who receives the college wage premium assessing the labor market returns to degrees and college transfer patterns using data from the 1979 national longitudinal survey of youth we estimate wage models in which college educated workers are classified according to their degree attainment college type and college transfer status the detailed taxonomy produces modest improvements in explanatory power relative to standard specifications and reveals considerable heterogeneity in the predicted wages of college educated workers we find that transfer students receive an indirect wage benefit insofar as changing colleges allows them to earn a degree some transfer students receive an additional direct wage benefit presumably because switching schools increases their skill investment opportunities

labor market returns to two and four year college the paper examines labor market returns to a two and four year college education analysis of the 1972 national longitudinal survey of youth observation that the average person who attended a two year college earned about 10 percent more than those without any college education comparison with the wages of those who attended a four year college education

obsolescence of knowledge and career publication profiles some evidence of differences among fields in costs of interrupted careers in recent years women have received about 45 percent of all baccalaureate degrees but only approximately 20 percent of all ph d s does this imply that academic careers as compared with careers of the wider market for college graduates are less conducive to dual career family objectives evidence suggesting the relative tradeoff of these objectives is shown by the fact that over the last thirty years the zero order correlation between average cohort fertility and the proportion of ph d recipients who are women is 0 939 a female recipient of a doctorate is twice as likely as a male recipient to have specialized in the humanities and only one third as likely to have specialized in a physical science field furthermore of those who receive a doctorate in physical science a male is 60 percent more likely than a female to pursue research as a primary work activity in the humanities on the other hand a woman is at least as likely as a man to have research as an initial postdoctoral work activity obviously many factors affect opportunities and resultant decisions to enter particular careers and to select specific occupational specialties this study considers only onethe rate of obsolescence or depreciation of knowledge as reflected in the age profile of cited works this measure of the obsolescence of knowledge refers to the rate of decay in the relative frequency at which citations are made to a particular vintage of research communications as the communications age in other words the usefulness of older published research papers as an input to current research depreciates over time the rate at which this depreciation occurs is interpreted as measuring the durability of a professor s accumulated stock of knowledge evidence presented in section ii indicates that the durability of knowledge varies considerably from discipline to discipline this information raises a number of questions concerning how the durability of knowledge influences career decisions one influence considered here is that of a temporary career interruption for example if a woman experiences a break in her academic career such as for the purpose of raising children she will incur an opportunity cost in the sense that her research knowledge will to some extent become obsolete consequently her accumulated stock of knowledge will decline relative to those professors who have continuous careers the relative cost imposed on a woman who pursues dual family career objectives is higher the less durable the jobrelated knowledge this difference in relative costs is expected to alter career incentives the results presented here suggest that women who pursue academic careers have responded to these incentives before discussing the evidence on female careers i consider a more general model in which a professor is assumed to have a continuous career profile this model which is more appropriately viewed as a male model of investment behavior is used to analyze how the durability of a professor s knowledge affects his research productivity over a career interestingly the evidence suggests that a professor s response to less durable knowledge is not to compact all learning early in his career but rather to smooth learning over the career perhaps the most assistant professor arizona state university i would like to thank an anonymous referee and many friends for helpful comments on earlier drafts i am especially indebted to finis welch for valuable suggestions throughout the development of this paper the views expressed are my own and i am responsible for any possible errors

multiproduct short run hospital cost functions empirical evidence and policy implications from cross section data economists and policymakers have been interested in hospital costs and the structure of hospital technologies for several decades now early interest was focused on the possibility of scale economies which implied increased efficiency for larger hospitals 6 8 12 13 18 20 while more recent interest has been stimulated by the inflationary spiral of hospital costs 1 15 17 22 as hospital costs have risen important policy questions concerning the impact on costs of the hospitals diagnostic case mix the hospitals admitting physicians the hospitals size and the hospitals efficiency have emerged and researchers have attempted to deal with these issues within the context of increasingly complex econometric models 1 2 5 24 27 however in attempting to analyze these important policy issues researchers have been forced to make two major types of compromises on the one hand appropriate data are often not available for estimating a well specified cost function e g information on admitting physicians and diagnostic case mix are often missing so that problems of specification error often plague the econometric results conversely in using imaginative ways to deal with data problems e g weighting in patient and out patient care to form a single index of hospital services 1 27 or estimating separate cost functions for each department in the hospital 2 researchers sometimes place unrealistic and unnecessary constraints on their econometric models the purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of several of the primary hospital characteristics mentioned above on the short run costs of hospitals within a theoretically consistent framework in the following discussion we also develop the theoretical

post secondary education in canada can ability bias explain the earnings gap between college and university graduates using the canadian general social survey we compute returns to post secondary education relative to high school unlike previous research using canadian data our data set allows us to control for ability selection into higher education we find strong evidence of positive ability selection into all levels of post secondary education for men and weaker positive selection for women since theability selection is stronger for higher levels of education particularly for university the difference in returns between university and college or trades education decreases slightly after accounting for ability bias however a puzzling large gap persists with university educated men still earning l education post secondaire au canada est ce que le differentiel d habilete peut expli quer les ecarts de gains entre les diplomes des colleges et des universites en utilisant les resultats de l enquete sociale generale au canada on calcule les rendements sur l education post secondaire par rapport a ceux sur l education secondaire contrairement aux travaux anterieurs sur les donnees canadiennes les donnees utilisees ici permettent de tenir compte des differentiels d habilete les resultats revelent un fort differentiel positif d habilete pour les hommes a tous les niveaux de l education post secondaire et un moin dre differentiel pour les femmes puisque ce differentiel est plus fort pour les plus hauts niveaux d education particulierement pour l universite la difference de rendements entre universites et colleges ou ecoles de metiers decroit quand on tient compte du differentiel d habilete cependant un large ecart residuel demeure et laisse perplexe les hommes avec une education universitaire gagnent encore plus de 20 de plus que ceux qui ont frequente les colleges et les ecoles de metiers apres normalisation pour le niveau d habilete

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

can fao s measure of chronic undernourishment be strengthened abstract in its sixth world food survey released at the 1996 world food summit the food and agriculture organization of the united nations fao reported that 841 million people in developing countries are chronically undernourished this number and its country and regional level disaggregations have proved tremendously useful to countless development aid agencies and researchers in the context of a recent wave of new nationally representative household food consumption and expenditure surveys this paper examines the estimation methodology underlying the food insecurity measure which relies on national aggregate measures of food availability and distribution the paper finds that the measure largely reflects national food availabilities and does not adequately capture people s ability to gain access to food the ultimate key to food security the implications for the indicator s use by policy makers in geographical targeting and tracking changes in food insecurity over time are drawn out the paper concludes by arguing that the time has come to review the potential for employing the new household survey data along with new methods to strengthen the empirical foundations of fao s measure

in school work experience and the returns to schooling students often accumulate substantial work experience before leaving school because conventional earnings functions do not control for in school work experience their estimates of the return to schooling include the benefit of work experience gained along the way using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth i estimate wage models with and without controls for in school work experience the estimated schooling coefficients are 25 44 higher depending on how i control for ability bias when in school work experience is omitted than when it is included these findings indicate that conventional models significantly overstate the wage effects of school only

weighing what s practical proxy means tests for targeting food subsidies in egypt abstract despite achieving a significant cost reduction over the past two decades the absolute cost of food subsidies in egypt is still high relative to the benefits received by the poor there is scope for better targeting these food subsidies in particular for targeting cooking oil and sugar ration cards both because reforms in this area are perceived to be far less politically sensitive than adjusting subsidy policy for bread and wheat flour and because higher income groups presently receive a significant percentage of the benefits targeting the high subsidy green ration cards to the poor and the low subsidy red ration cards to the nonpoor will require identification of both poor and nonpoor households an international food policy research institute research team in egypt in collaboration with the egyptian ministry of trade and supply developed a proxy means test for targeting ration cards the paper describes the process of moving from the optimal income predicting model to the final model that was both administratively and politically feasible an ex ante evaluation of the levels of accuracy of the proxy means testing model indicates that the model performs quite well in predicting the needy and nonneedy households an effective and full implementation of this targeting method would increase the equity in the ration card food subsidy system and at the same time the total budgetary costs of rationed food subsidies would decline moreover the experience gained under this reform would facilitate targeting future social interventions to reduce and prevent poverty in egypt

economies of scale and input substitution in public libraries abstract a translog cost function is applied to 1988 data for 194 indiana public libraries to measure economies of scale and input substitution elasticities book circulation measures library output and costs include noncapital expenditures scale economies exist for libraries with circulations up to 55 000 per year larger libraries exhibit constant returns to scale labor books and supplies services are all substitutes with inelastic own price and cross price elasticities

