emphasizes education knowledge and the environment affected by greenhouse gas emissions in addition to consumption and leisure thus we avoid a consumptionist fallacy that welfare depends only on commodity consumption and perhaps leisure we reject discounted utilitarianism as a normative criterion and consider two alternatives the first is an intergenerational maximin criterion which maximizes the quality of life of the first generation subject to maintaining at least that level for all successive generations the second is human development optimization that seeks the maximization of the quol of the first generation subject to achieving a given constant rate of growth in all subsequent generations hence our analysis focuses on a human notion of sustainability as opposed to the conventional green sustainability limited to keeping the quality of the environment constant because our dynamic optimization programs defy explicit analytical solutions our approach has been computational as a benchmark we consider a simple model with physical and human capital for which we prove a turnpike theorem we then devise a computational algorithm inspired by the turnpike property to construct feasible although not necessarily optimal paths in the more complex and realistic model our analysis indicates that with ghg emission paths entailing very low emissions in the future positive rates of growth in quol are possible while the first generation experiences a quol higher than the historical reference level we also observe a tradeoff between the quality of life of the first generation and the rate of growth in the quality of life yet generation 1 s sacrifice for the sake of a higher growth rate appears to be small the paths that we compute involve investments in knowledge at noticeably higher levels than in the past

mechanism experiments and policy evaluations randomized controlled trials are increasingly used to evaluate policies how can we make these experiments as useful as possible for policy purposes we argue greater use should be made of experiments that identify the behavioral mechanisms that are central to clearly specified policy questions what we call mechanism experiments these types of experiments can be of great policy value even if the intervention that is tested or its setting does not correspond exactly to any realistic policy option

student loans do college students borrow too much or not enough total student loan debt rose to over 800 billion in june 2010 overtaking total credit card debt outstanding for the first time by the time this article sees print the continually updated student loan debt clock will show an accumulated total of roughly 1 trillion borrowing to finance educational expenditures has been increasing more than quadrupling in real dollars since the early 1990s the sheer magnitude of these figures has led to increased public commentary on the level of student borrowing the authors move the discussion of student loans away from anecdote by establishing a framework for considering the use of student loans in the optimal financing of collegiate investments from a financial perspective enrolling in college is equivalent to signing up for a lottery with large expected gains indeed the figures presented here suggest that college is on average a better investment today than it was a generation ago but it is also a lottery with significant probabilities of both larger positive and smaller or even negative returns the authors look to available albeit limited evidence to assess which types of students are likely to be borrowing too much or too little

the effect of education on crime evidence from prison inmates arrests and self reports we estimate the effect of high school graduation on participation in criminal activity accounting for endogeneity of schooling we begin by analyzing the effect of high school graduation on incarceration using census data instrumental variable estimates using changes in state compulsory attendance laws as an instrument for high school graduation uncover a significant reduction in incarceration for both blacks and whites when estimating the impact of high school graduation only ols and iv estimators estimate different weighted sums of the impact of each schooling progression on the probability of incarceration we clarify the relationship between ols and iv estimates and show that the weights placed on the impact of each schooling progression can explain differences in the estimates overall the estimates suggest that completing high school reduces the probability of incarceration by about 76 percentage points for whites and 3 4 percentage points for blacks we corroborate these findings using fbi data on arrests that distinguish among different types of crimes the biggest impacts of graduation are associated with murder assault and motor vehicle theft we also examine the effect of drop out on self reported crime in the nlsy and find that our estimates for imprisonment and arrest are caused by changes in criminal behavior and not educational differences in the probability of arrest or incarceration conditional on crime we estimate that the externality of education is about 14 26 of the private return to schooling suggesting that a significant part of the social return to education comes in the form of externalities from crime reduction

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

intergenerational income mobility among daughters new evidence on daughters intergenerational mobility in a framework that encompasses women not in the labor force using broader measures of economic status than just the women s own earnings is presented and the role of husbands earnings is highlighted a parallel analysis of sons mobility is performed intergenerational transmission of income status may be weaker for daughters than for sons but is still quite substantial assortative mating is an important element in the intergenerational transmission process

educational reform ability and family background in this paper we evaluate the impact of a major school reform that took place in the 1950s in sweden on educational attainment and earnings the reform which has many common elements with reforms in other european countries including the uk consisted of increasing compulsor schooling imposing a national curriculum and abolishing selection by ability into academic and non academic streams at the age of 12 comprehensive school reform our data combines survey data with administrative sources we find that the reform increased both the educational attainment and the earnings of children whose fathers had just compulsory education however the earnings of those with educated parents declined possibly because of a dilution of quality at the top end of the education levels the overall effect of the reform was however positive

estimating average and local average treatment effects of education when compulsory schooling laws really matter the change to the minimum school leaving age in the united kingdom from 14 to 15 had a powerful and immediate effect that redirected almost half the population of 14 year olds in the mid twentieth century to stay in school for one more year the magnitude of this impact provides a rare opportunity to a estimate local average treatment effects late of high school that come close to population average treatment effects ate and b estimate returns to education using a regression discontinuity design instead of previous estimates that rely on difference in differences methodology or relatively weak instruments comparing late estimates for the united states and canada where very few students were affected by compulsory school laws to the united kingdom estimates provides a test as to whether instrumental variables iv returns to schooling often exceed ordinary least squares ols because gains are high only for small and peculiar groups among the more general population i find instead that the benefits from compulsory schooling are very large whether these laws have an impact on a majority or minority of those exposed

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

high school completion and future youth unemployment new evidence from high school and beyond in this paper i provide new evidence from high school and beyond hsb on the effects of compulsory attendance on high school completion and future youth unemployment i develop bayesian estimation approaches to the simultaneous equation model with ordered probit and two limit censored regression and the bivariate duration model accounting for the heterogeneity in returns to education and the nonlinearity in the effects of compulsory attendance i find substantial variability in returns to education across schools and evidence of diminishing marginal effects of compulsory attendance on high school completion the simulation results suggest that increasing the compulsory attendance age raises the probability of completing high school and reduces the proportion of time the individuals are unemployed these effects are much more pronounced for disadvantaged students but less pronounced for advantaged students suggesting the potential effects of compulsory attendance on reducing the inequality in education and employment copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd