data watch research data in the economics of education economists have developed a wide variety of policy relevant empirical research projects that address the role of education in promoting individual and social welfare recent examples include studies on the impact of school spending on educational outputs the differences between public and private schools the effects of competition among schools the determinants of teacher quality the impact of unions on schools and the consequences of education finance reform one reason for the proliferation of such empirical studies has been the emergence of high quality micro level data on education in this paper we discuss three broad types of data sets data on educational institutions data on educational outcomes at the individual level and data sets from school reforms and experiments in each section we summarize some of the leading surveys discuss the general availability of the data and identify some but certainly not all of the research that has utilized these data this review is by no means exhaustive we have restricted our attention to analyses of data sets describing primary and secondary education moreover we emphasize data sets that are excellent sources of information but are less wellknown and utilized by economists in particular two obvious omissions from this review are the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy and the panel study of income dynamics psid both are broad based studies that track people over periods of time gathering information both on educational attainment and on many other issues as well

a critical evaluation of rate of return analysis since the development of the concept of human capital schultz i 96 i becker i964 analysis of rates of return has been a standard means of assessing education the conventional way of measuring the return to education is to take a snap shot view of the earnings of people with differing educational experiences it is then possible to calculate the average income earned at different stages of a working life the rate of return to education can then be calculated as the internal discount rate which equates the discounted increment to average earnings to the costs involved in obtaining education both private and social rates of return can be calculated provision of education is often subsidised so that the private cost is lower than the social cost and this will tend to raise the private return above the social return taxation of the private benefit of education offsets this at least partly however ziderman i 973 records that in developed countries private returns normally exceed social returns this pattern is confirmed by psacharopoulos i985 in many cases it is not possible to calculate a full rate of return but one can look at the incremental effect of schooling on earning power thus denison i 967 suggests that in the united states each year of education raises earning power by an average of around 5 6 with the effect tending to rise with the duration of education card and kruger i992 identify effects of similar magnitude it need not be the case that education goes on raising earning power overeducation is clearly possible rudd i990 suggests that in the social sciences education beyond degree level is very damaging to earnings prospects tarsh i992 questions aspects of rudd s study but agrees that higher education graduates do suffer some pay disadvantage rate of return calculations can form the basis for policy decisions in principle social returns to investment in human capital could be compared with those on physical capital so as to give a basis for the allocation of resources between the two types of investment estimates of social rates of return to different types of education could also be used to guide expenditure decisions between these different types however there are many possibly offsetting biases entering into the calculations of rates of return and it is perhaps concern with these that has

effects of family background on earnings and returns to schooling evidence from brazil we investigate whether omitted family background variables are responsible for high returns to schooling estimated in brazil returns to schooling fall by about one third when parental schooling is added to wage equations surprisingly the schooling of fathers in law has larger effects on wages than the schooling of fathers on the basis of a model of assortative mating we interpret this as evidence that parental characteristics represent unobservable worker attributes rather than nepotism in the labor market we conclude that the family background bias in returns to schooling is modest and need not imply returns to family connections

caveat emptor cross country data on education and the labor force abstract cross country data on education and the labor force frequently are used to describe important dimensions of development and to estimate models of economic growth and growth determinants the impact of education and related phenomena this investigation finds 1 there are serious intertemporal and inter country comparability problems with these data that may importantly affect inferences about labor force size trends and productivity and schooling investments and impact 2 data gaps are systematically related to levels of development and literacy and 3 conclusions about the determinants or consequences of development based on constructed data that have been made available to fill data gaps can be seriously misleading

how teachers unions affect education production this study helps to explain why measured school inputs appear to have little effect on student outcomes particularly for cohorts educated since 1960 teachers unionization can explain how public schools simultaneously can have more generous inputs and worse student performance using panel data on united states school districts i identify the effect of teachers unionization through differences in the timing of collective bargaining especially timing determined by the passage of state laws that facilitate teachers unionization i find that teachers unions increase school inputs but reduce productivity sufficiently to have a negative overall effect on student performance union effects are magnified where schools have market power

