where has all the bias gone detecting gender bias in the intrahousehold allocation of educational expenditure abstract the reliability of the household consumption based engel curve methodology in detecting gender bias has been called into question because it has generally failed to confirm bias even where it exists this article seeks to find explanations for this failure by exploiting a data set that has educational expenditure information at the individual level and also by aggregation at the household level i find that in the basic education age groups the discriminatory mechanism in education is via differential enrollment rates for boys and girls education expenditure conditional on enrollment is equal for boys and girls the engel curve method fails for two reasons first it models a single equation for the two stage process second even when we make individual and household level expenditure equations as similar as possible the household level equation still fails to pick up gender bias in about one third of the cases where the individual level equation shows significant bias this article

dynamic market models in industrial organization abstract this paper surveys empirical work done on dynamic models of market performance these fall into one of two categories structural models which model how market structure and performance change in response to entry and reduced form models which describe change regardless of how it is brought about a typical example of each type of model is chosen from the literature and simulations are used to draw out the implications of the estimated coefficients both models depict the competitive process in the us economy as being extremely slow

entry in greek manufacturing industry athens vs the rest of greece the paper reports an attempt to estimate the determinants of entry in greek manufacturing industry in the 1984 87 period and to identify the differences between locatio nal entry preferences entry in athens is found to be hesitant with respect to factors such as profitability and increased competition conversely entry in the rest of the country is strongly related to expected profits and safe markets negatively affected by relative labour costs and indifferent to international competition threats the healthier approach of regional entry is enhancing regional development prospects and partly justifies the strict regional policies of the 1980s

new firm startups technology and macroeconomic fluctuations new firm startup activity is examined within a framework pooling a cross section of 117 industries over six time periods between 1976 and 1986 a model is introduced relating startup activity both to elements of the business cycle in particular the macroeconomic growth rate the cost of capital and the unemployment rate and to industry specific characteristics especially the technological conditions underlying the industry the pooled cross section regression results suggest that macroeconomic fluctuations as well as industry specific elements contribute to startup activity while new firm startups respond positively to macroeconomic growth they are promoted by a low cost of capital and high unemployment rate a somewhat surprising result is that new firm startups are not apparently deterred in capital intensive industries and where r d expenditures play an important role the empirical results suggest that new firms may be able to overcome their inherent size and experience disadvantages in such markets through exploiting university research and pursuing innovative activity

the impact of school lunches on primary school enrollment evidence from india s midday meal scheme at the end of 2001 the indian supreme court issued a directive ordering states to institute school lunches known locally as midday meals in government primary schools in this paper we provide a large scale assessment of the enrollment effects of india s midday meal scheme which offers warm lunches free of cost to 120 million primary school children across india and is the largest school feeding program in the world to isolate the causal effect of the policy we make use of its staggered implementation across indian states in government but not private schools using a panel dataset of more than 420 000 schools observed annually from 2002 to 2004 we find that midday meals result in substantial increases in primary school enrollment driven by early primary school responses to the program our results are robust to a wide range of specification tests

social divisions in school participation and attainment in india 1983 2004 this study documents the size and nature of hindu muslim and boy girl gaps in children s school participation and attainments in india individual level data from two successive rounds of the national sample survey suggest that considerable progress has been made in decreasing the hindu muslim gap nonetheless the gap remains sizable even after controlling for numerous socio economic and parental covariates and the muslim educational disadvantage in india today is greater than that experienced by girls and scheduled caste hindu children a gender gap still appears within as well as between communities though it is smaller within muslim communities while differences in gender and other demographic and socio economic covariates have recently become more important in explaining the hindu muslim gap those differences altogether explain only 25 percent to 45 percent of the observed schooling gap

the progress of school education in india this paper provides an overview of school education in india first it places india s educational achievements in international perspective particularly against countries with which it is now increasingly compared especially china second the paper examines schooling access in terms of enrolment and school attendance rates and schooling quality in terms of literacy rates learning achievement levels school resources and teacher inputs third the paper investigates the role of private schooling in india examining the extent of growth of private schooling and surveying evidence on the relative effectiveness and unit costs of private and public schools last the paper discusses some major public education initiatives the concluding section suggests a future research agenda and appeals for rigorous evaluation of the impacts and costs of the numerous existing educational interventions in order to learn about their relative cost effectiveness for evidence based policy making

