book review feature public policy in an uncertain world by charles f manski cambridge ma harvard university press 2013 pp 224 39 95 isbn 978 0674066892

the fetal origins hypothesis in finance prenatal environment the gender gap and investor behavior we find that differences in individuals prenatal environments explain heterogeneity in financial decisions later in life an exogenous increase in exposure to prenatal testosterone is associated with the masculinization of financial behavior specifically with elevated risk taking and trading in adulthood we also examine birth weight those with higher birth weight are more likely to participate in the stock market whereas those with lower birth weight tend to prefer portfolios with higher volatility and skewness consistent with compensatory behavior our results contribute to the understanding of how the prenatal environment shapes an individual s behavior in financial markets later in life received may 2 2014 accepted september 30 2015 by editor david hirshleifer

head start and the distribution of long term education and labor market outcomes we investigate the effect of head start on education and wage income for individuals in their 30s in the nlsy79 we contribute to the existing literature by examining effects across outcome distrib

preschool for all enrollment and maternal labour supply implications of a bilingual preschool policy abstractprevious research supports the effectiveness of preschool in various contexts yet there is limited evidence whether universal type preschool policies induce changes in enrollment while ce

the effect of fair trade affiliation on child schooling evidence from a sample of chilean honey producers we evaluate the impact of fair trade ft affiliation on child schooling within a sample of chilean honey producers with a retrospective panel data approach from a theoretical point of view we argue that ft should have a positive effect on child schooling since it generates a short run pure income effect together with a medium run productivity effect on both adult and child wages on the other hand because of the higher productivity generated by the medium run effect the opportunity cost of child education increases if they work with their parents the direction of the impact of ft affiliation on child schooling is therefore uncertain and requires empirical testing our econometric findings document a positive and significant impact of affiliation years on child schooling after controlling for endogeneity and heterogeneity between the treatment and control sample

spatial variations in new firm formation in the republic of ireland 1980 1990 hart m and gudgin g 1994 spatial variations in new firm formation in the republic of ireland 1980 1990 reg studies 28 367 380 this paper presents results of an investigation into regional 26 county differences in the formation of new manufacturing firms in the republic of ireland over the period 1980 90 the results of a multivariate analysis of the determinants of new firm formation at the regional level reveal that the proportion of small manufacturing establishments in an area growth in local industrial demand the proportion of professional and managerial occupations in the population and the impact of government new and small firms policy are all positive influences on gross formation rates the paper concludes by arguing that the process of new firm formation should not be viewed as the sole means of generating local economic growth and that the growth of existing small firms should also form an integral part of any development strategy hart m et gudgin g 1994 les variations geograp

virtuous interactions in removing exclusion the link between foreign market access and access to education abstract we outline a methodology which aims to give an answer to the widespread demand of impact analyses by regulators or by funding agencies which need to evaluate the current and past performance of development projects and may lack time series evidence we devise a retrospective panel data approach to evaluate the dynamics of the effects of fair trade affiliation on the schooling decisions of a sample of thai organic rice producers across the past 20 years we find that the probability of school enrolment in families with more than two children is significantly affected by fair trade affiliation years we try to ascertain whether our finding is robust to endogeneity of producers choices of local cooperative affiliation and adoption of organic techniques the significant difference between pre and post fair trade affiliation performance documents that fair trade participation generates a significant break in the schooling decisions of affiliated households

fiscal institutions fiscal policy and sovereign risk premia in emu we investigate the effect of fiscal institutions such as the strength of the finance minister in the budget process and deficits on interest rate spreads of eurozone countries deficits significantly increase risk premia measured by relative swap spreads the effect of deficits is significantly lower under emu this effect partly results from neglecting the role of fiscal institutions after controlling for institutional changes fiscal policy remains a significant determinant of risk premia in emu better institutions are connected with lower risk premia furthermore deficits matter less for risk premia in countries with better institutions markets acknowledge that better institutions reduce fiscal difficulties rendering the monitoring of annual developments less important

