measuring the incentives to learn in colombia using new quantile regression approaches abstract this paper employs newly developed quantile regression techniques to investigate a policy that could differentially affect students performance the colombian vouchers were assigned using lotteries and were renewable as long as the students maintained satisfactory academic progress this second aspect of the program may provide incentives for low attainment students to work harder the evidence supports the hypothesis that incentives could account for the impact of the vouchers including lower repetition rate the effect of the vouchers is largest in the lower tail of the educational attainment distribution a possibility that was conjectured by others but has not yet been confirmed empirically the evidence suggests that the incentive effect of the program increases weak students test scores by at least 0 1 standard deviations roughly the score gain associated to a half year of school learning

effects of a holiday trip on health and quality of life evidence from a natural experiment in south korea abstractwe examine whether having a holiday trip affects an individual s well being namely quality of life health status stress level and health behaviours we use the two stage estimation method to control for endogeneity of a travel experience exploiting a natural experiment of distributing travel vouchers at random among qualified applicants in south korea in 2012 we find that for applicants whose decision to travel is influenced by receiving a voucher a travel experience has no significant effects on the traveller s well being measured 3 12 months later we also find that the ols estimates overstate benefits of a travel

why do different countries choose a different public private mix of educational services we observe a wide range across countries in the percentage of total enrollments that attend private rather than public schools this paper seeks to explain 1 the systematically higher proportion of private enrollments pvt in developing as compared with developed countries at the secondary level and 2 the seemingly random variation across countries within a given level of education and stage of development i argue that the latter is due to differentiated demand and nonprofit supply both of which stem from cultural heterogeneity especially religious heterogeneity in contrast the large pvt at the secondary level in developing countries is hypothesized to stem from limited public spending which creates an excess demand from people who would prefer to use the public schools but are involuntarily excluded and pushed into the private sector the limited public spending on secondary education in turn is modelled as a collective decision which is strongly influenced by the

sustainability and the intergenerational distribution of natural resource entitlements abstract the paper describes an olg economy with a single exhaustible resource that has amenity value the steady states of this economy form a continuum implying path dependency we compare three policy scenarios first a zero extraction policy of enforced conservation that avoids environmental degradation possibly at the expense of intertemporal efficiency second a grandfathering policy that endows the present generations with all resources and that ensures efficiency but cannot prevent a persistent decline in lifetime utility from one generation to the next third a trust fund policy where future generations receive claims for the natural resource of the three only the trust fund ensures efficiency and protects welfare of all generations

equity and educational performance in this paper we review the main issues under discussion in the field of economics of education with a special focus on latin america we seek to organize the debate about educational policies by showing how these policies respond to different models based on different assumptions and hypotheses about how the educational system functions methodological and informational problems make it difficult to test the validity of different policies this would explain the enormous number of studies in the field that conclude with conflicting policy prescriptions we also use data from chile to analyze the importance of the school in educational outcome and to explore the heterogeneous impacts of student and school characteristics on educational achievement the results obtained allow us to conclude that the school plays a very important role in explaining educational achievement we also find that low income students stand to benefit the most from attending a private school however this conclusion is valid for a marginal analysis and does not necessarily apply to a massive reallocation of students among schools

evaluating education programs that have lotteried admission and selective attrition we study the effectiveness of magnet programs in an urban district that ration excess demand by admission lotteries differential attrition arises since students who lose the lottery are more likely to pursue options outside the school district than students who win the lottery when students leave the district important outcome variables are often not observed the treatment effects are not point identified we exploit known quantiles of the outcome distribution to construct informative bounds on treatment effects we find that magnet programs improve behavioral outcomes but have no significant effect on achievement

randomized evaluations of educational programs in developing countries some lessons this paper reviews recent randomized evaluations of educational programs in developing countries including programs to increase school participation to provide educational inputs and to reform education it then extracts some lessons for education policy and for the practice and political economy of randomized evaluations

the effect of school choice on participants evidence from randomized lotteries school choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement to evaluate the impact on participants we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the chicago public schools compared to those students who lose lotteries students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions including peer achievement and attainment levels nonetheless we find little evidence that winning a lottery provides any systematic benefit across a wide variety of traditional academic measures lottery winners do however experience improvements on a subset of nontraditional outcome measures such as self reported disciplinary incidents and arrest rates