school expenditures and post schooling earnings evidence from high school and beyond studies based on inputs measured at the state level generally report that school expenditures have substantial effects on students adult wages whereas studies based on less aggregated measures report small effects the author uses wage data from high school and beyond to analyze this discrepancy and to estimate the effect of school expenditures on students post schooling earnings the author finds that the discrepancy in the literature stems mostly from two factors measurement error in district level expenditures and omitted state effects in the earnings regression the author also finds that the effect of school expenditures on earnings is significant but small a 10 increase in school spending would increase students adult wages by only 0 68 copyright 1996 by mit press

why do some households trade so much when agents can learn about their abilities as active investors they rationally trade to learn even if they expect to lose from active investing the model used to develop this insight draws conclusions that are consistent with empirical study of household trading behavior households portfolios underperform passive investments their trading intensity depends on past performance and they begin by trading small sums of money using household data from finland the article estimates a structural model of learning and trading the estimated model shows that investors trade to learn even if they are pessimistic about their abilities as traders it also demonstrates that realized returns are significantly downward biased measures of investors true abilities the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

the impact of primary schooling on economic development a review of the evidence abstract the contribution of primary schooling to economic development is greater than has conventionally been percieved this review of recent research shows that primary schooling increases labour productivity in both urban and rural sectors and that the economic returns to such investment are typically high in addition it reduces fertility improves health and nutrition and promotes other behavioural and attitudinal changes which are helpful to economic development investment strategies which give primary schooling an important place would be more conducive of growth with equity than many alternatives priorities for government and donor policies are indicated as are those for future research

up close and personal investor sophistication and the disposition effect this paper analyzes the trading records of a major discount brokerage house to investigate the disposition effect the tendency to sell stocks that have appreciated in price winners sooner than stocks that trade below the purchase price losers in contrast to previous research that has demonstrated the disposition effect by aggregating across investors our main objective is to identify differences in the disposition bias across individuals and explain this in terms of underlying investor characteristics building on the findings in experimental economics and social psychology we hypothesize that differences in investor literacy about financial markets and trading frequency are responsible in part for the variation in individual disposition effect using demographic and socioeconomic variables as proxies for investor literacy we find empirical evidence that wealthier individuals and individuals employed in professional occupations exhibit a lower disposition effect consistent with experimental economics trading frequency also tends to reduce the disposition effect we provide guidelines for investment advisors regulators and investment communities to utilize our findings and help investors make better decisions

a more general approach to fertility determination in a developing country the importance of biological supply considerations endogenous tastes and unperceived jointness the chicago columbia economic model of fertility emphasizes that both the number quantity and the unobservable quality of children are arguments in the parental preference function focus is generally on demand determinants with fixed tastes biological supply considerations gernerally are deemphasized the major alternative to the chicago columbia model is the pennsylvaina model which emphasizes that parental utility is conditional on norms regarding family size and own consumption empirical tests which shed some light on the relevance of the chicago columbia versus the pennsylvania models for understanding fertility determination in a developing country were conducted on a sample of nicaraguan women aged 15 45 using a more general fertility model epw which encompasses features of both models the estimation of a linear approximation to the fertility determination relation resulting from a generalized model includes 3 sets of variables 1 those included in standard chicago columbia empirical estimates 2 some related to the pennsylvaina models emphasis on natural fertility supply factors and 3 some related to the latter models emphasis on endogenous norms tastes the pennsylvania model with its emphasis on supply tastes and unperceived jointness adds to the understanding of the empirical completed fertility experience in the nicaraguan sample beyond that of the standard chicago columbia model the implications of this basic result are numerous and may be quite important in understanding fertility behavior in developing economies and in devising appropriate related policies 4 examples are given 1 fertility behavior may be more complicated than assumed in conventional chicago columbia analyses 2 results suggest that it may be important to analyze fertility and to formulate policy within a larger framework which integrates fertility and health and nutrition concerns 3 if tastes are important and endogenous as the results suggest they are interpretations of the impact of fertility changes on private welfare are much more ambiguous than often is realised 4 some conventional interpretations of the variables in the standard model may be misleading in understanding and in policy formulation standard chicago columbia variables are womens schooling and household income the full epw pennsylvania model correlates the supply variables parasites therapeutically treatable medically preventable womens age age of 1st cohabitation months breastfed nutrition the taste variables religious or civil marriage religious services month residence birth rate siblings parents present migration currently or in childhood and compares them to the chicago columbia variables outcome on the nicaraguan sample