the health returns of education policies from preschool to high school and beyond the accessibility of quality schools and educational resources for children are key engines of upward mobility in the united states holding the potential to break the cycle of poverty from one generation to the next inequalities in economic status tend to be correlated across generations in part because of intergenerational correlations in health and education rucker c johnson 2009 residential segregation by race and class that leads to unequal access to quality schools is often cited as a culprit in perpetuating inequality in attainment outcomes over the past four decades three major government interventions have had substantial impacts on the provision of school resources and have narrowed black white differences in access to dimensions of school quality i court mandated school desegregation ii state legislation and legal action aimed to change the distribution and level of school funding and iii the expansion of targeted preschool programs for disadvantaged children through head start court ordered school desegregation has been described as the most controversial and ambitious social experiment of the past 50 years human capital health outcomes and inequality

longer term effects of head start specially collected data on adults in the panel study of income dynamics are used to provide evidence on the longer term effects of head start an early intervention program for poor preschool age children whites who attended head start are relative to their siblings who did not significantly more likely to complete high school attend college and possibly have higher earnings in their early twenties african americans who participated in head start are less likely to have been booked or charged with a crime there is some evidence of positive spillovers from older head start children to their younger siblings language en

transfers in cash and in kind theory meets the data we review theoretical explanations for in kind transfers in light of the limited empirical evidence after reviewing the traditional paternalistic arguments we consider explanations based on imperfect information and self targeting we then discuss the large literature on in kind programs as a way of improving the efficiency of the tax system and a range of other possible explanations including the samaritan s dilemma pecuniary effects credit constraints asymmetric information amongst agents and political economy considerations our reading of the evidence suggests that paternalism and interdependent preferences are leading overall explanations for the existence of in kind transfer programs but that some of the other arguments may apply to specific cases political economy considerations must also be part of the story

evaluating the effects of childcare policies on children s cognitive development and maternal labor supply to explore the role of childcare policies in the development of early cognitive skills this paper jointly estimates a cognitive achievement production function and a dynamic discrete choice model of maternal labor supply and childcare decisions using counter actuals from the model i investigate how the designs of two childcare programs head start and childcare subsidies affect the formation of cognitive skills through maternal work and childcare decisions the results suggest large impacts on cognitive skills from expanding head start to current noneligibles and negligible impacts of subsidies on cognitive skills of current eligibles abstract from author

the determinants of earnings a behavioral approach we survey the determinants of earnings and propose a framework for understanding labor market success we suggest that the advantages of the children of successful parents go considerably beyond the benefits of superior education the inheritance of wealth or the genetic inheritance of cognitive ability we suggest that noncognitive personality variables such as attitudes towards risk ability to adapt to new economic conditions hard work and the rate of time preference affect both earning and the transmission of economic status across generations

maternal labor supply and the availability of public pre k evidence from the introduction of prekindergarten into american public schools in the 1980s and 1990s many states began to provide funding for prekindergarten programs for the first time this paper takes advantage of the staggered timing in program funding to investigate the effect that increased availability of prekindergarten programs has on the labor supply of mothers with four year olds i find that mothers with a four year old and no younger children were significantly more likely to be in the labor force and employed once prekindergarten became available and that these effects were largest for single low educated mothers and married college educated mothers mothers with a four year old and other younger children were also significantly more likely to be in the labor force and employed although these effects were smaller in magnitude and not significant for specific subpopulations

new business formation in a rapidly growing economy the irish experience the extraordinary growth of the irish economy since the mid 1990s the celtic tiger has attracted a great deal of interest commentary and research indeed many countries look to ireland as an economic development role model and it has been suggested that ireland might provide key lessons for other eu members as they seek to achieve the objectives set out in the lisbon agenda much of the discussion of ireland s growth has focused on its possible triggers the long term consequences of the late 1980s fiscal stabilisation eu structural funds education wage moderation and devaluation of the irish punt the industrial policy perspective has highlighted the importance of inflows of foreign direct investment but a notable absence from the discourse on the celtic tiger has been any mention of the role of new business venture creation and entrepreneurship in this paper we use unpublished irish vat data for the years 1988 2004 to provide the first detailed look at national trends in business birth and death rates in ireland over the take off period we also use sub national vat data to shed light on spatial trends in new venture creation our overall conclusions are that new business formation made no detectable contribution to the acceleration of ireland s growth in the late 1990s although we do find evidence of spatial convergence in per capita business stocks