borrowing constraints and progress through school evidence from peru this paper investigates the effect of borrowing constraints on the timing of human capital investment in a developing country by looking at how quickly children with different family backgrounds progress through the primary school system in peru the main findings are that children start withdrawing from school earlier as indicated by repetition of grades in households with lower income and durable good holdings and when children are more closely spaced behavior also differs as predicted between children from households that appear to be borrowing constrained and those that appear unconstrained copyright 1994 by mit press

does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in american public education naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation i derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area my results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater tiebout choice have more productive public schools and less private schooling little of the effect of tiebout choice works through its effect on household sorting this finding may be explained by another finding students are equally segregated by school in metropolitan areas with greater and lesser degrees of tiebout choice among districts

school choice stratification and information on school performance lessons from chile in the early 1980s chile implemented a nationwide school choice system under which the government finances education via a flat per student sub sidy or voucher to the public or private school chosen by a family at present about 94 percent of all schools public religious and secular private are voucher funded more than half of urban schools are private and most of these operate as for profit institutions 1 since the early 1990s chile has also publicized information on school performance and increased per pupil expen diture substantially despite these and other reforms chile has found it challenging to improve students learning outcomes 2 hsieh and urquiola find that the country s rel ative performance in international tests did not change much between 1970 and 1999 3 its performance on the 2000 programme for international student assessment pisa is not only much lower than the oecd average but is similar to that of other latin american countries and low relative to countries with similar income per capita

bureaucratic structure and bureaucratic performance in less developed countries abstract we argue that several easily identifiable structural features constitute the key ingredients of effective state bureaucracies and should help to predict ratings of bureaucratic performance competitive salaries internal promotion and career stability and meritocratic recruitment we collect a new dataset on these features for bureaucracies of 35 less developed countries controlling for country income level of education and ethnolinguistic diversity we find that our measure of meritocratic recruitment is a statistically significant determinant of ratings supplied by two of three country risk agencies the importance of competitive salaries and internal promotion and career stability could not be clearly established

private school vouchers and student achievement an evaluation of the milwaukee parental choice program in 1990 wisconsin began providing vouchers to a small number of low income students to attend nonsectarian private schools controlling for individual fixed effects i compare the test scores of students selected to attend a participating private school with those of unsuccessful applicants and other students from the milwaukee public schools i find that students in the milwaukee parental choice program had faster math score gains than but similar reading score gains to the comparison groups the results appear robust to data imputations and sample attrition although these deficiencies of the data should be kept in mind when interpreting the results

demand and supply side determinants of conditional cash transfer program effectiveness summary the programa nacional de becas estudiantiles is a conditional cash transfer program designed to promote human capital accumulation and reduce poverty among argentine youth this study follows a 1999 cohort of students for five years and uses matching methods with a comparison group of students excluded due to quotas to estimate average and marginal program impacts multilevel methods are used to explore the role of program management and execution in explaining variation between schools in student outcomes the results suggest that the becas program improved students attendance and performance in part through program conditions requiring good attendance and academic progress for continued scholarship receipt

effects of public policy on child labor current knowledge gaps and implications for program design many policy instruments can be used to address or affect child labor even if they are implemented to achieve other objectives from a theoretical point of view however the impact of these policies on child labor is undetermined this paper discusses the evidence generated by rigorous evaluations on the impact on child labor of labor market programs conditional and unconditional transfers and microcredit among other social programs and interventions the study finds that although transfer programs generally tend to reduce child labor other policies risk increasing child labor especially if they affect households productive opportunities the findings also point to knowledge gaps that should be addressed in future evaluations while progress has been made over the past decade there is still much to learn about the effects of public policy on the labor participation of many children in developing countries

long term educational consequences of secondary school vouchers evidence from administrative records in colombia colombia s paces program provided over 125 000 poor children with vouchers that covered the cost of private secondary school the vouchers were renewable annually conditional on adequate academic progress since many vouchers were assigned by lottery program effects can reliably be assessed by comparing lottery winners and losers estimates using administrative records suggest the paces program increases secondary school completion rates by 15 to 20 percent correcting for the greater percentage of lottery winners taking college admissions tests the program increased test scores by two tenths of a standard deviation in the distribution of potential test scores jel i21 j12 i28

