Misreporting of Government Transfers: How Important Are Survey Design and Geography?

Recent studies linking household surveys to administrative records reveal high rates of misreporting of program receipt. We use the FoodAPS survey to examine whether the findings of these studies of general household surveys using one or two states generalize to a survey with a narrow focus and across many states. First, we study how reporting errors differ from other surveys. We find a lower rate of false negatives (failures to report true receipt) in FoodAPS, likely partly due to the shorter recall period of FoodAPS. Misreporting varies with household characteristics and between interviewers. Second, we examine geographic heterogeneity in survey error to assess whether we can extrapolate from linked data from a few states. We find systematic differences between states in unconditional error rates but no evidence of substantial differences conditional on common covariates. Thus, extrapolating error rates across states may yield more accurate receipt estimates than uncorrected survey estimates.     

Separating uncertainty from heterogeneity in life cycle earnings

This paper develops and applies a method for decomposing crosssection variability of earnings into components that are forecastableat the time students decide to go to college (heterogeneity)and components that are unforecastable. About 60% of variabilityin returns to schooling is forecastable. This has importantimplications for using measured variability to price risk andpredict college attendance.     

The Poverty of Politics: How Income Redistribution Hurts the Poor

In spite of the significant research literature identifying a tradeoff between income redistribution and economic growth, massive public programs have been implemented to help the poor by transferring income to them. Since Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty began in 1964, over 3.5 trillion dollars have been transferred. However, the possibility that everyone, including the poor, may in fact be made worse off by the transfer has largely been ignored. With a simple algebraic model, the authors demonstrate that, over time, both high and low-income groups are harmed by redistribution. In addition, social mobility, as well as political concerns with relative poverty and international income redistribution increases the damage to all income groups produced by redistribution.     

DOES MOTHER'S EDUCATION MATTER IN CHILD'S HEALTH? EVIDENCE FROM SOUTH AFRICA1

Using the 1993 South Africa Integrated Household Survey, this paper studies the effect that mother's education through the knowledge channel has on children's health using height for age Z‐scores as health measure. Under a two‐stage least square methodology we find that an increase in 4 years on mother's education (approximately 1 standard deviation) will lead to an increase of 0.6 standard deviations on her child's height for age Z‐score. We also find, as the medical literature suggests, support for the hypothesis that mother's education is more important for children older than 24 months of age.     

Accounting Conservatism and the Temporal Trends in Current Earnings’ Ability to Predict Future Cash Flows versus Future Earnings: Evidence on the Trade‐off between Relevance and Reliability*

This research reports that an increasing level of accounting conservatism over the 1973–2005 period is associated with: (1) an increase in the ability of current earnings to predict future cash flows and (2) a decrease in the ability of current earnings to predict future earnings. We also find that usefulness of earnings for explaining stock prices over book values is positively related to reliability but not to relevance. Our results hold for the constant and full samples in both in‐sample and out‐of‐sample analyses and are robust to the use of alternative measures for relevance, reliability, earnings usefulness, and conservatism. Our findings about the relations among conservatism, relevance, reliability, and usefulness suggest a trade‐off between relevance and reliability and seem to indicate that the adoption of an increasing number of conservative accounting standards has a possible adverse impact on earnings usefulness through a negative effect on reliability.     

COST AND QUALITY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR HOME COMMUNITY-BASED CARE SERVICES TO ORPHANS AND VULNERABLE CHILDREN

The encouragement of care of orphans and vulnerable children by non-profit organisations (NPOs) is a major policy response to the HIV and AIDS epidemic in South Africa. The purpose of this article is to present a quality–cost model with five performance indicators for quality and two for costs and to test these against actual performance using data collected from nine rural and urban organisations in 2004 and 2005. Six NPOs had acceptable cost but all had unacceptable quality scores; three had unacceptable cost and unacceptable quality scores. Each rural caregiver had many more orphans and vulnerable children beneficiaries than their urban counterparts but made fewer total visits. As a result, urban beneficiaries received, on average, 3.5 times more visits than their rural counterparts. The results suggest the need for different performance indicators and expectations for rural and urban NPOs and that monitoring and evaluation using the model could improve horne community-based care services.     

Beyond Income: What Else Predicts Very Low Food Security Among Children?

We examine characteristics and correlates of households in the United States that are most likely to have children at risk of inadequate nutrition—those that report very low food security (VLFS) among their children. Using 11 years of the Current Population Survey, plus data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), we describe these households in great detail with the goal of trying to understand how these households differ from households without such severe food insecurity. While household income certainly plays an important role in determining VLFS among children, we find that even after flexibly controlling for income‐to‐poverty rates some household characteristics and patterns of program participation have important additional explanatory power. Finally, our examination of the NHANES data suggests an important role for both mental and physical health of adults in the household in determining the food security status of children.     

Faculty Gender in the College Classroom: Does It Matter for Achievement and Major Choice?

Many feel that faculty members of the same gender may serve as role models, helping students to perform better in classes and encouraging them to continue in a subject. However, while higher education research has found evidence of positive effects of matching on gender, there are also many findings of zero impact. The main hurdle in this literature is identifying the exogenous impact in the absence of student sorting by gender. This article addresses this difficulty by using institutional data from a private liberal arts institution to examine outcomes for students in courses taught by new faculty members for which the students would not know the gender before registering. Results provide evidence of a role model effect for both genders; students earn higher grades in courses taught by same‐gender instructors in fields traditionally dominated by the opposite gender. Major choice and course‐taking behavior are mostly unaffected by faculty gender.     

AN ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT OF PEDAGOGIC INTERVENTIONS IN FIRST-YEAR ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT AND MAINSTREAM COURSES IN MICROECONOMICS

This paper analyses the impact of pedagogic interventions in first-year academic development and mainstream courses in microeconomics on students' performance in the final examination. The data for six cohorts, covering the years 1999 and 2001-2005, are pooled, and the Heckman two-part procedure is used to account for those students who started the course but did not write the final examination. The results suggest that the pedagogic interventions have a positive impact on the performance of academic development students relative to the mainstream cohort and on the performance of mainstream students.