a model of expertise we study a model in which perfectly informed experts offer advice to a decision maker whose actions affect the welfare of all experts are biased and thus may wish to pull the decision maker in different directions and to different degrees when the decision maker consults only a single expert the expert withholds substantial information from the decision maker we ask whether this situation is improved by having the decision maker sequentially consult two experts we first show that there is no perfect bayesian equilibrium in which full revelation occurs when both experts are biased in the same direction it is never beneficial to consult both in contrast when experts are biased in opposite directions it is always beneficial to consult both indeed in this case full revelation may be induced in an extended debate by introducing the possibility of rebuttal

budget referendums and government spending evidence from swiss cantons vortrag im forschungsseminar der wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen fakultat der universitat basel schweiz am 20 november 2000

public inputs and child schooling in brazil household data from a one percent sample of the 1970 brazilian census are used to analyze the effect of public inputs i e the supply of schooling on children s school attainment in brazil the household data are combined with measures of school availability and quality derived directly from the same census data the measures are based on the number and education of schoolteachers in each of 169 different areas of the country elasticities of demand with respect to these public inputs are estimated these elasticities are high in both rural and urban areas in urban areas the positive effect of public inputs is greater for children from households with poorer and less educated parents in rural areas the positive effect of public inputs is greater if anything for children from households that are relatively better off at least compared to other rural households

educational vouchers when there are peer group effects size matters in this article i study the effects various educational voucher policies have on the sorting of children across schools and the per student expenditure levels at these schools when a child s peer group matters and students differ over income and ability i find that depending on the magnitude of the voucher switching from a public system to a voucher system could entail either welfare gains or losses all voucher policies under consideration lead to greater inequality than the public system however these increases are not monotone in the voucher size several states are considering enacting or have enacted educational voucher plans which entail giving parents money to send their children to private schools both the cities of milwaukee and cleveland have started educational voucher programs during the 1996 1997 school year around 1650 students in milwaukee received vouchers worth 4400 at a total cost of over 7 million in the same year cleveland spent 6 4 million distributing an average voucher of around 2000 to 1996 students other smaller scale voucher plans have sprouted up in school districts around the country proponents claim vouchers give poor parents educational choice for their children and give poor children a chance to succeed where the public schools fail them opponents argue that by funding vouchers resources will be funneled out of the public schools to a small number of students and that the majority of students who are left behind in the public schools will suffer in order to evaluate these proposals a framework is needed that incorporates the factors important to educational outcomes along with family background and educational expenditure many empirical studies have shown that the peer group plays a significant role in educational achievement consider a change in educational policy for example adopting a voucher system such a switch will affect not only

the effect of subsidies in kind on the choice of a college abstract it is possible that government subsidies to higher education disbursed in kind can produce the anomalous result of reducing the consumption of the good being subsidized in this paper i employ individual and college data to estimate the effect of such subsidies on students choices of college quality empirical estimates from a switching regression model with correction for the joint decisions to apply to college and choose the public or private sector are presented predictions from the model suggest that students choose a substantially lower quality public college than they would have chosen in the private sector

social interaction and stock market participation we propose that stock market participation is influenced by social interaction in our model any given social investor finds the market more attractive when more of his peers participate we test this theory using data from the health and retirement study and find that social households those who interact with their neighbors or attend church are substantially more likely to invest in the market than non social households controlling for wealth race education and risk tolerance moreover consistent with a peer effects story the impact of sociability is stronger in states where stock market participation rates are higher

a human capital model of the effects of ability and family background on optimal schooling levels this paper develops a theoretical model of optimal schooling levels where ability and family background are the central explanatory variables we derive schooling demand and supply functions based on individual wealth maximization using nlsy79 data we stratify our sample into one year fte work experience cohorts for 1985 1989 mincer s 1974 overtaking cohort the years of work experience at which individuals observed earnings approximately equal what they would have been based on schooling and ability alone corresponds to 13 fte years of work experience yielding on average a rate of return of 9 6 percent and an average optimal 11 4 years of schooling

labour market impacts of school expenditure and class size evidence from china this study is a first attempt to estimate the impact of school resources on students subsequent labour market earnings in china combining unprecedented school data from the early 1950s to the 199

examining the link between teacher wages and student outcomes the importance of alternative labor market opportunities and non pecuniary variation researchers using cross sectional data have failed to produce systematic evidence that teacher salaries affect student outcomes these studies generally do not account for non pecuniary job attribu

does school quality explain the recent black white wage trend around 1980 the trend toward racial wage convergence essentially stopped i ask whether this break in the convergence trend can be explained by school quality department of education surveys provide earnings data for the high school class of 1972 in 1979 and the class of 1980 in 1986 both linked to data from the respondents high schools by several measures differences between schools attended by blacks and whites were already rather small in the 1970s furthermore i find that measurable school inputs generally have little effect on wages thus school quality explains little of the recent black white wage trend

where has all the education gone cross national data show no association between increases in human capital attributable to the rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker this implies that the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of total factor production is large strongly statistically significant and negative these are on average results derived from imposing a constant coefficient however the development impact of education varied widely across countries and has fallen short of expectations for three possible reasons first the institutional governance environment could have been sufficiently perverse that the accumulation of educational capital lowered economic growth second marginal returns to education could have fallen rapidly as the supply of educated labor expanded while demand remained stagnant third educational quality could have been so low that years of schooling created no human capital the extent and mix of these three phenomena vary from country to country in explaining the actual economic impact of education or the lack thereof

financial speculators underperformance learning self selection and endogenous liquidity we develop an equilibrium model of learning by rational traders to reconcile several empirical regularities cross sectionally most individual speculators lose money large speculators outperform small speculators past performance positively affects subsequent trade intensity most new traders lose money and cease speculation and performance shows persistence learning from trading generates substantial endogenous liquidity reducing bid ask spreads and the impact of exogenous liquidity shocks on asset prices but amplifying the effects of real shocks introducing slightly overconfident traders increases bid ask spreads hurting all traders finally behavioral theories cannot reconcile all of these empirical regularities

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

the influence of private school enrollment on public school performance school choice reform refers to changes that allow parents greater freedom to choose schools for their children school choice reform is contentious because it fundamentally alters the environment in which public and private schools operate and could result in significant changes for both demanders and suppliers of education this article develops a model of public education with imperfect exit to predict how private school enrollment influences performance of public schools empirical evidence from data on all private and public schools in california provides substantial support for the hypothesis that public school test scores are inversely related to private school enrollments and charter school enrollments when private and charter schooling reflects exiting by parents unhappy with local public schools implications regarding how expanded private school choice might influence public school performance in california and elsewhere are discussed

the returns to the quantity and quality of education evidence for men in england and wales until the late 1960s state schooling in england and wales was determined by an ability test of pupils at age 11 which had an effect on both the quantity and quality of education by estimating the relationship between earnings and earlier schooling during a period when school areas changed from selective to non selective education we consider how the returns to the quantity of education are confounded by differences in the quality of schooling and whether the effects of quality are confounded by its correlation with quantity our results confirm recent evidence that returns to education quantity are large and quality effects are small

school quality and returns to education of u s immigrants using the u s labor market as a common point of reference this article investigates the influence of source country school quality on the returns to education of immigrants based on 1980 and 1990 census data we first estimate country of origin specific returns to education results reveal that immigrants from japan and northern europe receive high returns and immigrants from central america receive low returns next we examine the relationship between school quality measures and these returns holding per capita gdp and other factors constant immigrants from countries with lower pupil teacher ratios and greater expenditures per pupil earn higher returns to education