the impact of changes in common property resource management on intrahousehold allocation abstract in developing countries common property resources cprs can be an important source of income for certain individuals within households this paper demonstrates that if changes in the management of cprs impose fixed costs on them or cause a decline in the prices of goods produced from it the intrahousehold allocation of resources may alter in a manner detrimental to those individuals the paper also shows that the assumption of a unitary household model causes the detrimental effects of certain cpr policy interventions to be overlooked although the model is narrowly conceived the results can be generalised to examples where households have members who specialise in different economic activities outside the home

a poor means test econometric targeting in africa proxy means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information in a now widely used version a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy means test score based on chosen covariates which is then implemented for targeting out of sample in this paper the performance of various proxy means testing methods is assessed using data for nine african countries standard proxy means testing helps filter out the nonpoor but excludes many poor people thus diminishing the impact on poverty some methodological changes perform better with a poverty quantile method dominating in most cases even so either a basic income scheme or transfers using a simple demographic scorecard are found to do as well or almost as well in reducing poverty however even with a budget sufficient to eliminate poverty with full information none of these targeting methods brings the poverty rate below about three quarters of its initial value the prevailing methods are particularly deficient in reaching the poorest

do government food price policies affect the prevalence of obesity empirical evidence from egypt summary obesity has become one of the most serious but neglected global public health problems especially in developing countries i examine the impact of the egyptian food subsidy program on mothers weight it is hypothesized that the program causes a wide disparity in per calorie costs between energy dense and energy dilute foods and thus aggravating the obesity problem the estimated elasticities reveal that mothers bmi is inversely related to the price of subsidized energy dense food and directly to the price of a high diet quality but expensive food items suggesting that the program aggravates obesity by lowering the direct costs of becoming obese

social capital and coping with economic shocks an analysis of stunting of south african children abstract south african households live in an environment characterized by risks and many face a significant probability of experiencing economic losses that threaten their daily subsistence using household panel data that include directly solicited information on economic shocks and employing household fixed effects estimation we explore how well households cope with shocks by examining the effects of shocks on child nutritional status unlike in the idealized village community some households appear unable to insure against risk particularly when others in their communities simultaneously suffer large losses households in communities with more social capital however seem better able to weather shocks

demand for factors of production in municipal police departments as the fiscal crises of municipalities deepen the search for ways to reduce the cost of providing municipal services increases in the production of police service the use of civilians to handle administrative jobs has mcrease in this regard the studies of demand for productive factors in municipal police departments becomes interesting several attempts have been made to estimate input demands or expenditure functions for police departments carr hill and stern 5 chapman et al 161 vatey and philips 231 pbifips and votey 201 greenwood and wadyeki 1121 ohls and wales 18 and ehrlich ll all have estimated the demand for factors as part of a simultaneous equation system most of these studies were not interested in the factor demands they were only necessary to estimate correctly the supply of offense equations same of the equations are no1 carefully specified and justified there are however some single equation studies hirsch 15 borcherding and deacon 4 bergstrom and goodman l and mcdougall i 61 all estimated police demand equations all the above studies use lhe cobb douglas or the ces functional form functional forms that are too restrictive in particular the assumptions of constant elasticity of substitution between inputs is unacceptable when there are more than two inputs second these studies have created police production as nonjoint even though police departments are considered as multiproduct firms producing a variety of outputs philips 19 has employed the constant difference elasticity production function to estimate factor demands in municipal police departments in

gender differentials in farm productivity implications for household efficiency and agricultural policy abstract within many african households agricultural production is simultaneously carried out on many plots controlled by different members of the household detailed plot level agronomic data from burkina faso provides striking evidence of substantial inefficiencies in the allocation of factors of production across the plots controlled by different members of the household production function estimates imply that the value of household output could be increased by 10 15 by reallocating currently used factors of production across plots this finding contradicts standard models of agricultural households a richer model of behaviour which recognizes that the individuals who comprise a household compete as well as co operate has important implications for the structure of agricultural production and for the design of agricultural policy

