education as liberation this paper studies the political and social impacts of increased education by utilizing a randomized girls merit scholarship programme in kenya that raised test scores and secondary schooling consistent with the view that education empowers the disadvantaged to challenge authority we find that the programme reduced the acceptance of domestic violence and political authority young women in programme schools also increased their objective political knowledge we find that this rejection of the status quo did not translate into greater perceived political efficacy community participation or voting intentions instead there is suggestive evidence that the perceived legitimacy of political violence increased

an evaluation of government sponsored vocational training programmes for the unemployed in urban russia this is the first study on the effects of active labour market programs such as training in russia we use the data from the official unemployment register combined with information from the follow up survey in a large industrial city in the year 2000 the method of propensity score matching was applied to learn whether participation in the training programmes increased the monthly salaries of participants the findings suggest that individuals tend to benefit from the participation in the training programmes however one year later this effect disappeared copyright 2005 oxford university press

sustainability aid and material welfare in small south pacific island economies 1900 1990 abstract the paper discusses the concept of sustainability and puts forward the argument that conventional notions of what constitutes economic development cannot be applied mechanistically to the very small island economies of the pacific in practice what matters is whether the entitlement of island communities to rent incomes remains sustainable this in turn requires that labor access to the modern capitalist economies of the region continues or is opened up and that the major regional powers continue to subsidize consumption levels in the small island countries unless or until those countries achieve a satisfactory level of rent income both of these conditions hinge upon the long run political commitment of aid donor governments to the welfare of island communities and on the skills of island politicians and officials in negotiating and maneuvering for access to aid funds from competing donors

corruption s direct effects on per capita income growth a meta analysis corruption is a symptom of weak institutional quality and could have potentially adverse effects on economic growth however heterogeneity in reported findings makes it difficult to synthesize the evidence base with a view to test competing hypotheses and or support evidence based policy and practice to address this issue we have extracted 327 estimates of corruption s direct effect on per capita gdp growth from 29 primary studies following a peer reviewed and pre published systematic review protocol precision effect and funnel asymmetry tests indicate that corruption has a negative effect on per capita gdp growth after controlling for publication selection bias and within study dependence however multivariate meta regression analysis results indicate that the overall effect is not robust to inclusion of moderating variables through a general to specific procedure for model specification we report that the marginal effect of corruption on per capita gdp growth is more adverse when the primary study estimates relate to long run growth are based on low income country data only and extracted from journal papers the effect is less adverse in studies that use the international country risk guide corruption perceptions index and in those reporting estimates from two stage least squares estimations

missing women age and disease relative to developed countries and some parts of the developing world most notably sub saharan africa there are far fewer women than men in india and china it has been argued that as many as a 100 million women could be missing the possibility of gender bias at birth and the mistreatment of young girls are widely regarded as key explanations we provide a decomposition of these missing women by age and cause of death while we do not dispute the existence of severe gender bias at young ages our computations yield some striking new findings 1 the vast majority of missing women in india and a significant proportion of those in china are of adult age 2 as a proportion of the total female population the number of missing women is largest in sub saharan africa and the absolute numbers are comparable to those for india and china 3 almost all the missing women stem from disease by disease comparisons and not from the changing composition of disease as described by the epidemiological transition finally using historical data we argue that a comparable proportion of women was missing at the start of the 20th century in the united states just as they are in india china and sub saharan africa today

the effectiveness of targeted wage subsidies for hard to place workers targeted wage subsidies paid to employers are an important element of active labour market policies in germany this article uses propensity score matching to investigate their effect on the employment and unemployment rates of subsidized hard to place workers in a first scenario we estimate the average treatment effect of a subsidy on previously unemployed individuals a second scenario analyses the effects of a subsidy on employment probabilities conditional on taking up employment the third scenario investigates the additional effect of a subsidy on individuals who have participated in a short term training measure beforehand summing up and in line with the literature the results show that subsidies have a favourable effect on the employment prospects of participants

programme evaluation with multiple treatments this paper reviews the main identification and estimation strategies for microeconometric policy evaluation particular emphasis is laid on evaluating policies consisting of multiple programmes which is of high relevance in practice for example active labour market policies may consist of different training programmes employment programmes and wage subsidies similarly sickness rehabilitation policies often offer different vocational as well as non vocational rehabilitation measures first the main identification strategies control for confounding variables difference in difference instrumental variable and regression discontinuity identification are discussed in the multiple programme setting thereafter the different nonparametric matching and weighting estimators of the average treatment effects and their properties are examined download discussion paper pdf 484 kb

