城镇居民教育收益率及其分布特征

本文以中国居民收入分配课题组2002年城镇住户调查数据为基础,利用分位回归分析方法讨论城镇居民教育收益率与收入条件分布之间的关联形式。本文的基本结论表明,在收入条件分布较高的分位点上,所对应的教育收益率相对较低,即教育收益率随着收入等级的提高而下降;另一方面,收入函数中引入不同类型的控制变量将会影响到平均的教育收益率估计水平,这也在一定程度上影响到教育收益率的分布特征。就方法论来说,分位回归分析可能为教育收益率估计中如何剔除能力因素所造成的偏差提供了一种解决办法;就政策意义而言,本文的结论表明,教育扩展可能更有利于低收入人口的收入的增长。当然,在施加不同类型控制变量的过程中,我们也发现就业特征对于教育收益率具有非常重要的影响,这不仅表明我国劳动力市场具有分割特性,也可能意味着就业或职业获得成为收入差距扩张的重要因素。     

The returns to education and wage penalty from overeducation: New evidence from Vietnam

This study intends to estimate the rate of returns to education in Vietnam, the distributive effects of education on wages, and the wage penalty from the incidence of overeducation in the Vietnamese labor market during 2004–2016. This study employs a pseudo-panel approach to address omitted variables bias and the unconditional quantile regression to identify the heterogeneity of returns to education across the income distribution. Our main finding indicates that the estimated rate of returns to education in Vietnam is approximately 6.5%, showing a downward bias from previous estimates. The returns vary across wage distributions, where a lower rate of return is observed in lower quantiles and a higher rate among those individuals at the higher quantiles. The returns to education have declined since 2008, confirming the oversupply of highly educated workers in the Vietnamese labor market with an estimated wage penalty of 17%. Government assistance measures are needed to reduce the overeducation and the wage penalty issues in the Vietnamese labor market.     

公共部门与非公共部门收入差异的变迁

基于社会阶层动态演化理论,本文提出了部门收入差异阶段性假说。随后利用CHNS面板数据实证检验了该假说。结果表明,第一阶段(1989—1997年),在较高的收入层次上,非公共部门比公共部门具有明显的收入优势,并且这一收入优势随着收入水平的提高而提高。非公共部门的教育回报率也更高;第二阶段(2000—2009年),在中低收入分位数上,公共部门比非公共部门表现出明显的收入优势。在较高的收入分位数上,非公共部门不再具有收入优势。在较高的教育水平上,两大部门的教育回报率接近。同时,两个阶段中在较低和较高收入分位数上表现出的部门收入差异主要源自部门特征因素。实证研究支持了阶段性假说,为我国收入分配结构性调整提供了启示。     

A Quantile Regression Analysis of Wages in Panama

Differences in the effects of worker characteristics on wages in Panama at different points of the conditional wage distribution are investigated. Public sector employment increases wages relatively more at lower quantiles. Within the public sector, employment in that sector increases wages of the median worker and reduces wage inequality. Presence of a labor union increases relatively more private sector wages at lower quantiles. Unions reduce wage inequality within the union private sector and increase average wages within that sector. In the public sector, the presence of a labor union increases wages of men at lower quantiles at a lower rate than in the private sector. Self-employment decreases wages at lower quantiles and increases wages at higher quantiles. Urban location affects wages in a U-shaped pattern as one moves from lower to higher quantiles. Rates of return to experience are higher for men at higher quantiles. Experience increases men's wage inequality.     

Individual heterogeneity in the returns to schooling: instrumental variables quantile regression using twins data

Considerable effort has been exercised in estimating mean returns to education while carefully considering biases arising from unmeasured ability and measurement error. Recent work has investigated whether there are variations from the “mean” return to education across the population with mixed results. We use an instrumental variables estimator for quantile regression on a sample of twins to estimate an entire family of returns to education at different quantiles of the conditional distribution of wages while addressing simultaneity and measurement error biases. We test whether there is individual heterogeneity in returns to education and find that: more able individuals obtain more schooling perhaps due to lower marginal costs and/or higher marginal benefits of schooling and that higher ability individuals (those further to the right in the conditional distribution of wages) have higher returns to schooling consistent with a non-trivial interaction between schooling and unobserved abilities in the generation of earnings. The estimated returns are never lower than 9 percent and can be as high as 13 percent at the top of the conditional distribution of wages but they vary significantly only along the lower to middle quantiles. Our findings may have meaningful implications for the design of educational policies.     

Monetary environments and stock returns revisited: A quantile regression approach

We investigate the impact of monetary conditions on stock market returns at different points on the return distributions. Our results reveal no association between stock returns and monetary environments at the lower quantiles. At the upper quantiles, however, we find that expansive monetary conditions lead to significantly larger stock returns. The relationship between returns and monetary conditions at the upper quantiles is also found to be asymmetric, exhibiting a monotonic increase in responsiveness at successive quantiles.     