decision processes agency problems and information an economic analysis of capital budgeting procedures corporations use a variety of processes to allocate capital this article studies the benefits and costs of several common budget procedures from the perspective of a model with agency and information problems processes that delegate aspects of the decision to the agent result in too many projects being approved while processes in which the principal retains the right to reject projects cause the agent to strategically distort his information about project quality we show how the choice of a decision process depends on these two costs and specifically on severity of the agency problem quality of information and project risk capital budgeting would be easy in a world without agency and information problems the decision maker would simply calculate a project s irr and compare it to the cost of capital but in the real world those providing the funds for investment must rely on self interested agents to identify projects and provide information on expected returns as a result the quality of capital allocation depends on how effective the decision process is in attenuating agency problems and bringing forth accurate information corporations employ a variety of decision procedures in practice some decisions are fully delegated to division and plant managers typically expansion of an existing plant some decisions require approval of headquarters typically construction of a new plant and other decisions require approval conditional on the nature of the proposal such as when projects requiring more than 1 million go to headquarters while smaller projects can be approved locally 1

delegation versus an approval process and the demand for talent abstract in many organizations a principal uses simple decision rules or decision processes as opposed to complete contingent monetary contracts to regulate a more informed agent s behavior this paper models two such rules delegation and an approval process we determine the principal s preferable rule under different conditions and characterize the optimal demand for talent in addition we describe the agent s expected welfare under these rules and characterize how different talent might sort into the rules if the decision process is not a choice or if the principal chooses approval for private gain the demand for talent can be tied to the magnitude of loss in the worst state rather than the degree of discretion given to the manager however if the principal has discretion over the decision process and proper incentives then more talent is demanded under delegation

if you pay peanuts do you get monkeys a cross country analysis of teacher pay and pupil performance why are teachers paid up to four times as much in some countries compared to others and does it matter specifically is the quality of teachers likely to be higher if they are paid higher up the income distribution in their own country and are pupil outcomes influenced by how well their teachers are paid this paper considers the determinants of teachers salaries across countries and examines the relationship between the real and relative level of teacher remuneration and the internationally comparable measured performance of secondary school pupils we use aggregate panel data on 39 countries published by the oecd to model this association our results suggest that recruiting higher ability individuals into teaching and permitting scope for quicker salary advancement will have a positive effect on pupil outcomes

labor force participation and earnings determinants for women in the special conditions of developing countries abstract little systematic analysis exists regarding hypothesized special labor market conditions for women in developing countries this study explores such conditions in nicaragua major results are i small children affect participation less than in developed countries due to child care from extended families or while on informal sector jobs and the necessity for poor mothers to work ii schooling and experience have major roles affecting work sector and earnings but the primary school return is half that cited by the world bank iii other human capital variables particularly nutrition have some impact

the southern wage gap human capital and the quality of education this suggests that school quality can play an important role in explaining the racial wage gap welch 28 and smith 19 both provide anecdotal evidence that relates the narrowing of school quality to the falling racial gap in earnings the rising rate of return for black workers on years of school documented by weiss and williamson 27 welch 28 and smith and welch 20 also is consistent with the improving quality of their education nevertheless school quality has not been incorporated into systematic statistical analysis of the racial wage gap this is the main focus of this paper i examine 15 southern states which had data on the segregated white and black school systems i have attempted to link the demonstrated lower quality of education during segregation in the south to the persistent southern wage gap in addition i have tried to

the impact of school quality on earnings and educational returns evidence from a low income country abstract the expansion of education has been widely adopted as a key element in the development strategies of low income countries while there is substantial evidence on the benefits of greater educational attainment for subsequent labor market earnings empirical evidence on the role played by school quality is scarce this paper combines household survey data with unique data on school quality from honduras to study the importance of school quality as a determinant of earnings our objective measures of school quality capture teacher training school infrastructure and school crowding the results display strong positive effects of school quality on earnings and on educational returns these effects persist across a variety of model specifications