are urban poverty and undernutrition growing some newly assembled evidence abstract the population of the developing world is becoming more urban are poverty and undernutrition beginning to relocate to urban areas as well we use survey data on poverty from eight countries and on child undernutrition from 14 countries to address this question using data from the past 15 20 years we find that in a majority of countries the absolute number of poor and undernourished individuals living in urban areas has increased as has the share of overall poverty and undernourishment coming from urban areas given these trends and the current stock of knowledge as to the levels determinants and solutions to urban poverty and undernutrition we argue for more research on these issues

reaching the poor cash transfer program targeting in cameroon identifying and selecting poor households with efficient targeting methods is essential for effective poverty alleviation programs this paper assesses the ex post performance of two popular targeting mechanisms proxy means testing pmt and community based targeting cbt in a pilot cash transfer program in cameroon several indicators and metrics to measure each method s performance in terms of inclusion of poor households and exclusion of non poor households are employed results consistently show that cbt performs poorly in terms of selecting households with low per capita consumption when compared to pmt cbt appears to select households with low physical and human capital regardless of actual consumption level however cbt also shows more variability in the selection decision than pmt even when alternative poverty definitions are used as robustness tests the pmt method used in the pilot slightly outperforms other targeting methods hybrid alternative pmt and universal targeting with equal budget but errors remain high when selecting 35 of the population for program participation the results suggest caution is needed in employing cbt methods to select households with low per capita consumption in an environment where poverty levels are high and administrative capacities are limited cbt performance may be improved through more uniform and consistent guidance on program selection criteria and process including explicit criteria that enable cbt monitoring as well as a better integration between pmt and cbt

measuring food insecurity the frequency and severity of coping strategies abstract defining and interpreting food security and measuring it in reliable valid and cost effective ways have proven to be stubborn problems facing researchers and programs intended to monitor food security risks this paper briefly reviews the conceptual and methodological literature on food insecurity measurment describes a particular method for distinguishing and measuring short term food insecurity at the household level and discusses ways of generalizing the method the method developed enumerates the frequency and severity of strategies relied on by urban households when faced with a short term insufficiency of food this method goes beyond more commonly used measures of caloric consumption to incorporate vulnerability elements of food insecurity as well as the deliberate actions of household decision makers when faced with food insufficiency

the true effect of students employment on the duration of studies abstractwe examine the effect of the first degree students employment on the prolongation of their studies when employing a popular instrumental variable the regional unemployment rate we find a negative impact of students employment on duration of studies then adding a predetermined iv the individual s employment prior to the beginning of academic studies turns the estimate positive furthermore we find that the relationship between the extent of students employment and duration of their studies depends on their age among the younger students aged 22 26 the extent of employment has no effect on the duration of studies while among the older students the effect is positive and statistically significant

the effect of sibling sex composition on women s education and earnings this paper documents the impact of siblings on the education of men and women born in the united states between 1920 and 1965 we examine the effect of the number and sex composition of a boy or girl s siblings on that child s educational attainment we find that throughout the century women s educational choices have been systematically affected by the sex composition of her siblings and that men s choices have not women raised only with brothers have received on average significantly more education than women raised with any sisters controlling for household size since sibling sex composition affects women s educational attainment and plausibly may be unrelated to other determinants of earnings it may provide a useful instrument for education in earnings functions for women our results suggest that standard estimates significantly underestimate the return to schooling for women

a dynamic analysis of educational attainment occupational choices and job search this article examines career choices using a dynamic structural model that nests a job search model within a human capital model of occupational and educational choices wage growth occurs in the model because workers move between firms and occupations as they search for suitable job matches and because workers endogenously accumulate firm and occupation specific human capital simulations performed using the estimated model reveal that both self selection in occupational choices and mobility between firms account for a much larger share of total earnings and utility than the combined effects of firm and occupation specific human capital

targeting the poor in mexico an evaluation of the selection of households into progresa abstract in this paper we conduct an evaluation of the targeting method used by health education and nutrition program progresa of mexico to identify beneficiary households we address two key questions a how well does progresa s targeting perform and b how does the program perform in terms of its impact on poverty alleviation relative to other feasible methods and transfer schemes the first question is accomplished by comparing progresa s method to an alternative selection method based on household consumption which is our preferred measure of welfare we employ the concepts of undercoverage and leakage and find that progresa selection method is more effective in identifying the extremely poor localities or households but less so when it comes to distinguishing among localities or households in the middle of the scale to address the second question we compare the potential impact of progresa on poverty alleviation against uniform transfers that involve no targeting at all targeting based on consumption and geographic targeting i e targeting at the locality level rather than at the household level we find that progresa s method of targeting households outperforms uniform coverage and targeting at the locality level in terms of reducing the poverty gap and severity of poverty indices even after taking into account the economic costs of targeting but the closeness of progresa s performance to what could be achieved by geographic targeting alone raises some serious questions about the costs and benefits associated with the practice of household targeting within poor localities