diversification market growth and concentration in u s manufacturing in this paper i report the results of an empirical investigation of the sources of expansion in secondary industries by diversified firms and the influence of that expansion on changes in seller concentration during the period from 1972 to 1977 interest in the issue arises from long lived public policy arguments over the effects of conglomerate diversification and the expected results of restrictions on conglomerate mergers despite the interest data weaknesses have restricted both the number of statistical studies of the issue and their results i use census data to test several distinct hypotheses generated by past studies the results indicate that diversification is directed toward industries of high growth and profits and they also provide support for a view first advanced by charles berry that diversification into an industry is associated with declining concentration in industries of initially

reconsidering gender bias in intrahousehold allocation in india abstract finding evidence of gender discrimination among children in the intrahousehold allocation of goods has often proven to be difficult this article uses data on education expenditures in india to test whether data aggregation data reliability and the statistical method used help explain this pattern results suggest that discrimination against girls is increasing in age and robust to the statistical method and the expenditure measure at the all india level although state level results are more sensitive i find that data aggregation and statistical method are important factors in detecting gender bias while data reliability does not seem to play a major role

entry into regulated monopoly markets the development of a competitive fringe in the local telephone industry abstract incumbent firms operating in today s local telephone industry are beginning to face competition from new entrants using the dominant firm competitive fringe framework and a recently constructed panel data set of local telephone markets this paper provides an empirical analysis of the competitive transition underway in the u s local telephone industry of particular interest is the differential impact of economic regulation on the development of fringe competition in flocal telephone markets empirical results reveal that local telephone markets with price cap regulation have witnessed less net fringe entry and subsequently contain smaller competitive fringes during the time period studied these findings imply that the widespread adoption of price cap regulation by state public utility commissions has contributed to the slow development of local telephone competition to reconcile this surprising conclusion a political economy explanation that details how state regulators have benefited from

prices technology and farm size in this paper we construct and empirically test a theory of the agricultural firm which explains the long term growth in farm size in the united states typically the u s farm unit is a family enterprise consequently the ratio of the opportunity cost of farm labor to the price of machinery services determines the size of the farm operation by influencing the machine labor ratio applying the model to u s data we explain virtually all of the growth in the machine labor ratio and in farm size over the 1930 70 period by changes in relative factor prices without reference to technological change or economies of scale

the relationship between firm growth size and age estimates for 100 manufacturing industries this study uses a sample of all firms operating in 100 manufacturing industries to examine some aspects of firm dynamics it finds that firm growth the variability of firm growth and the probability that a firm will fail decrease with firm age it also finds that firm growth decreases at a diminishing rate with firm size even after controlling for the exit of slow growing firms from the sample gibrat s law therefore fails although the severity of the failure decreases with firm size copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

india s development in the era of growth the recent growth pattern of india is set in the context of the parallel experience of china the experience of poverty reduction is reviewed and a number of papers illuminating india s development are introduced

the failure of input based schooling policies in an effort to improve the quality of schools governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them by concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement this paper provides a review of the us and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies it then contrasts the impact of resources with that of variations in teacher quality that are not systematically related to school resources finally alternative performance incentive policies are described

remember when it rained schooling responses to shocks in india abstract despite long standing international agreements like the millennium development goals 264 million children in developing countries are not enrolled in school and children in rural areas remain twice as likely to be out of school as children in urban areas one potential explanation for this pattern is that children s education in rural areas is vulnerable to weather shocks but there is no consensus about whether rainfall shocks help or harm school enrollment in the existing literature this paper explores whether changes in the relationship between rainfall shocks and schooling outcomes over time can explain the different results in the literature by using household survey data from india across three decades my study finds that adverse rainfall shocks have an increasingly stronger positive impact on school enrollment over time whereas enrollment is increasingly falling after positive rainfall shocks this effect is stronger for girls than for boys more pronounced for older children and is consistent with an increase in the importance of opportunity costs of a child s time in more recent years children may have to drop out of school when employment opportunities are more readily available after a positive rainfall shock but are able to go to school when jobs are scarce these results offer a potential explanation for the different results in the literature where studies on countries with higher economic development tend to find results consistent with an opportunity cost story whereas this is not the case for studies on countries with a lower level of development the results suggest that policymakers need to pay close attention to the obstacles faced by girls and older children to make access to education universal and should develop policy tools that incentivize households to send their children to school even when employment opportunities are readily available

what explains the stagnation of female labor force participation in urban india female labor force participation rates in urban india between 1987 and 2011 are surprisingly low and have stagnated since the late 1980s despite rising growth fertility decline and rising wages and education levels married women s labor force participation hovered around 18 percent analysis of five large cross sectional micro surveys shows that a combination of supply and demand effects have contributed to this stagnation the main supply side factors are rising household incomes and husband s education as well as the falling selectivity of highly educated women on the demand side the sectors that draw in female workers have expanded least so that changes in the sectoral structure of employment alone would have actually led to declining participation rates