sixty years after the magic carpet ride the long run effect of the early childhood environment on social and economic outcomes this paper estimates the effect of the early childhood environment on a large array of social and economic outcomes lasting almost 60 years to do this we exploit variation in the living conditions experienced by yemenite children after being airlifted to israel in 1949 we find that children who were placed in a more modern environment i e with better sanitary and infrastructure conditions were more likely to obtain higher education marry at an older age have fewer children and work at age 55 they were also more likely to be assimilated into israeli society to be less religious and have more worldly tastes in music and food however these effects are found mainly for women and not for men we also find an effect on the next generation children who lived in a better environment grew up to have children with more education

assessing students equality of opportunity in oecd countries the role of national and school level policies abstractthis article analyses the relationship between equality of opportunity and the characteristics of the educational system jointly considering country and school level policies because school social environment represents a fundamental channel in shaping educational opportunities we consider all policies recorded in pisa 2012 dataset that affect the sorting of students to schools we show that including sorting policies enriches the explanation of the socio economic gradient that is the association between students performances and parental background with respect to previous studies including only country level features the negative impact of early tracking on equality of opportunity is overvalued without including other sorting policies while grouping students within school by ability increases the socio economic gradient and a greater students heterogeneity in the school reduces the gradient

maternal labour supply and childhood obesity in canada evidence from the nlscy this paper investigates the socioeconomic factors affecting childhood overweight and obesity in canada using data from the national longitudinal survey of children and youth in particular i attempt to address the issue of whether an increase in the mother s work intensity is associated with an increase in the risk of the child s becoming overweight or obese i also attempt to evaluate the causality of this relationship and the mechanisms that might facilitate this link the results suggest that an increase in the mother s work intensity when she first returned to work in the period after the child s birth and before the child started school is associated with an increase in the risk of the child s becoming overweight or obese later in childhood conditional on the mother returning to work in the period between the child s birth and the start of school for the child a 10 hour increase in the number of hours worked per week when the mother first returned to work is associated with an increase in the probability that the child later becomes overweight or obese that is in the range of 2 5 to 4 percentage points ce memoire analyse les facteurs socio economiques qui affectent l exces de poids et l obesite des enfants au canada a l aide des donnees de l elnej en particulier on se demande si un accroissement de l intensite de travail de la mere est associea l accroissement de poids et a l obesite de l enfant on etudie le lien de causalite et les mecanismes qui sous tendent ce lien les resultats montrent qu un accroissement de l intensite de travail de la mere quand elle retourne au travail dans la periode apres la naissance de l enfant et avant qu il ne commence ses classes est associea la probabilite d exces de poids et d obesite plus tard un accroissement de 10 heures dans le nombre d heures travaillees par semaine est associea une probabilite de 2 5 a 4 points de pourcentage que l enfant va avoir des problemes de poids ou d obesite

the effect of pre primary education on primary school performance although the theoretical case for universal pre primary education is strong the empirical foundation is weak in this paper we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre primary education on subsequent primary school performance in argentina we estimate that one year of preprimary school increases average third grade test scores by 8 percent of a mean or by 23 percent of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores we also find that preprimary school attendance positively affects student s self control in the third grade as measured by behaviors such as attention effort class participation and discipline