the effectiveness of active labour market policies a meta analysis this paper provides a meta analysis of microeconometric evaluation studies on the effectiveness of active labor market policies the analysis is built upon a systematically assembled data set of causal impact estimates from 57 experimental and quasi experimental studies providing 654 estimates published between january 1990 and december 2017 we distinguish between the short and longer term impacts in our analysis at 6 12 24 and 36 months after program start after correcting for publication bias and country specific macroeconomic characteristics subsidized labor and public employment programs have negative short term impacts which gradually turn positive in the longer run schemes with enhanced services including job search assistance and training programs do not have these negative short term effects and stay positive from 6 until 36 months after program start

does increasing women s schooling raise the schooling of the next generation the positive cross sectional relationship between the schooling of mothers and their children is substantially biased upward due to correlations between schooling and heritable ability as well as assortative mating an increase in the schooling of women would not have beneficial effects in terms of the schooling of children increased maternal schooling leads to reduced home time for mothers anticipating the consequences of investing in women s schooling requires attention to the role that schooling plays in the marriage market as well as to opportunities in the labor market for women

effectiveness of sequences of one euro jobs for welfare recipients in germany empirical evidence reveals that german welfare recipients often participate in multiple active labour market programmes almps however evidence on the effectiveness of almps exists mostly for single almp participations so far this article evaluates the sequential participation in almps for welfare recipients in germany based on comprehensive administrative data to control for dynamic selection that arises in the evaluation of sequences using a dynamic causal model and an inflow sample of welfare recipients the article analyses the effects of sequences of a public employment programme called one euro jobs on labour market outcomes for female participants in one euro jobs in the first period especially in west germany the results imply that participating in two consecutive one euro jobs compared with receiving only welfare benefits for two consecutive periods better facilitates integration into regular employment moreover taking part in a one euro job directly after entry into welfare receipt is

integrating behavioral choice into epidemiological models of aids increased hiv risk creates incentives for people with low sexual activity to reduce their activity but may make high activity people fatalistic leading them to reduce their activity only slightly or actually increase it if high activity people reduce their activity by a smaller proportion than low activity people the composition of the pool of available partners will worsen creating positive feedbacks and possibly multiple steady states early public health efforts may allow societies to reach more favorable steady states excerpt

macroeconomic effects of active labour market programmes in a union wage setting model the recent western european policy debate on unemployment has emphasized the benefits of active labor market programs the authors analyze the effects on wage pressure and equilibrium employment in a union wage setting framework programs are wage reducing to the extent that they help maintain effective labor force participation but they may also weaken insider incentives for wage restraint as the disutility of layoffs becomes smaller targeting the long term unemployed is crucial for the success of active labor market policy since the welfare effects on the laid off then are more heavily discounted and employment opportunities are redistributed from insiders to outsiders copyright 1995 by royal economic society

picture this a simple graph that reveals much ado about research funnel graphs provide a simple yet highly effective means to identify key features of an empirical literature this paper illustrates the use of funnel graphs to detect publication selection bias identify the existence of genuine empirical effects and discover potential moderator variables that can help to explain the wide variation routinely found among reported research findings applications include union productivity effects water price elasticities common currency trade effects minimum wage employment effects efficiency wages and the price elasticity of prescription drugs

sexually transmitted infections sexual behavior and the hiv aids epidemic forty million people are infected with hiv worldwide twenty five million of them are in sub saharan africa this paper addresses the question of why africa has been so heavily affected by hiv and what explains the variation within africa i present a model that decomposes epidemic level into differences in sexual behavior and differences in viral transmission rates i argue using evidence drawn from the existing medical literature that africa has very high hiv transmission rates likely due to high rates of other untreated sexually transmitted infections while transmission rates in the united states are low the difference in transmission rates is large enough to explain the observed difference in prevalence between the united states and sub saharan africa the model also provides a good fit to cross country data within africa and suggests that in contrast to the intracontinental results differences within that continent can be attributed to differences in sexual behavior and epidemic timing the results suggest that cost effective policy interventions would focus on decreasing transmission rates within africa possibly by treating other untreated sexually transmitted infections authors

beyond publication bias abstract this review considers several meta regression and graphical methods that can differentiate genuine empirical effect from publication bias publication selection exists when editors reviewers or researchers have a preference for statistically significant results because all areas of empirical research are susceptible to publication selection any average or tally of significant insignificant studies is likely to be biased and potentially misleading meta regression analysis can see through the murk of random sampling error and selected misspecification bias to identify the underlying statistical structures that characterize genuine empirical effect meta significance testing and precision effect testing pet are offered as a means to identify empirical effect beyond publication bias and are applied to four areas of empirical economics research minimum wage effects union productivity effects price elasticities and tests of the natural rate hypothesis

meta analysis of economics research reporting guidelines meta regression analysis mra can provide objective and comprehensive summaries of economics research their use has grown rapidly over the last few decades to improve transparency and to raise the quality of mra the meta analysis of economics research network maer net has created the below reporting guidelines future meta analyses in economics will be expected to follow these guidelines or give valid reasons why a meta analysis must deviate from them

unemployment in britain male unemployment in britain has risen from around 2 per cent in the 1950s to around 17 per cent in 1985 see figure 1 the figures are for male unemployment because there is no consistent series for women 1 even more remarkably unemployment has fallen in only three years out of the last twenty 1973 1978 and 1979 to account for this we need a model that explains both changes in the natural or non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu and deviations from it we use a three equation supply side model centred on the labour market this has two main features the first concerns the determination of employment in the short run the labour demand function that we use cuts through the fruitless debate now raging especially in europe as to whether current unemployment is classical or keynesian according to the classical view employment is too high because real wages are too high according to the keynesian view real wages are not binding and unemployment is high because the product market does not clear with prices too high relative to nominal demand the whole debate is set in the framework of perfect competition yet in perfect competition prices are set by impersonal forces and it is not clear what could possibly stop prices clearing the market it is much more reasonable to think of prices as being set by imperfectly competitive firms existing prices being the best they can think of given the demand they face in this context firms demand for labour will depend on both the real product wage and the level of real aggregate demand this is the demand function we estimate and it conforms both to common sense and to the data however this does not imply that employment can be made to grow without limit by pumping up real demand for in the medium term when price surprises are eliminated our model determines three variables employment real wages and real demand on the basis of three equations an employment equation a price equation and a wage equation thus in the medium term there is a natural level of employment and corresponding to this a natural level of real aggregate demand the second key feature of our model concerns the medium term determination of unemployment in the medium term the planned mark up of wages over prices in wage settlements must be consistent with the mark up of prices over wage costs in employers pricing behaviour for if wage setters try to set real product wages higher than is consistent with employers pricing behaviour this generates ever increasing inflation thus the key to understanding unemployment in the medium term is the behaviour of wage setters if events occur that push them towards too high real wages then unemployment has to rise to offset these influences we shall call these influences wage pressure variables or push factors and they are clearly crucial in understanding unemployment the variables here include the social security system employment protection

mother s education and the intergenerational transmission of human capital evidence from college openings we examine the effect of maternal education on birth outcomes using vital statistics natality data from 1970 to 1999 we also assess the importance of four channels through which maternal education may improve birth outcomes use of prenatal care smoking marriage and fertility in an effort to account for the endogeneity of education attainment we use data about the availability of colleges in the womans country in her 17th year as an instrument for maternal education we find that higher maternal education improves infant health as measured by birth weight and gestational age it also increases the probability that a new mother is married reduces parity increases use of prenatal care and reduces smoking suggesting that may be important pathways for the ultimate effect on health our results add to the growing body of literature which suggests that estimates of the returns to education which focus only on increases in wages understate the total return

experimental evidence on the effects of early meetings and activation we analyze the effects of four randomized social experiments involving early and intensive active labour market policy conducted in denmark in 2008 the experiments entailed different combinations of early and intensive treatment in terms of meetings and active labour market programmes we find that frequent meetings between newly unemployed workers and case workers can increase employment rates over the next two years by up to 10 weeks the effects continue to grow over the whole 4 year horizon studied for men we find evidence of a threat effect of having to participate in early active labour market programmes while no such effect is found for women we conduct a cost benefit analysis of each ofthe four experiments and find that meetings yield the largest net benefits

effectiveness of active labor market tools in conditional cash transfers programs evidence for argentina summary this paper examines the impact of the program seguro de capacitacion y empleo sce implemented to provide support in skills upgrading job seeking and job placement to eligible beneficiaries of the argentinian conditional cash transfer program plan jefes the sce is an example of a growing trend observed in latin america where labor activation components have been increasingly included into cash transfers programs to support beneficiaries in finding more stable income opportunities despite this growing trend not enough is known regarding the effectiveness of these components especially on job quality in this context this paper sheds light on whether the provision of a comprehensive package of active labor market measures contributes to a successful labor market integration of cash transfers beneficiaries taking advantage of the panel structure of the permanent household survey and exploiting the time variation in the assignment of the program as identification strategy we apply difference in difference estimators to measure the impact on a number of labor market indicators we find that the program affects positively the job quality of participants by increasing the probability of having a formal job and raising hourly wages moreover the intervention is associated with a lower probability of having a low paid job and working an excessive number of hours these effects are however not homogeneous across all groups of participants while the program is more successful among the younger beneficiaries it does not contribute to an improvement in the labor market conditions of female beneficiaries who in fact are the majority of sce participants our results suggest that reducing dependency on monetary transfers through programs such as the sce that are rich in activation components is beneficial for participants labor market trajectories and therefore it constitutes a satisfactory exit strategy to more universal cash transfer programs

evaluation of swedish youth labor market programs this paper evaluates two swedish active labour market programmes for youth namely youth practice and labour market training a non parametric matching approach is applied to estimate the average p

how to help unemployed find jobs quickly experimental evidence from a mandatory activation program abstract this paper investigates how a mandatory activation program in denmark affects the job finding rate of unemployed workers the activation program was introduced in an experimental setting where about half of the workers who became unemployed in the period from november 2005 to march 2006 were randomly assigned to the program while the other half was not it appears that the activation program is very effective the median unemployment duration of the control group is 14 weeks while it is 11 5 weeks for the treatment group the analysis shows that the job finding rate in the treatment group is 30 higher than in the control group this result is mainly driven by the more intensive contacts between the unemployed and the public employment service

the effect of work first job placements on the distribution of earnings an instrumental variable quantile regression approach government employment programs for low skilled workers typically emphasize rapid placement of participants into jobs of which many are temporary help jobs using data from detroit s welfare to work program and the chernozhukov hansen instrumental variables quantile regression method we find that neither direct hire nor temporary help job placements significantly affect the lower tail of the earnings distribution in the upper tail direct hire placements yield sizable earnings increases for over half of participants while temporary help placements yield significant earnings losses at higher quantiles our results cast doubt on the efficacy of employment programs exclusive focus on rapid job placement and their widespread reliance on temporary help placements

education hiv and early fertility experimental evidence from kenya a seven year randomized evaluation suggests education subsidies reduce adolescent girls dropout pregnancy and marriage but not sexually transmitted infection sti the government s hiv curriculum which stresses abstinence until marriage does not reduce pregnancy or sti both programs combined reduce sti more but cut dropout and pregnancy less than education subsidies alone these results are inconsistent with a model of schooling and sexual behavior in which both pregnancy and sti are determined by one factor unprotected sex but consistent with a two factor model in which choices between committed and casual relationships also affect these outcomes

do labor market opportunities affect young women s work and family decisions experimental evidence from india do labor market opportunities for women affect marriage and fertility decisions we provided three years of recruiting services to help young women in randomly selected rural indian villages get jobs in the business process outsourcing industry because the industry was so new at the time of the study there was almost no awareness of these jobs allowing us in effect to exogenously increase women s labor force opportunities from the perspective of rural households we find that young women in treatment villages were significantly less likely to get married or have children during this period choosing instead to enter the labor market or obtain more schooling or postschool training women also report wanting to have fewer children and to work more steadily throughout their lifetime consistent with increased aspirations for a career copyright 2012 oxford university press

employment and earnings effects of awarding training vouchers in germany participation in intensive training programs for the unemployed in germany is allocated by awarding training vouchers using rich administrative data for all vouchers and actual program participation the authors provide first estimates of the short run and long run employment and earnings effects of receiving a training voucher award based on a selection on observables assumption the results imply that after the award voucher recipients experience long periods of lower labor market success compared to had they not received training vouchers small positive employment effects and no gains in earnings were observed four to seven years after the receipt of the voucher award in addition the findings suggest stronger positive effects both for all low skilled individuals who were awarded and redeemed a voucher and for low skilled and medium skilled individuals who chose to take degree courses than for higher skilled recipients

schooling information and nonmarket productivity contraceptive use and its effectiveness information from two u s fertility surveys on couples knowledge about and use of specific contraceptives are used to estimate the technology of human reproduction in order to examine the association between schooling and productivity in the household sector the results indicate that more schooled couples have a wider knowledge of contraceptive methods use more efficiently those contraceptive methods for which there is little information and large scope for misuse and are better able to mitigate the effects of their biological constraints fecundity on their fertility compared to less schooled couples excerpt

the effects of human capital interventions on entrepreneurial performance in industrialized countries this paper provides a systematic review of studies on the effects of human capital interventions on entrepreneurial performance in industrialized countries we identify 21 experimental and quasi experimental studies published before september 2018 these studies examine the effects of business training formal education and entrepreneurship education their performance outcomes include firm profits firm size and entrepreneurial earnings the main finding across these studies is that these interventions do not have statistically significant effects formal education is the only exception showing positive effects on firm profits and entrepreneurial earnings yet these effects are small in magnitude evidence is inconclusive regarding effect duration these findings stand in stark contrast to correlational studies which tend to find large positive correlations between human capital interventions and entrepreneurial performance we therefore conclude that correlational studies tend to overestimate the benefits of human capital interventions moreover our estimates show that the interventions are associated with moderately low additionality

a microeconometric evaluation of the active labour market policy in switzerland in the second part of the 1990 s switzerland conducted an ambitious active labour market policy almp encompassing a wide variety of programmes we evaluate the effects of these programmes on the individual employment probability of potential participants our econometric analysis uses unusually informative data origi nating from administrative unemployment and social security records we apply a matching es timator adapted for the case of multiple programmes we find substantial positive effects for one particular programme that is a unique feature of the swiss almp it consists of a wage subsidy for temporary jobs in the regular labour market that would otherwise not be taken up by the unemployed we also find large negative effects for traditional employment programmes oper ated in sheltered labour markets for training courses the results are mixed doi 10 1111 1468 0297 00072 download internet appendix pdf 2 590 kb

education and fertility evidence from a natural experiment declining fertility is often attributed to the increased education of women it is difficult to establish a causal link because both fertility and education have changed secularly in this paper we study the connection between fertility and education using educational reform as an instrument to control for selection our results indicate that increasing education leads to postponement of first births away from teenage motherhood and towards women having their first birth in their 20s as well as for a smaller group up to the age of 35 40 we find no evidence however that more education results in more women remaining childless or having fewer children

active labour market policies a case of evidence based policy making the 1990s was a decade of renewed enthusiasm for active labour market policies however it is not clear that this was the result of an appreciation of the evidence on the effectiveness of different policies relatively simple and cost effective initiatives to improve matching and to enhance job search appear to have a significant impact on employment training programmes generally do not produce better outcomes there is no convincing evidence that work programmes improve employment and recruitment subsidies often suffer from low take up however a strategy appears to be emerging in the uk and the usa by design or by accident of trying to use job search focused programmes to move people into regular employment and then to subsidize households especially with children so that their net incomes can come above the poverty line most of this expenditure could be classified as good old fashioned fiscal redistribution to the poor copyright 2000 by oxford university press

active labor market policy evaluations a meta analysis this article presents a meta analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies we categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007 job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective training programmes are associated with positive medium term impacts although in the short term they often appear ineffective we also find that the outcome variable used to measure programme impact matters but neither the publication status of a study nor the use of a randomised design is related to the sign or significance of the programme estimate

publication selection and the income elasticity of the value of a statistical life abstract estimates of the value of a statistical life vsl establish the price government agencies use to value fatality risks transferring these valuations to other populations often utilizes the income elasticity of the vsl which typically draw on estimates from meta analyses using a data set consisting of 101 estimates of the income elasticity of vsl from 14 previously reported meta analyses we find that after accounting for potential publication bias the income elasticity of value of a statistical life is clearly and robustly inelastic with a value of approximately 0 25 0 63 there is also clear evidence of the importance of controlling for levels of risk differential publication selection bias and the greater income sensitivity of vsl from stated preference surveys

the effects of welfare to work program activities on labor market outcomes studies examining welfare to work program effectiveness present mixed and sometimes discrepant findings partly due to research design data and methodological limitations using administrative data on missouri and north carolina welfare recipients we substantially improve on past estimation approaches to identify the distinct effects of each state s welfare to work subprograms assessment job search assistance and job readiness training and more intensive programs designed to augment human capital more intensive training is associated with greater initial earnings losses but also greater long run earnings gains the negative program impacts we observe in quarters immediately following participation turn positive by the second year after participation