labor supply and taxes a survey i survey the male and female labor supply literatures focusing on implications for effects of wages and taxes for males i describe and contrast results from three basic types of model static models especially those that account for nonlinear taxes life cycle models with savings and life cycle models with both savings and human capital for women more important distinctions are whether models include fixed costs of work and whether they treat demographics like fertility and marriage and human capital as exogenous or endogenous the literature is characterized by considerable controversy over the responsiveness of labor supply to changes in wages and taxes at least for males it is fair to say that most economists believe labor supply elasticities are small but a sizeable minority of studies that i examine obtain large values hence there is no clear consensus on this point in fact a simple average of hicks elasticities across all the studies i examine is 0 30 several simulation studies have shown that such a value is large enough to generate large welfare costs of income taxation for males i conclude that two factors drive many of the differences in results across studies one factor is use of direct vs ratio wage measures with studies that use the former tending to find larger elasticties another factor is the failure of most studies to account for human capital returns to work experience i argue that this may lead to downward bias in elasticity estimates in a model that includes human capital i show how even modest elasticities as conventionally measured can be consistent with large welfare costs of taxation

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

early childhood nutrition and academic achievement a longitudinal analysis abstract many policymakers propose early childhood nutrition programs as a way to increase students academic achievement this paper investigates the nutrition learning nexus using a unique longitudinal data set that follows a large sample of filipino children from birth until the end of their primary education we find that better nourished children perform significantly better in school partly because they enter school earlier and thus have more time to learn but mostly because of greater learning productivity per year of schooling our cost benefit analysis suggests that a dollar invested in an early childhood nutrition program in a developing country could potentially return at least three dollars worth of gains in academic achievement and perhaps much more

evaluating the impact of reforming the food subsidy program in egypt a mixed demand approach abstract food subsidy is one of the policies considered to protect consumer welfare against food price increases in particular when the insufficient local production has to be complemented by food imports with volatile prices egypt has experienced several food crises the latest in 2008 which put an halt to attempts to reform in depth the system of food subsidies because of social unrest in this paper we use a mixed demand approach to analyze the consumption structure of egyptian households our model specification takes into consideration the characteristics of the egyptian food subsidy system where some food items have predetermined quotas while others are associated with predetermined subsidized prices price income and quota elasticities are estimated from the egyptian family expenditure survey and welfare change measures are derived by income class simulations of various options to eliminate subsidies on selected food items are conducted we estimate the negative welfare impact of the reforms especially in the context of increasing food prices by comparing welfare effects of policy options by income quartiles and by household category rural urban

estimates of the economic returns to schooling from a new sample of twins this paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically identical twins with different schooling levels multiple measurements of schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting error on the estimated economic returns to schooling the data indicate that omitted ability variables do not bias the estimated return to schooling upward but that measurement error does bias it downward adjustment for measurement error indicates that an additional year of schooling increases wages by 12 to 16 percent a higher estimate of the economic returns to schooling than has been previously found copyright 1994 by american economic association

community college enrollment college major and the gender wage gap the literature on the narrowing of the gender wage gap during the 1980s considers among other factors the closing of the male female differential in post secondary education this paper looks specifically at the role played by the dramatic relative increase in women s enrollment in two year colleges with independent cross sections developed using nlsy data the authors find that the gender wage gap narrowed by 0 0469 log points between 1985 and 1990 and by 0 0932 log points between 1989 and 1994 the more pronounced decrease observed for 1989 94 is largely explained by erosion of male female differences in weeks worked job tenure and full time employment a more novel finding is evidence that while change in the quantity of education provides essentially no explanatory power disaggregating education by two year and four year providers and by major field of study accounts for 8 5 11 of the closing of the wage gap over the 1989 94 period