do individual currency traders make money abstract using a unique online currency transactions dataset we examine the performance trading activity drawdown and timing abilities of individual currency traders evidence from 428 accounts during the 2004 2009 period shows that currency traders earn positive abnormal returns even after accounting for transaction costs additionally the results reveal that day traders not only trade more frequently than non day traders but also outperform them in terms of raw a passive benchmark and risk adjusted returns finally sorts on trade activity measured as the mean number of trades per day per account and account turnover show a positive association between performance and trade activity

the effects of cognitive ability and high school quality on college entry decisions nonparametric estimation of parameters of interest the decisions to attend college are analysed and nonparametric predictions compared to those obtained from the widely used logit model the impacts of measured cognitive ability and proxies for high school quality on the decisions to attend college are examined for a sample of white and black males and females from the usa two different parameters of interest which isolate the effects of ability and high school quality on college entry decisions are described and estimated by integrating out the effect of other covariates it is found that measured cognitive ability is an extremely important determinant of college entry for all race and gender groups at the same point in the ability distribution blacks are more likely to select into college than whites and females more likely than males of the same racial group proxies for high school quality such as teacher education student teacher ratios school enrolment and library size are shown to have little or no effects on the likelihood of college entry

double for nothing experimental evidence on an unconditional teacher salary increase in indonesia how does a large unconditional increase in salary affect the performance of incumbent employees in the public sector this paper presents experimental evidence on this question in the context of a policy change in indonesia that led to a permanent doubling of teachers base salaries the analysis uses a large scale randomized experiment across a representative sample of indonesian schools that accelerated this pay increase for teachers in treated schools the findings show that the large pay increase significantly improved teachers satisfaction with their income reduced the incidence of teachers holding outside jobs and reduced self reported financial stress nevertheless after two and three years the increase in pay led to no improvement in student learning outcomes the effects are precisely estimated making it possible to rule out even modest positive impacts on test scores the results suggest that unconditional pay increases are unlikely to be an effective policy option for improving the effort and productivity of incumbent employees in public sector settings

weak form efficiency in currency markets many past studies have found that currencies trend so technical trading rules produced statistically and economically significant profits in other words foreign exchange markets were weak form inefficient the study reported here reexamined this phenomenon with use of a new database of currency futures for 1975 2006 that includes old and newly liquid currencies the findings from the recent data are contradictory the profitability of trend following eroded for major currencies and their associated cross exchange rates around the mid 1990s newly liquid currencies after 2000 do trend however just as major currencies did in earlier years the evidence is consistent with early weak form inefficiency followed by vanishing trends as traders learn and adapt their strategies

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 effects of education and family planning programs on fertility in indonesia abstract numerous studies indicate that female education is a major determinant of fertility and that the estimated effects are large relative to other variables including family planning program variables there are however two serious deficiencies in the research relating educational attainment to fertility that could give rise to invalid inferences first many public programs including health and family planning programs may influence a woman s decisions about education and these indirect programmatic effects might be large second nearly all existing studies of the impacts of education on fertility assume that a woman s educational attainment is exogenous education could be serving as a proxy for such unobservable determinants as ability motivation and parental background as these factors most likely are important determinants of a woman s educational attainment we use the 1993 indonesian family life survey to compare the estimated impacts of education on fertility from a simple model tha

education employment and earnings of secondary school and university leavers in tanzania evidence from a tracer study this study uses a tracer survey of secondary school completers in tanzania to analyse the impact of educational qualifications on labour market earnings we show that the rates of return to the highest educational qualifications for wage employees are not negligible and at the margin provide an investment incentive however we find little evidence of human capital effects in the earnings determination process for the self employment sector introducing controls for father s educational background and a set of school fixed effects designed to proxy for school quality and potential labour market network effects reduces the estimated rates of return to educational qualifications a comparison of our results with the available evidence from other countries in the region suggest that despite an extremely small secondary and university education system the private rates of return to education in the tanzanian wage employment sector are comparatively low