do schools matter for high math achievement evidence from the american mathematics competitions this paper uses data from the american mathematics competitions to examine the rates at which different high schools produce high achieving math students there are large differences in the frequency with which students from seemingly similar schools reach high achievement levels the distribution of unexplained school effects includes a thick tail of schools that produce many more high achieving students than is typical several additional analyses suggest that the differences are not primarily due to unobserved differences in student characteristics the differences are persistent across time suggesting that differences in the effectiveness of educational programs are not primarily due to direct peer effects

incentives and the supply of effective charter schools charter school funding is typically set by formulas that provide the same amount for all students regardless of advantage or need in this paper i present evidence that this policy skews the distribution of students served by charters towards low cost populations by influencing where charter schools decide to open and whether they survive i develop and estimate an empirical model of charter school supply and competition to evaluate the effects of funding policies that aim to correct these incentives to do this i recover estimates of cost differentials across student populations by linking charter school effectiveness at raising student achievement with unique records of charter school expenditures gathered from florida i then leverage revealed preference with the exit and location choices of charter schools in an entry game to uncover how charter schools respond to competitive and financial incentives the results indicate that a cost adjusted funding formula would significantly increase the share of charter schools serving disadvantaged students with little reduction in the aggregate effectiveness of the sector

vouchers for private schooling in colombia evidence from a randomized natural experiment colombia used lotteries to distribute vouchers which partially covered the cost of private secondary school for students who maintained satisfactory academic progress three years after the lotteries winners were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished 8th grade primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades and scored 0 2 standard deviations higher on achievement tests there is some evidence that winners worked less than losers and were less likely to marry or cohabit as teenagers benefits to participants likely exceeded the 24 per winner additional cost to the government of supplying vouchers instead of public school places

the world bank of the future even in today s world of burgeoning private capital markets there is much that an organization like the world bank can contribute toward realizing the dream of a world without poverty first of course there is emergency relief at any point of time there are people in the world who are in the middle of an acute crisis and need emergency relief while delivering relief effectively is not easy there is broad agreement that it is a worthwhile goal however the world bank believes rightly that this is not enough as we see it there are at least three important ways it can contribute to the broader project

the economic analysis of international migration a generalization this note examines and extends the following two propositions that finite international factor movements are beneficial to the nationals of the destination country but detrimental to those left behind in the source country and that marginal movements do not have such welfare effects using some newly developed techniques the propositions are found to be valid irrespective of the number of goods and factors if the economy starts from the autarky position when only one factor can flow the gain of the nationals loss of those left behind will be positively dependent upon the amount of inflow outflow however if goods trade and or factor flow are initially present the propositions are in general not true summary in fre excerpt

finishing high school and starting college do catholic schools make a difference in this paper we consider two measures of the relative effectiveness of public and catholic schools finishing high school and starting college these measures are potentially more important indicators of school quality than standardized test scores in light of the economic consequences of obtaining more education single equation estimates suggest that for the typical student attending a catholic high school raises the probability of finishing high school or entering a four year college by thirteen percentage points in bivariate probit models we find almost no evidence that our single equation estimates are subject to selection bias

patience among children abstract recent policy initiatives offer cash payments to children and often their families to induce better health and educational choices these policies implicitly assume that children are especially impatient i e have high discount rates however little is known about the nature of children s patience how it varies across children and whether children can even make rational inter temporal choices this paper examines the inter temporal choices of 5 to 16 year old children in an artefactual field experiment we examine their choices between varying levels of compensation received in 2 or 4 months in the future and in 0 or 2 months in the future we find that children s choices are consistent with hyperbolic discounting boys are less patient than girls older children are more patient and that mathematical achievement test scores private schooling and parent s patience are not correlated with children s patience we also find that although more than 25 of children do not make rational inter temporal choices within a single two period time frame we cannot find variables that explain this behavior other than age and standardized mathematical achievement test scores

social interactions in high school lessons from an earthquake after an earthquake hit southern italy in 1980 young men from certain towns were exempted from compulsory military service we show that the exemption raised high school graduation rates of boys by more than 2 percentage points we do this by comparing high school graduation rates of young exempt men and older nonexempt men from the least damaged areas and men of the same age groups from nearby towns that were not hit by the quake similar comparisons show that graduation rates of young women in the affected areas also increased since in italy women are not subject to the draft the findings suggest the presence of spillover effects jel i21 j13