investment and technical progress models in which the growth rate is exogenous provide no role for government in determining growth in our model growth is associated with investment through externalities from learning by watching rather than with the level of the capital stock presumption of a technical progress function with first increasing and then decreasing returns leads to multiple steady state growth equilibria there is also an explicit role of government policy in setting tax rates on output it follows that two economies with identical structures and stochastic tax policies may exhibit very different growth paths over sustained periods although the stationary distribution of growth rates is the same given the desirability in principle of subsidizing investment various practical methods are considered copyright 1992 by oxford university press

the implicit taxes from college financial aid abstract families who earn more or who heed the experts advice and save for college typically receive less financial aid the financial aid system therefore implicitly taxes both income and assets we use npsas aid award data to estimate these implicit taxes and find that at average priced colleges the marginal income tax ranges from 2 to 16 and the marginal asset levy from 8 to 26 a typical family loses aid worth about 11 000 at average priced colleges and 15 000 at expensive colleges by accumulating an extra 50 000 in assets

semiparametric bayesian inference for dynamic tobit panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity summary this paper develops semiparametric bayesian methods for inference of dynamic tobit panel data models our approach requires that the conditional mean dependence of the unobserved heterogeneity on the initial conditions and the strictly exogenous variables be specified important quantities of economic interest such as the average partial effect and average transition probabilities can be readily obtained as a by product of the markov chain monte carlo run we apply our method to study female labor supply using a panel data set from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

whose education matters in the determination of household income evidence from a developing country the plan of this article is as follows section ii discusses the data used and presents a few descriptive statistics on headship in ghana and labor activities of ghanaian households section iii presents three simple paradigms about whose education matters in regression models of household income this section also describes the composition of household income and proposes the appropriate explanatory variables for estimation section iv describes the estimation methodology consistent estimates for the farm and off farm income functions are obtained by using j l powells censored least absolute deviations estimators standard errors are obtained by using a bootstrap methodology that mimics the two stage sample design section v contains a summary of the estimation results most notably the results suggest that the allocative effect is the largest effect for total income while the productivity effect appears to dominate when considering farming and nonfarming activities separately all specifications of household income and its components reject the use of the minimum level of household schooling as well as the schooling level of the head of the household section vi provides some concluding comments excerpt

market access by smallholder farmers in malawi implications for technology adoption agricultural productivity and crop income abstract in malawi maize is the major crop and food staple given limited off farm employment opportunities much needed increases in household income for improving food security must come from gains in agricultural productivity through better technology and more profitable crops in the past hybrid maize and more recently tobacco were promoted by policy for increasing smallholder income an analysis of determinants of adoption of these two crops and related income effects is presented apart from factor endowment and exposure to agroecological risks differences in the household s access to financial and commodity markets significantly influence its cropping shares and farm income

the flypaper effect and other anomalies abstract i develop a model in which income both in its own right and as a proxy for other socioeconomic characteristics is an input in the production function for local public services the most obvious example is education though there are other applications as well the comparative statics results from this model yield the following results 1 the observed flypaper effect the tendency for local government to spend a higher fraction of unrestricted grants than income of residents may be due at least in part to the fact that own income but not grants is a substitute for purchased inputs in the technology hence the propensity to spend on purchased inputs out of own income is lower than out of grants 2 the income elasticity of demand for public sector output may be higher than the observed income elasticity of demand for purchased inputs 3 equalization of educational opportunity via wealth neutrality as suggested by feldstein requires major changes in education finance once we recognice the distinction between purchased inputs and output

is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect evidence from a school feeding programme are public transfers targeted toward children neutralised by the household as the theory of altruism implies or is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect whereby such transfers stick to the child this paper studies the impact of a school feeding programme on child caloric intake in the philippines using a quasi experimental methodology the empirical results confirm an intrahousehold flypaper effect indeed they indicate virtually no intrahousehold reallocation of calories in response to the feeding programme in poorer households however children s gains from the programme appear to be taxed more heavily

pension portability and labor market efficiency a survey of the literature this paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature evaluating the labor market effects of policies to enhance pension portability one perspective is that reducing the cost of job change w

educational financing and lifetime earnings this paper formulates and estimates a dynamic programming model of optimal educational financing decisions the main purpose of the paper is to measure the effect of short term parental cash transfers received during school on educational borrowing and in school work decisions and on post graduation lifetime earnings the estimated parameters of the model imply that parental cash transfers do not significantly influence post graduation lifetime earnings long term factors such as family background and prior human capital investments are more important parental cash transfers do however significantly determine the decision to borrow or work during school and the level of lifetime consumption