Investor sentiment and the prediction of stock returns: a quantile regression approach

We employ quantile regression to provide a detailed picture of the stock return forecasting ability of investor sentiment. We find that investor sentiment predicts aggregate stock returns at lower quantiles. However, the forecasting power is lost at upper quantiles. The results are robust after controlling for a comprehensive set of macroeconomic and financial predictors and for characteristic portfolios. We also show that investor sentiment consists mainly of cash flow news and contains little information about discount rate news. The ability to forecast cash flows increases gradually from the lower quantiles to upper quantiles. Our results do not support that the ability of investor sentiment to predict stock returns comes from a rational forecast of future cash flows.     

The impact of education expansion on wage inequality

The findings on education expansion and income inequality have important implications for policymakers to implement effective policies to reduce income inequality. This study attempts to explain how education expansion affects income inequality by education distribution and the rate of return to education. We decompose the effect of education expansion on wage gaps into price effect and structure effect. We compare the income inequality from 2002 to 2013 using the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) 2002 and CHIP2013 survey data and employ FFL decomposition method. Our findings suggest that income inequality increased in 2013 and that income inequality among the high-income groups increased even more significantly. The structure effect of education expansion on income inequality is negative, when average education increases one year, the income gap between 80th and 20th will decrease 1.2%, in other words, education expansion decreases income inequality by allowing a wide range of individuals to attend college. However, this effect is offset by the price effect, which is positive and much more significant in magnitude. One extra year of average education will increase income gap by 29% which means that the demand for high-skilled labour is increasing faster than the supply and thus lead to the increasing premium for higher education return.     

Spillovers from the USA to stock markets in Asia: a quantile regression approach

This article analyses return spillovers from the USA to stock markets in Asia by means of quantile regressions. Traditional studies consider spillovers as effects of the conditional means of foreign returns onto the conditional means of chronologically succeeding domestic markets’ returns. We, by contrast, study the full range of quantiles of the conditional distribution of the domestic markets’ returns. This enables us to document the detailed structure of spillovers across return quantiles. Generally, we find spillovers from the USA to Asia to be negative. Specifically, however, we reveal an asymmetric structure of spillovers with an increasing negative magnitude from lower to upper return quantiles. Theoretically, this pattern is consistent with an asymmetric overreaction of traders in Asia to news from the US market. Extensions from the baseline model further suggest the presence of contagion throughout the financial crisis of 2007–2008 as well as of calm-down effects over weekends.     

农村人力资本高等教育投资的影响因素探析

高等教育阶段,影响农村人力资本投资的因素很多,包括农村居民收入的低水平循环增长、教育机会的不均等、农村家庭高等教育投资与收益的不对称和农村人力资本高等教育收益率较低等。     

人力资本回报率变化与收入差距:“马太效应”及其政策含义

在分析人力资本回报率变化对收入差距影响的基础上,本文运用抽样调查数据估计了教育回报率及其随教育程度和收入水平的变化。结果发现,中国目前的教育回报率仍然不高,总体来看,每增加1年教育,个人收入会增加4.34%;同时,教育回报率还展现出随收入水平增加而增加的趋势,最高95%收入者的教育回报率是最低5%收入者的2倍多。教育回报率变化的“马太效应”意味着收入差距不断扩大是市场失败的产物,在这种情况下,要缩小收入差距,人力资本投资必须更多地向穷人倾斜。     

Migrants’ international transfers and educational expenditure

The primary objective of this article is to cast some light upon the relationship between education expenditure and the volume of remittances sent to Albania from abroad by international migrants. To assess the existence of an education enhancing effect of remittances, an Engel curve framework is used. In addition, quintile regression analysis is employed to investigate whether migrants’ remittances have a differentiated effect on various quantiles of the conditional distribution of education consumption. The two main empirical findings are that household income has a positive and well‐determined impact on education expenditure, whereas international transfers do not influence education spending.     

The effects of demographics and maternal behavior on the distribution of birth outcomes

This paper utilizes quantile-regression techniques in order to estimate the effects of demographics and maternal behavior during pregnancy at various quantiles of the birthweight distribution. Due to the high costs and long-term effects (both medical and economic) associated with low-birthweight babies, there is a great deal of interest in quantifying these effects, particularly at the lower end of the birthweight distribution. Using large samples of 1992 and 1996 births in the United States, the quantile-regression estimates indicate that several factors (including race, education, and prenatal care) have a significantly higher impact at lower quantiles and lower impact at higher quantiles. These effects at lower quantiles are underestimated by least-squares regression estimates. The inequality in birthweights implied by these results is quite significant, and there is little indication that the inequality has changed much in recent years.     

Heterogeneity in Ability and Inheritance,Disparities, and Development

This paper investigates the impact of income inequality on economic growth. A two-period overlapping generations model is developed where agents are heterogeneous in innate abilities and inheritance. In the first period, they receive their inheritance and their abilities are revealed. There are only two types of abilities: high and low. Individuals decide on their education level, and divide their inheritance between spending on education and saving. In the second period, individuals supply their labor and allocate the labor income and the return to their saving between consumption and bequests to their offsprings. Initial capital stock is owned entirely by the capitalists. In this context, a more equal distribution of income enhances economic growth if the economy is lower than a threshold capital-labor ratio, while income inequality has an insignificant effect above this threshold. The predictions of the model are tested empirically using the Hansen (1999) threshold estimation. The results, using a panel of 70 countries for the period 1971-1999, suggest that there is a statistically significant threshold income per capita, below which the coefficient on the relationship between inequality and economic growth is significantly negative and above which the estimate is not significant.     

DYNAMIC STOCK RETURN–VOLUME RELATION: EVIDENCE FROM EMERGING ASIAN MARKETS

This paper empirically examines the dynamic stock return–volume relations for six emerging Asian markets: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. Evidence is found that trading volume Granger causes stock return in quantiles and the causal effects of volume are heterogeneous across quantiles. This shows that volume carries some information to the return and could be interpreted in light of theoretical models. In addition, we find that there is bi‐directional causality between stock return and trading volume in most of the markets. The finding indicates that those Asian emerging markets with different institutions and information flows than more mature markets have present similar causal effects on the stock return–volume relation. Furthermore, the cross‐country evidence shows that the US market helps to predict the returns of the emerging Asian markets.     

社会资本对收入水平及差异的影响是扩大还是减少*——来自12省份城市居民的样本

本文基于CHIP（中国家庭收入调查）（2002年）数据,实证研究了我国城市居民的社会资本对其收入水平和差异的影响。在其他条件相同的情况下,居民收入会随着自身社会资本的改善而提高。社会资本对收入差距的影响可以分解为两种不同的机制：（1）即使个体的社会资本相同,由于社会资本的收入回报率的异质性,社会资本在不同的收入群体中会产生扩大收入差距的影响;（2）给定社会资本的收入回报率相同,个体社会资本量的异质性也会扩大收入差距。笔者用分位数回归方法分析了社会资本的收入回报率在不同收入水平上的分布,从而验证了第一类机制。给定社会资本的收入回报率相同,使用夏普利值分解的方法发现,个体社会资本量的异质性会加剧收入差距的扩大,但是这一贡献并没有区域、行业特征等因素显著。随后的实证分析检验了社会资本对收入确实有提高作用,同时也分析出社会资本可能会缩小收入差距。这加深了我们对于社会资本在经济发展中微观机制的理解,并对制定消除收入差距的政策有指导意义。     

Is Mobility in the United States Still Alive? Tracking career opportunities and income growth

Longitudinal data are used to compute income and earnings mobility in the 1970s and 1980s. The various strengths and weakness of different perspectives on mobility are assessed, with the change in real income or earnings being chosen as the one that most closely resembles the common-sense meaning of progress or decline. Care is taken to choose the proper age ranges and to define quantiles on the basis of 10-year income or earnings. Based on the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, this paper finds the share of family income losers among prime-age adults rose from 21% in the 1970s to 33% in the 1980s. This jump is reflected in a corresponding jump in the share of male earners with declining earnings over the same time period. Female earners, however, worked 44% more in the 1980s than the 1970s and fewer were on declining earnings paths. In terms of sub-populations, lower income and less educated groups had larger increases of income and earnings losses.     

Does speculation Granger cause return in Chinese commodity markets?

We test the Granger causal relations between speculation and returns in Chinese commodity markets using quantile regression method. We find that speculation Granger causes returns in rebar, bean pulp and rapeseed oil markets. At lower quantiles, estimates are negative; but estimates are positive at upper quantiles. This indicates that larger speculation results in larger return volatility.     

The impact of income,economic openness and interest rates on housing prices in China: evidence from dynamic panel quantile regression

The rapid growth of housing prices has attracted the attention of the whole of society in China. This article adopts the dynamic panel quantile regression to investigate the impact of income, economic openness and interest rates on housing prices in China, based on the panel data of 35 major cities from 2002 to 2012. Compared with previous studies, we can more precisely and reasonably discuss the impact of these variables on different levels of housing prices. The empirical results indicate that the impact of independent variables on housing prices is heterogeneous across quantiles. Specifically, the impact of income is positive and significant across quantiles, and the impact becomes greater at the 90th and 95th quantiles. Economic openness has a positive and significant effect at the 5th–80th quantiles, which support the Balassa–Samuelson effect, but it is insignificant at the 90th and 95th quantiles. The impact of interest rates is positive and significant at low quantiles, but the impact is negative and insignificant at high quantiles. Furthermore, we also find that the coefficients of interest rates at various quantiles are smaller. In addition, the population has a significant positive effect across quantiles. Finally, we provide important policy implications.