investing in health the long term impact of head start on smoking i introduction there is a strong evidence that early childhood socioeconomic conditions have long term economic consequences reinforcing and sustaining disparities over the lifecourse 1 this observation provides a compelling rationale for public investments targeted toward disadvantaged children to expand opportunities and break the cycle of poverty head start is the principal federally funded program through which the united states invests directly in the human capital of disadvantaged preschool children since its inception in 1965 as part of president lyndon johnson s war on poverty head start has provided services to more than 23 million preschool children in 2005 there were more than 900 000 children enrolled in the program at a total cost of 6 8 billion office of head start 2006a to achieve its overall goal of increasing the school readiness of participants head start provides a comprehensive set of services including education health nutritional and social services to participants and their families research has shown that head start has positive impacts on participants human capital both in childhood and in adulthood 2 in recent years questions have arisen about the relative effectiveness of head start and whether it should be continued in its present form u s department of health and human services 2003 much of the debate has centered on the magnitude and persistence of the cognitive achievements of head start participants however given the link between education and health 3 and the comprehensive nature of head start with substantial health components one could reasonably expect it to have a favorable impact on participants health as well as education if significant health effects were found to persist into adulthood this in itself could alter the evaluation of head start and have important implications for the associated policy debate smoking is the leading preventable cause of mortality in the united states mokdad et al 2004 it is linked to an extensive list of diseases chaloupka and warner 2000 and imposes large economic costs on society centers for disease control and prevention 2002 tobacco use generally begins before individuals graduate high school and as an addictive behavior youth smoking is linked to adult smoking u s department of health and human services 1994 adolescents from low socioeconomic status households with low academic achievement are more likely to use tobacco products u s department of health and human services 1994 thus comprehensive development programs targeted toward disadvantaged youths that are designed to improve child outcomes have the potential to influence smoking improve health over the lifecourse and reduce the social costs from smoking suggestive evidence that head start might influence the smoking behavior of participants comes from evaluations of other preschool programs that targeted low income children participants in both the carolina abecedarian preschool program and the high scope perry preschool program were much less likely to smoke as adults barnett and masse 2007 belfield et al 2006 in this article we assess the impact of head start participation on adult smoking behavior using data from the panel study of income dynamics psid and its supplements on early childhood education and health we examine the cohort of adults above age 21 in 1999 whose age is low enough to have potentially participated in a head start program following currie and thomas 1995 and garces thomas and currie 2002 we employ a sibling based model to control for unobservable family characteristics that may affect smoking or the decision to participate in head start our results show that head start participation significantly influences smoking related behavior we estimate that if head start participants had not enrolled in the program these individuals would be approximately 20 percentage points more likely to smoke cigarettes beyond age 25

could the irish miracle be repeated in hungary it is widely recognized that foreign direct investment fdi plays an important role in economic development however its impact on entrepreneurial activity has not been well researched internalization theory is used to explore how inward fdi impacts entrepreneurial activity using data from global entrepreneurship monitor gem we find significant differences in entrepreneurial activity between ireland and hungary in both the type of people starting businesses and the opportunities pursued economic development policies should focus on increasing human capital promoting enterprise development and upgrading the quality of fdi

looking at the population problem through the prism of heterogeneity welfare and policy analyses upon introducing heterogeneity and dynamics into a model of the demand for children a problem of optimal population is defined and analyzed it is shown that from the perspective of social welfare better educated individuals produce too few children while less educated individuals produce too many children and all individuals invest too little in the education of their children the impact of several policy tools geared at addressing the population problem is investigated in particular how child allowances and other tax subsidy policies can be harnessed to enhance welfare and how and why early childhood education programs can mitigate the population problem

the rate of return to the high scope perry preschool program abstract this paper estimates the rate of return to the highscope perry preschool program an early intervention program targeted toward disadvantaged african american youth estimates of the rate of return to the perry program are widely cited to support the claim of substantial economic benefits from preschool education programs previous studies of the rate of return to this program ignore the compromises that occurred in the randomization protocol they do not report standard errors the rates of return estimated in this paper account for these factors we conduct an extensive analysis of sensitivity to alternative plausible assumptions estimated annual social rates of return generally fall between 7 and 10 with most estimates substantially lower than those previously reported in the literature however returns are generally statistically significantly different from zero for both males and females and are above the historical return on equity estimated benefit to cost ratios support this conclusion

extended families and child well being studies of household behavior have established the distribution of resources among household members predicts spending and savings patterns however there is a paucity of evidence on the relationship between the well being of individual family members and the distribution of resources within an extended family including non co resident family members given the central role the family plays in many models of economic behavior this is an important gap in the literature using rich longitudinal survey data from the indonesia family life survey ifls evidence is presented on the relationship between three measures of health and education related human capital of children and the distribution of resources among extended family members ifls is ideally suited for this research since the survey collects detailed information about income and wealth from both coresident and non co resident family members the empirical model is founded on a natural extension of the collective model of household decision making chiappori 1988 1992 to the extended family the model is particularly appealing in this context because it places few restrictions on preferences of individual family members and does not specify a specific bargaining mechanism that underlies negotiations the collective model yields empirical tests of whether the behavior of family members is pareto efficient a special case of the model allows all family members to be completely altruistic which is observationally equivalent to a unitary model of family behavior that special case is rejected by the data however the restrictions of the efficient model are not rejected indicating that non co resident family members are able to co ordinate allocation decisions with respect to child human capital investments in such a way as to make no family member better off without another member being worse off

children s schooling and parents behavior evidence from the head start impact study abstract parents may have important effects on their children but little work in economics explores whether children s schooling opportunities crowd out or encourage parents investment in children we analyze data from the head start impact study which granted randomly chosen preschool aged children the opportunity to attend head start we find that head start causes a substantial increase in parents involvement with their children such as time spent reading to children math activities or days spent with children by fathers who do not live with their children both during and after the period when their children are potentially enrolled in head start

early life health interventions and academic achievement this paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long run academic achievement in school we use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients such as the classification of very low birth weight vlbw which assigns infants special care at a specific birth weight cutoff using detailed administrative data on schooling and birth records from chile and norway we establish that children who receive extra medical care at birth have lower mortality rates and higher test scores and grades in school these gains are in the order of 0 15 0 22 standard deviations

how good are the uk vat registration data at measuring firm births this paper utilises some data from a survey of recent vat registrations in the north of england to examine two issues first the extent to which registrants are involved in setting up entirely new businesses and secondly the relationship between the date of registration and the start of trading the paper suggests that some caution should be exercised in the use of vat registration statistics in the analysis of firm births

teachers pay for performance in the long run the dynamic pattern of treatment effects on students educational and labour market outcomes in adulthood this paper examines the dynamic effects of a teachers pay for performance experiment on long term outcomes at adulthood the program led to a gradual increase in university education of the treated high school students reaching an increase of 0 25 years of schooling by age 28 30 the effects on employment and earnings were initially negative coinciding with a higher rate of enrollment in university but became positive and significant with time these gains are largely mediated by the positive effect of the program on several high school outcomes including quantitative and qualitative gains in the high stakes matriculation exams

worker absence and productivity evidence from teaching a significant amount of work time is lost each year due to worker absence but evidence on the productivity losses from absenteeism remains scant due to difficulties with identification we use uniquely detailed data on the timing duration and cause of absences among teachers to address many of the potential biases from the endogeneity of worker absence our analysis indicates that worker absences have large negative impacts the expected loss in daily productivity from employing a temporary substitute is on par with replacing a regular worker of average productivity with one at the 10th 20th percentile of productivity

boys cognitive skill formation and physical growth long term experimental evidence on critical ages for early childhood interventions the effects of early life circumstances on cognitive skill formation are important for later human capital development labor market outcomes and well being in this paper we test the hypothesis that the first 1 000 days are the critical window for both cognitive skill formation and physical development by exploiting a randomized conditional cash transfer cct program in nicaragua we find that boys exposed in utero and during the first 2 years of life have better cognitive but not physical outcomes when they are 10 years old compared to those also exposed but in their second year of life or later these results confirm that interventions that improve nutrition and or health during the first 1 000 days of life can have lasting positive impacts on cognitive development for children the finding that the results differ for cognitive functioning and anthropometrics highlights the importance of explicitly considering cognitive tests in addition to anthropometrics when analyzing impacts on early childhood development

effects of attending preschool on adolescents outcomes evidence from china abstractthis study examines whether attending preschool enhances the cognitive abilities health and socialization of junior high school students in china using propensity score matching to control for a rich data set of student family and school characteristics i find that attending preschool enhances cognition among seventh graders but those gains fade among ninth graders the greatest benefits from preschool accrue to both seventh and ninth graders from economically disadvantaged families results for non cognitive categories are mixed and no evidence suggests superior health outcomes evidence also shows cognitive benefits among adolescents especially those economically disadvantaged who entered preschool earlier

giving children a better start preschool attendance and school age profiles this brief summarizes the giving children a better start preschool attendance and school age profiles in uruguay for the period 1995 the author study the effect of pre primary education on children s subsequent school outcomes by exploiting a unique feature of the uruguayan household survey ech that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance in the context of a rapid expansion in the supply of pre primary places using a within household estimator we find small gains from preschool attendance at early ages that get magnified as children grow up by age 15 treated children have accumulated 0 8 extra years of education and are 27 percentage points more likely to be in school compared to their untreated siblings instrumental variables estimates that attempt to control for non random selection of siblings into preschool lead to similar results pre primary education appears as a successful and cost effective policy to prevent early grade failure and its long lasting consequences in low income countries