repayment performance in group based credit programs in bangladesh an empirical analysis abstract this paper analyzes the repayment rates of 128 credit groups belonging to three group based credit programs in bangladesh the association for social advancement asa the bangladesh rural advancement committee brac and the rangpur dinajpur rural service rdrs using tobit analysis specific tests are performed on the following hypothesized determinants group size size of loans degree of loan rationing enterprise mix within groups demographic characteristics social ties and status and occurrence of idiosyncratic shocks the paper concludes that if basic principles of prudential banking are adhered to repayment rates can be good even in poor and remote communities the important thing for financial institutions is to tailor services such that it becomes worthwhile for the poor to establish a profitable long term association in addition more freedom to members in the process of group formation is recommended

are experience and schooling complementary evidence from migrants assimilation in the bangkok labor market abstract this paper models the assimilation process of migrants and shows evidence of the complementarity between their destination experience and upon arrival human capital bayesian learning is assessed using panel data of wages from bangkok thailand it is found that i schooling returns are lower for migrants than for natives ii the accumulation of destination experience raises wages for migrants iii the experience effect is greater for more educated agents and iv the complementarity increases as destination experience accumulates the results imply that more educated migrants have higher learning efficiency and can perform tasks of greater complexity ultimately yielding higher wage growth in the destination market

the contribution of associate s degree holders to u s earnings labor quality productivity and overall economic growth there is substantial evidence on the importance of education as a driver of earnings productivity and economic growth however knowledge of the specific role of associate s degrees in u s economic growth is limited we analyze the sources of u s economic growth and identify the contribution of associate s degree holders to improvements in earnings labor quality productivity and overall economic growth we find evidence that substitution toward workers with associate s degrees has increased u s earnings aggregate labor quality and productivity and that these effects are concentrated in the health care trade and government sectors while the average educational attainment of people entering the labor force has plateaued our results suggest that shifting workers from some college to associate degrees could improve earnings the quality of the workforce productivity and growth potentially without more time spent in school

trust membership in groups and household welfare evidence from kwazulu natal south africa unfortunately these two literatures have remained largely unconnected the group and network literature concludes that participation has important economic benefits even when the stated function of the group is noneconomic in most cases however the mechanisms by which groups and networks achieve this are unclear the determinants of trust and participation in groups literature highlights the importance of income and social homogeneity what remains less understood is whether and how trust can be generated for example via participation in groups this article links the empirical literatures referenced above by exploring the relationship between membership in groups and trust specifically using longitudinal data from kwazulu natal province south africa we examine 1 the importance of trust in the decision to join groups 2 the subsequent ability of groups to generate trust and 3 the effect of group membership and trust on a measure of well being per capita household income in addition we disaggregate groups into financial and nonfinancial and we categorize trust in people by agent or actor therefore we can explore whether trust in different kinds of actors is important for participation in different kinds of groups and whether participation in different kinds of groups is important for generating trust in different kinds of actors excerpt

poverty in egypt modeling and policy simulations abstract poverty profiles are a useful way of summarizing information on the levels of poverty and the characteristics of the poor in a society but they are limited by the bivariate nature of their informational content using the 1997 egypt integrated household survey eihs this article estimates models of household consumption in the first stage and then predicts poverty rates corresponding to changes in potential policy variables the key results of the study point to the important instrumental role of education parental background land redistribution and access to health facilities in alleviating poverty in egypt

working women in an urban setting traders vendors and food security in accra abstract data collected from a 1997 household survey carried out in accra ghana are used to look at the crucial role that women play as income earners and securing access to food in urban areas one third of the households surveyed are headed by women for all households women s labor force participation is high with 75 of all households having at least one working woman the high number of female headed households and the large percentage of working women in the sample provide a good backdrop for looking at how women earn and spend income differently than men in an urban area livelihood strategies for both men and women are predominantly labor based and dependent on social networks for all households in the sample food is still the single most important item in the total budget yet important and striking differences between men s and women s livelihoods and expenditure patterns exist compared to men women are less likely to be employed as wage earners and more likely to work as street food vendors or petty traders women earn lower incomes but tend to allocate more of their budget to basic goods for themselves and their children while men spend more on entertainment for themselves only despite lower incomes and additional demands on their time as housewives and mothers female headed households petty traders and street food vendors have the largest percentage of food secure households women may be achieving household food security but at what cost this paper explores differences in income expenditure and consumption patterns in an effort to answer this question and suggests ways that urban planners and policy makers can address special concerns to working women in urban areas

omitted ability bias and the increase in the return to schooling over the 1980s there were sharp increases in the return to schooling estimated with conventional wage regressions we explore whether the relationship between ability and schooling changed over this period in ways that would have increased the schooling coefficient in these regressions our empirical results reject the hypothesis that an increase in the bias of the schooling coefficient due to a change in the relationship between ability and schooling has contributed to observed increases in the return to schooling we also find that the increase in the schooling return has occurred for workers with relatively high levels of academic ability

leaving the safety net an analysis of dropouts in an urban conditional cash transfer program summary in poverty reduction programs a significant number of beneficiaries change program status an analysis of oportunidades data from urban mexico shows that beneficiaries that drop out for behavioral and administrative reasons are those who are marginally eligible improving targeting through minimizing errors of inclusion results also indicate that the very poorest recipients particularly in large urban areas and less marginal communities are more likely to drop out increasing the errors of omission households deemed ineligible through a recertification process were those that had obtained basic durables or changed their demographic composition implying that oportunidades retargeting is based on limited information

estimation of optimal human capital accumulation parameters for the netherlands abstract using the theory of optimal investments in human capital in general and rosen s 1975 1976 version of it in particular we tried to model and explain aggregate life cycle income profiles for the netherlands in 1965 1972 and 1979 the model allowed us to estimate and impute human capital accumulation parameters and paths changes in rates of return depreciation rates the value of the human capital stock and of lifetime human wealth could be identified and compared for the sample years it was found that in terms of some of these parameters public sector employees gained compared with private sector employees and employees with higher vocational training gained ground over university trained employees

the demand for and return to education when education outcomes are uncertain this article treats education as a sequential choice that is made under uncertainty a simple model is used to explore the effects of ability high school preparation preferences for schooling the borrowing rate and ex post payoffs to college on the probability of various post secondary college outcomes and the ex ante return to starting college the model motivates an empirical method of accounting for uncertainty about educational outcomes and for nonlinearity in the relationship between years of education and earnings when estimating the expected return to the first year of college

the robustness of poverty profiles reconsidered poverty measures and profiles are used increasingly to guide antipoverty policies in low income countries an essential element in these analyses is the specification of a poverty line however there are many different methods for setting poverty lines and different methods can yield strikingly different results with correspondingly different policy implications using recent household survey data from mozambique this paper explores the differences that occur using the most common poverty line methodologies the food energy intake fei and the cost of basic needs cbn methods over different levels of geographic specificity we find that regional and provincial rankings of foster greer and thorbecke poverty indices are not robust to the method of poverty line determination but that the characteristics of the poor are reasonably similar under all methods the fei poverty lines often yield counterintuitive results whereas the family of cbn poverty lines was more robust food consumption patterns of the poor show a high degree of substitution among basic staples from one region to another which is consistent with observed differences in relative food prices indicating that cbn poverty lines that allow for regional variation in the food consumption bundle may be most appropriate in these settings

the varied economic returns to postsecondary education new evidence from the class of 1972 this paper estimates the returns to postsecondary education using the national longitudinal survey of the class of 1972 with earnings measured at about age 32 the results are based on transcripts rather than self reports about the amount of education allowing postsecondary education to be more precisely described than usual the results confirm the well known returns to b a degrees other credentials associate degrees and certificates for women also lead to higher earnings and wage rates though indirectly these credentials gain individuals access to jobs where they accumulate more experience and on the job training but provide no further advantage once experience and ojt are controlled most individuals who enroll in postsecondary education but fail to complete credentials have no higher earnings than high school graduates the effects of experience high school achievement and family background are familiar the results indicate a fundamental difference between labor markets for college graduates and the sub baccalaureate labor market

post secondary fees and the decision to attend a university or a community college abstract this paper examines the effect that post secondary fees have on a potential student s decision to start his or her college education at a university or a community college a theoretical model demonstrates that the student s decision follows a natural ordering that depends on his or her probability of graduation based on this natural ordering ordered probit is used to estimate the effect of interstate variation in fees on student attendance the results indicate that the own price effects of fee increases are negative while the cross price effects are positive