international comparisons of rural urban educational attainment data and determinants we study cross country differences in rural and urban educational attainment by using a data set comprising 56 countries we focus on the determinants of rural urban educational inequality which is measured by the ratio of rural to urban average years of schooling within each country we find that riskier human capital investment less credit availability a colonial heritage a legal system of french origin and landlockedness of nations are all associated with relatively lower rural educational levels and greater rural urban educational inequality conversely larger formal labor markets better infrastructure and a legal system of british origin are associated with relatively higher rural educational levels and lower rural urban educational inequality we also identify an interaction effect between economic development level and some of these factors in particular we find that as development level increases the negative positive relationship between french british legal systems and rural urban educational inequality is reversed and becomes positive negative

on the rate of return to schooling quality empirical evaluation of the effect of school quality or type and amount of resources per student on adult earnings requires a conceptual framework a model of the returns to schooling in a simple human capital growth context is extended to illustrate how factors such as consumption benefits of students parental concern over equity between siblings and use of schools to facilitate parental labor supply can alter the apparent return to school quality the need for microlevel time diary and other data on human capital formation in both classrooms and families is highlighted copyright 1996 by mit press

schooling and earnings distributions with endogenous labour force participation marital status and family size this paper investigates the impact of various schooling investment strategies on family and per capita earnings within a framework that integrates effects on earnings family size marital status and labour force participation data are from a 1977 1978 survey of urban nicaraguan women aged 15 45 excerpt

the quality of schooling quantity alone is misleading although much research discusses the quantity of schooling as an effective impact on productivity and earnings most such research leaves out the idea of the quality of schooling which may cause biases in the estimated returns to schooling this paper consequently attempts to extend the standard mincerian approach to incorporate school quality as well as quantity it demonstrates how exclusion of quality in the standard procedure may cause biases in the estimated returns to years of schooling probably in the upward direction the paper explores the implications of this extension of the standard model for the case of young brazilian males it shows that the estimate of the private return to years of schooling using the preferred quality inclusive specification is only one half the estimate using the standard procedure indicating substantial upward bias in the standard estimates it further outlines a method for estimating a social return to quality and finds that it exceeds substantially the social return to quantity the paper then shows why this in turn suggests there may be an equity productivity trade off in schooling investments

trading as entertainment among 1 000 german brokerage clients for whom both survey responses and actual trading records are available investors who report enjoying investing or gambling turn over their portfolio at twice the rate of their peers including entertainment attributes as additional explanatory variables in cross sectional regressions of portfolio turnover on objective investor attributes more than doubles the fraction of the total variation of portfolio turnover that can be explained the results are robust to controlling for gender and proxies for overconfidence constructed from survey responses nonpecuniary benefits of trading thus appear to offer a straightforward explanation of the excessive trading puzzle

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

what do retail fx traders learn what is the benefit of experience using data from a leading trading platform we find no evidence that retail fx traders learn to trade better but they do appear to learn about their innate abilities as traders and respond appropriately in particular following an unsuccessful trading day they are more likely to cease trading to trade smaller amounts and to trade less frequently these effects are stronger for younger and less experienced traders who might be expected to have more to learn than older more experienced traders as regards learning through experience surprisingly we find that more seasoned traders demonstrate a slight decline in performance once we account for the endogenous decision to cease trading and even very experienced traders consistently lose money

outstanding female economists in the analysis and practice of development economics abstract this article examines the contributions of five eminent economists all women to the analysis and practice of development economics irma adelman frances stewart and nancy birdsall are leading advocates of alternative development strategies that focus on poverty alleviation and investment in human capital anne krueger and alice amsden stand at the forefront of two opposing camps in a lively and long lasting debate on the appropriate role of government in trade and industrialization we use the storied careers of these economists as a vehicle to convey the big picture of how development economics has evolved and which topics have proved durable