defining the government s debt and deficit although the budget deficit and the public debt feature prominently in political debate and economic research there is no agreement about how they should be measured they can b e defined for different sets of public institutions including the nested sets corresponding to central government general government and the public sector and for any definition of government there are many measures of the debt and deficit including those generated by four kinds of accounts cash financial full accrual and comprehensive which can be derived from four nested sets of assets and liabilities each debt and deficit measure says something about public finances but none tells the whol e story each is also vulnerable to manipulation and is likely to be manipulated if it is subject to a binding fiscal rule or target narrow definitions of government encourage the shifting of spending to entities outside the defined perimeter of governme nt narrow definitions of debt and deficit encourage operations involving off balance sheets assets and liabilities while broad measures are susceptible to the mismeasurement of on balance sheet assets and liabilities reviewing the literature on these is sues the paper concludes that governments should publish several measures of the debt and deficit in a form that clearly reveals their interrelationships

does head start help hispanic children abstract poor educational attainment is a persistent problem among us hispanic children relative to non hispanics many of these children are immigrants and or come from households that use a minority language in the home this paper examines the effects of participation in a government sponsored preschool program called head start on these children we find that large and significant benefits accrue to head start children when we compare them to siblings who did not participate in the program on average head start closes at least 1 4 of the gap in test scores between hispanic children and non hispanic white children and 2 3 of the gap in the probability of grade repetition however we find that the benefits of head start are not evenly distributed across sub groups

correlation consumption confusion or constraints why do poor children perform so poorly the economic and social mobility of a generation may be largely determined by the time it enters school given early developing and persistent gaps in child achievement by family income and the importance of adolescent skill levels for educational attainment and lifetime earnings after providing new evidence of important differences in early child investments by family income we study four leading mechanisms thought to explain these gaps an intergenerational correlation in ability a consumption value of investment information frictions and credit constraints in order to better determine which of these mechanisms inf uence family investments in children we evaluate the extent to which these mechanisms also explain other important stylized facts related to the marginal returns on investments and the effects of parental income on child investments and skills

non cognitive child outcomes and universal high quality child care exploiting a rich panel data child survey merged with administrative records along with a pseudo experiment generating variation in the take up of pre school across municipalities we provide evidence of the effects on non cognitive child outcomes of participating in large scale publicly provided universal pre school programs and family day care vis a vis home care we find that compared to home care being enrolled in pre school at age three does not lead to significant differences in child outcomes at age seven no matter the gender or mother s level of education family day care on the other hand seems to significantly deteriorate outcomes for boys whose mothers have a lower level of education finally increasing hours in family day care from 30 40 hours per week to 40 50 hours per week and hours in pre school from 20 30 hours per week to 30 40 hours per week leads to significantly poorer child outcomes

worms at work long run impacts of a child health investment this study estimates long run impacts of a child health investment exploiting community wide experimental variation in school based deworming the program increased labor supply among men and education among women with accompanying shifts in labor market specialization ten years after deworming treatment men who were eligible as boys stay enrolled for more years of primary school work 17 more hours each week spend more time in nonagricultural self employment are more likely to hold manufacturing jobs and miss one fewer meal per week women who were in treatment schools as girls are approximately one quarter more likely to have attended secondary school halving the gender gap they reallocate time from traditional agriculture into cash crops and nonagricultural self employment we estimate a conservative annualized financial internal rate of return to deworming of 32 and show that mass deworming may generate more in future government revenue than it costs in subsidies

evaluating public programs with close substitutes the case of head start this paper empirically evaluates the cost effectiveness of head start the largest early childhood education program in the united states using data from the randomized head start impact study hsis we show that head start draws a substantial share of its participants from competing preschool programs that receive public funds this both attenuates measured experimental impacts on test scores and reduces the program s net social costs a cost benefit analysis demonstrates that accounting for the public savings associated with reduced enrollment in other subsidized preschools can reverse negative assessments of the program s social rate of return estimates from a semi parametric selection model indicate that head start is about as effective at raising test scores as competing preschools and that its impacts are greater on children from families unlikely to participate in the program efforts to expand head start to new populations are therefore likely to boost the program s social rate of return provided that the proposed technology for increasing enrollment is not too costly

immigrating to opportunity estimating the effect of school quality using a natural experiment on ethiopians in israel in may 1991 fifteen thousand ethiopian jews were brought to israel in an overnight airlift and sorted in a haphazard and essentially random fashion to absorption centers across the country this quasi random assignment produced a natural experiment whereby the initial schooling environment of ethiopian children can be considered exogenous to their family background and parental decisions we examine the extent to which the initial elementary school environment affected the high school outcomes of ethiopian children using administrative panel data on the educational career of each child in israel through much of the 1990s the results show that the early schooling environment has an important effect on high school dropout rates repetition rates and the passing rate on matriculation exams necessary to enter college the results are robust to using alternative measures of the schooling environment and to the inclusion of community fixed effects which suggests that aspects of the elementary school itself are important for high school success

public accounting fudges towards emu a first empirical survey and some public choice considerations this paper analyses some one off measures and other accounting tricks that eu member states have been using to qualify for emu membership moving from empirical evidence to strategic goals this investigation brings to the fore three crucial issues the weakness of the methodological rules of the european system of accounts used to assess budgetary convergence in line with the maastricht treaty the open ended definition of the required budgetary discipline the shortcomings of the excessive deficit procedure enforced through the stability pact the conclusion urges a return to a strict annual balance requirement for governments current accounts to impede strategic adjustments of budgetary positions that are in fact creative accounting operations

canadian contributions to family economics canadian scholars have made substantial contributions to the relatively new field of family economics these include new models of how men and women match in marriage markets and of how decisions are made in multi person households several were early contributors to the literature on married women s labour supply and labour supply in a family context and helped to develop empirical methods in this area a particular focus has been on the impacts of policy relevant parameters such childcare costs on family labour supply and child well being new work on child development the impact of early life conditions and the processes of intergenerational transmission also highlight the importance of family context in determining economic well being

the impact of repealing sunday closing laws on educational attainment adolescents face daily tradeoffs between human capital investment labor and leisure this paper exploits state variation in the repeal of sunday closing laws to examine the impact of a distinct and plausibly exogenous rise in the quantity of competing diversions available to youth on their educational attainment the results suggest that the repeals led to a significant decline in both years of education and the probability of high school completion i explore increased employment and risky behaviors as potential mechanisms further i find a corresponding decline of the repeals on adult wages

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

does head start improve children s life chances evidence from a regression discontinuity design this paper exploits a new source of variation in head start funding to identify the program s effects on health and schooling in 1965 the office of economic opportunity oeo provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties to develop head start proposals the result was a large and lasting discontinuity in head start funding rates at the oeo cutoff for grant writing assistance we find evidence of a large drop at the oeo cutoff in mortality rates for children from causes that could be affected by head start as well as suggestive evidence for a positive effect on educational attainment i introduction head start was established in 1965 as part of the war on poverty to provide preschool health and other social services to poor children age three to five and their families and currently serves over 900 000 children each year at a cost of around 7 billion hhs 2006 this paper provides new evidence on the effects of the head start program on schooling and health by drawing on a new source of variation in program funding spe

the effect of child health insurance access on schooling evidence from public insurance expansions although a sizable literature analyzes the effects of public health insurance programs on short run health outcomes little prior work has examined their long term effects we examine the effects of public insurance expansions among children in the 1980s and 1990s on their future educational attainment we find that expanding health insurance coverage for low income children increases the rate of high school and college completion these estimates are robust to only using federal medicaid expansions and mostly are due to expansions that occur when the children are not newborns our results indicate that the long run benefits of public health insurance are substantial

does preschool education attendance matter evidence from a natural experiment in spain the non compulsory and non free of charge character of preschool education level before 3 years old in spain raises some doubts about the exogenous nature of this variable this article provides new evidence about the impact of preschool years on educational outcomes by exploiting a peculiar spanish database that supplies information on two classrooms at fourth grade in primary schools where students were randomly allocated into each group using an identification strategy that reproduces a natural experiment we find that belonging to the group with more average years of preschool education significantly and positively impacts on fourthgrade students average outcomes particularly an increase of one standard deviation in the difference in years of preschool attendance results in an increase of 0 16 0 13 standard deviations in the group achievement for mathematics reading in view of the importance of preschool education and considering that preschool attendance before 3 years old is related with socio economic variables we conclude that extending free preschool education to the 2 year old age group in spain should be considered especially for students in families with less favourable backgrounds

defining the government s debt and deficit defining the government s debt and deficit although the budget deficit and the public debt feature prominently in political debate and economic research there is no agreement about how they should be measured they can be defined for different sets of public institutions including the nested sets corresponding to central government general government and the public sector and for any definition of government there are many measures of the debt and deficit including those generated by four kinds of accounts cash financial full accrual and comprehensive which can be derived from four nested sets of assets and liabilities each debt and deficit measure says something about public finances but none tells the whole story each is also vulnerable to manipulation and is likely to be manipulated if it is subject to a binding fiscal rule or target narrow definitions of government encourage the shifting of spending to entities outside the defined perimeter of government narrow definitions of debt and deficit encourage operations involving off balance sheets assets and liabilities while broad measures are susceptible to the mismeasurement of on balance sheet assets and liabilities reviewing the literature on these issues the paper concludes that governments should publish several measures of the debt and deficit in a form that clearly reveals their interrelationships

multinational companies technology spillovers and plant survival how does the presence of multinational companies affect plant survival in the host country we postulate that multinational companies can impact positively on plant survival through technology spillovers we examine the nature of the effect of multinationals using a cox proportional hazard model which we estimate using plant level data for irish manufacturing industries our results show that the presence of multinationals has a life enhancing effect only on indigenous plants in high tech industries suggesting the presence of technology spillovers in contrast multinationals compete with each other in low tech sectors in the host country

the effects of single mothers welfare use and employment decisions on children s cognitive development i introduction in this article we study the effects of low skilled single mothers welfare use and employment choices during their children s early years on their children s cognitive development we use participation in aid to families with dependent children afdc and after 1996 temporary aid to needy families tanf to represent welfare use before 1996 afdc was one of the largest welfare programs in the united states in addition to cash benefits participation in the afdc program often assured eligibility for other programs such as head start food stamps and medicaid 1 in 1996 the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act prwora ended afdc replacing it with the tanf program even though prwora introduced a time limit on welfare benefits tanf is still one of the most expansive government programs and participation in tanf remains highly correlated with other program participation welfare is used mostly by low skilled single mothers with low incomes who are likely to be highly constrained in terms of resources to invest in their children s development welfare program participation can provide these mothers with monetary and nonmonetary resources that can be very important to early nurturing but does welfare use benefit the development of the participating children through provision of these resources we analyze the relationship between a mother s welfare use and employment decisions during the first 5 years of her child s life and the child s first observed standardized mathematics score from the peabody individual achievement test piat math it is important to identify contributors to early cognitive development since this has been shown to be a strong predictor of long term achievement in particular early test scores are strongly correlated with educational attainment criminal activity salaries and out of wedlock pregnancy see reviews by duncan and brooks gunn 1997 haveman and wolfe 1995 and currie and thomas 1999 we use math scores on piat test as our primary measure of attainment primarily because they have been shown to be predictors of not only later math scores but also other academic achievement for example see claessens duncan and engel 2009 and duncan et al 2007 we contribute to the literature in three ways first the effects of a mother s decisions in our attainment function are allowed to interact with the child s observed innate ability which we will define later this allows us to obtain distributions for the effects of work and welfare by children s innate ability in addition to a single coefficient that measures only the effect at the mean level to our knowledge our article is one of few that allow for this flexibility bernal 2008 and bernal and keane 2010 2011 find that the marginal effects of a mother s work and child care choices decrease with the innate ability of the child that is although the effects on a child with average innate ability may be small and positive there are significantly larger positive impacts for the children with below average innate ability and large negative effects for children with above average innate ability second we model the child s attainment as a function of the mother s cumulative inputs a child s attainment observed when they turn six is determined by the cumulative welfare use and work experiences of the first 20 quarters 5 years after birth the longer multiple periods not only enable us to identify the effects using a much richer variation in mothers decisions but also allow us to investigate the influence of different intensity levels of work and welfare use third we model multiple channels through which a mother s decisions can affect her child s attainment including direct monetary benefits available for each child parental time and exemplary behavior role model effects captured by the mother s employment and non pecuniary benefits from in kind transfer programs