entry and exit on the competitive fringe microeconomic theories of industry evolution reserve key roles for the entry and exit of firms competitive models of industry supply often assume that individual firms have ushaped long run average cost curves in consequence an industry s output adjustment in movement from one long run equilibrium to another is entirely accomplished through the entry and exit of firms rather than through changes in long run equilibrium output of individual firms in empirical applications the speed of movement to new equilibrium levels of output and price measured by the time it takes for profits to return to competitive levels following a demand shock clearly depends upon the ease of entry and exit however the simplest competitive models have a clear theoretical weakness abundant evidence against u shaped long run average cost curves precludes a simple identification of entry with industry expansion and exit with industry contraction expansion of industry supply can be met either by incumbents or entrants and we have little empirical evidence of the division entry conditions are also a staple of oligopoly and monopoly models potential entry constrains the pricing options open to industry leaders and actual entry of new firms and new products erodes at varying rates the market power of incumbent firms if actual entry responds rapidly to profit opportunities then the persistent exercise of monopoly power will be rare however analyses of monopoly and oligopoly models typically approach entry indirectly by inferring that persistent profit differentials reflect high barriers to entry there are few direct tests of the effects of such barriers on actual entry despite their importance very few empirical studies of entry and exit exist severe data limitations restrict both the number of studies and the scope of extant analyses the research reported in this paper provides measures of entry and exit in 46 food manufacturing industries during the 1976 82 period measures of incidence the number of firms as well as extent the size of firms are provided the analysis also distinguishes between diversified firms and specialist producers entry and exit rates vary considerably across industries and the paper reports the results of statistical analyses that account for industry differences in entry and exit rates by specialist firms

the relevance of standard estimates of rates of return to schooling for education policy a critical assessment abstract this paper examines the accuracy and usefulness of estimated rates of return to schooling based on the standard human capital model of becker and mincer regarding accuracy it investigates whether failure to account for differences in ability and school quality lead to significant biases estimates using ghanaian data confirm this possibility even when accurate estimated rates of return to additional years of schooling may have limited policy implications more useful for governments are rates of return to investments in school quality the paper uses data on cognitive skills to estimate rates of return to three types of school quality improvements

entry industry growth and the microdynamics of industry supply entry is widely discussed but rarely subjected to empirical study this study develops a competitive theory of entry with primary focus on the relationship between entry and industry growth the main ingredients are adjustment costs to firms already in the industry and the distribution of fixed entry cost to potential entrants the theory suggests sufficient conditions under which the entry rate is an increasing convex function of the industry growth rate a regression model correcting for severe heteroscedasticity is applied to data from swedish manufacturing industries the results are consistent with the theoretical prediction for growth and other key variables expected to influence entry significantly

does the labour market explain lower female schooling in india labour market discrimination against women and parental discrimination against daughters are two of the most commonly cited explanations of the gender gap in education in developing countries this study empirically tests the labour market explanation for india using recent household survey data the results reveal substantial omitted family background bias in the estimates of rates of return to education the findings suggest that as well as overall labour market discrimination girls face poorer economic incentives to invest in schooling than boys because they reap lower labour market returns to education than boys

identifying the influencing factors of the sustainable energy transitions in china abstract this paper aims to explore the influencing factors that facilitate sustainable energy transitions in china for this purpose this paper assumes that the impact of the energy transition is from three main factors energy technology innovations the energy market and socio technical regimes which can be subdivided into 11 subfactors to empirically test the proposed hypotheses questionnaire survey data collected from chinese energy enterprises are statistically analysed by structural equation models sems the results show that first energy technology innovations the energy market and socio technical regimes are the major forces in the transition to sustainable energy in china second the effects of the three main factors on the energy transition vary according to 11 different subfactors some subfactors i e innovation strategy innovation factors innovation policy innovation network and new energy competitiveness have very important positive effects on the energy transition some subfactors i e competitiveness of the coal industry customer habits and coal based infrastructure have negative effects on the transition to sustainable energy in china third the influence of the subfactors on the transition performance is diminished as a result of the joint intermediate effects of transition behaviours

the determinants of exit in an open economy in this paper the determinants of exit are investigated for the manufacturing sector of the united states economy which has been subjected to growing international influences the analysis uses united states cross sectional data the results of the exit equation suggest that low profitability declining industry growth and displacement of incumbents by entrants foster exit international influences are also seen to have an impact on u s manufacturing exit specifically imports into an industry have a small effect on exit and protection has little influence in stemming exit

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded