Gender,Sibling Order,and Differences in the Quantity and Quality of Education: Evidence from Japanese Twins*

Using information on 1045 pairs of Japanese monozygotic twins, we examined differences in education by considering both the years of schooling (quantity) and the reputation of the last attended school (quality). We found that a difference in learning performance at 15 years of age is one of the key factors determining the differences. We also found that a female eldest child in the family from the 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts averaged 0.54 years less schooling than did her ‘younger’ twin. However, for the same birth cohorts, a male eldest child in the family generally had access to higher‐quality education than his ‘younger’ twin. Nonetheless, as the Japanese economy matured in the 1970s and thereafter, educational differences between twins disappeared, regardless of gender and sibling order.     

Effects of Japanese compulsory educational reforms on household educational expenditure

This study investigates the effects of the 2002 Japanese reforms of compulsory education on household expenditure on supplementary schooling and out-of-school activities for junior high school students. These reforms marked a dramatic change in Japan's compulsory education system in two main respects: from April 2002, every Saturday became a public school holiday and instructional time was reduced following the government's revisions of national curriculum guidelines, leaving private schools largely unaffected. Based on aggregate data taken from the Child Study Expenditure Survey, the difference-in-differences estimation—households with children attending public schools as the treatment group and those attending private schools as the control group—reveals that the 2002 educational reforms increased target household expenditure on supplementary education by 13% and spending on outdoor activities/volunteering, arts, sports, and cultural activities by 23%. Disaggregated analysis based on microdata taken from the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure carried out by the Bureau of Statistics further reveals that the impacts of these educational reforms were larger for higher-income households than for lower-income ones.     

Early Experience and Later Outcomes of Education: Schooling Transition Evidence from Indonesia

This paper investigates the effect of early school experience on later educational attainment. Using the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), we find that students who repeat a grade at primary school are less likely to progress to junior high school. We also find that grade retention is associated with lower rates of transition from junior high school to senior high school. The relationship persists across years and samples. Meanwhile, the age of students when starting school and the hours they spend there have limited effects on whether they continue their schooling. We also observe that the effects of parental education and household income on the transition of students from primary school to junior high school are weakening. Given the long-term impact of grade retention, policymakers should be cautious when recommending it for underachieving children and should look for alternatives.     

Reproducing Difference? Schooling,Jobs, and Empowerment in Uttar Pradesh,India

This article examines the role of school education in reproducing caste and class inequalities in rural Bijnor district, Uttar Pradesh, India. Drawing on Bourdieu’s work, the article shows that a rural elite has used its superior wealth, connections, and social status to ensure that their sons receive privileged access to schooling credentials and government employment. The greater availability of formal educational opportunities allied to the political rise of lower castes has allowed a small group of Dalits to raise their social standing, but has failed to alter historical relationships of dependence and exploitation.     

The impact of parental education on children’s outcomes in China

This paper exploits the exogenous shock to basic education during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to estimate the causal relationship between parental schooling and children’s educational attainment in China. Using deviations of cohort graduation rates from predicted education trends as instruments for parents’ education, the results indicate that an additional year of parental education increases children’s probability of completing junior and senior high schools by 7.94 and 9.76%, respectively. Parental education not only has positive and significant effects on children’s schooling outcomes, its importance also increases with children’s education level. These findings suggest that public investment in education has important long-term effects on individual’s educational achievement.     

Regional patterns of employment changes of less-educated men in Japan: 1990–2007

We investigate regional patterns in employment of less-educated men in Japan from 1990 to 2007. The employment–population ratio of junior high school graduate men (9 years of compulsory schooling) decreased from 1990 to 2007. Wage growth across regions had a unique pattern during this period: it was high in the low-wage regions in the 1990s but high in the high-wage regions in the 2000s. We use these regional variations in wage growth to identify the labor supply elasticity of less-educated men. The estimated elasticity of the employment-to-population ratio of junior high school graduate men is around 0.15.     

新课标下初中地理“活动”栏目的教学探讨

针对初中地理新教材增设"活动"栏目以及研究性学习的开展,依据初中教学的理念和地理教学大纲的要求,该文探讨初中地理"活动"栏目的课堂教学。     

The progress of school education in India

This paper provides an overview of school education in India.First, it places India's educational achievements in internationalperspective, particularly against countries with which it isnow increasingly compared, especially China. Second, the paperexamines schooling access in terms of enrolment and school attendancerates, and schooling quality in terms of literacy rates, learningachievement levels, school resources, and teacher inputs. Third,the paper investigates the role of private schooling in India,examining the extent of growth of private schooling and surveyingevidence on the relative effectiveness and unit costs of privateand public schools. Last, the paper discusses some major publiceducation initiatives. The concluding section suggests a futureresearch agenda and appeals for rigorous evaluation of the impactsand costs of the numerous existing educational interventions,in order to learn about their relative cost-effectiveness forevidence-based policy-making.     

Wage Returns to Schooling in Nigeria

Abstract: In the last two decades, primary and secondary school enrollment rates have declined in Nigeria while enrollment rates in post‐secondary school have increased. This paper estimates from the General Household Survey for Nigeria the private returns to schooling associated with levels of educational attainment for wage and self‐employed workers. The estimates for both men and women are small at primary and secondary levels, 2–4 percent, but are substantial at post‐secondary education level, 10–15 percent. These schooling return estimates may account for the recent trends in enrollments. Thus, increasing public investment to encourage increased attendance in basic education is not justifiable on grounds of private efficiency, unless investments to increase school quality have higher private returns. With high private returns to post‐secondary schooling, students at this level should pay tuition, to recoup more of the public costs of schooling, which may be redistributed to poor families through scholarships.     

Pain of disasters: The educational cost of exogenous shocks evidence from Tangshan Earthquake in 1976

Based on a random sample from 1 percent population survey data of 2005, this paper studies the impacts of Tangshan Earthquake on the educational attainment and subsequent labor market outcomes of affected cohorts using the methodology of difference-in-differences model and the local average treatment effect interpretation of instrumental variables technique. We find that the schooling years of the cohorts potentially affected by Tangshan Earthquake is 14%–21% of a year of schooling lower than the non-earthquake cohorts, which can be considered as the shortterm educational cost of Tangshan Earthquake. The rate of returns to years of schooling for the earthquake cohorts is 20.93%–27.85%. The earthquake leads 3.51%–4.77% loss of average income through the reduction of schooling years. A loss of 0.30%–0.41% of GDP in 2005 can be attributed to the lower educational attainment of the earthquake cohorts, which can be considered as the long-term educational cost of Tangshan Earthquake.     

The demographic cycle and optimal schooling choices

A model is developed that enables the authors to estimate the effects of demographic cycles on both earnings and schooling. The model is tested using data from the 1991 Korean Occupational Wage Survey. The results indicate that cohorts following large birth cohorts in the cycle choose relatively less formal schooling compared to pre-peak cohorts, and that post-peak cohorts also have lower incomes. This result concerning South Korea is consistent with findings from previous studies concerning the United States.     

China＇s Regional Disparity and Its Policy Responses

The fruits of China＇s rapid economic development over the 3 decades have not been distributed fairly across different regions. Using data from a sample of 815 Chinese listed firrns during 1998-2004, our error-correction investment model showes evidence of different financial constraints on firms＇ investment in different regions. We argue that China＇s regional development policies have contributed greatly to the regional inequalities. To control the rising inequality, China has shifted its focus from the coast to the interior regions. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the government to direct the economy, as market mechanisms now have afar greater influence on the economy than the government does. The people-centered approach of the current leadership has meant that substantial attention has been placed on regional development disparities in an attempt to build a ＂harmonious society. ＂ China needs further extensive reforms if all the measures for reducing regional disparity are to be effective.     

Black-White Inequality in Reading and Math Across K-12 Schooling: A Synthetic Cohort Perspective

While much has been written on the racial gap in achievement, few national studies have assessed the gap’s trajectory over K-12 schooling. The reason for this is understandable—most national data sets do not contain respondent information for this entire educational period. I utilize survey data from three national data sets containing White and Black students to document the trajectory of reading and math inequality between school entry and the end of high school. An attempt to clarify these observed patterns is made by assessing changes in the score distributions of these students across grade level, and examining how Black score distributions would fare if held to the White score distributions. Findings suggest that efforts to equalize achievement disparities must not only focus on “bringing the bottom up”, but also on keeping the top Black achievers on pace with the top White achievers across grade level.     

Can school centralization foster human capital accumulation? A quasi-experiment from early twentieth-century Italy

This article shows that a shift towards a more centralized school system can benefit countries that are characterized by poor levels of human capital and large regional disparities in education. In 1911, Italy moved from a fully decentralized primary school system towards centralization through the Daneo-Credaro Reform. The design of the Reform allows us to compare treated municipalities with those that retained school autonomy. Our quasi-experiment, based on propensity score matching (PSM), shows that centralization substantially increased the pace of human capital accumulation. Treated municipalities were characterized by a 0.43 percentage-point premium on the average annual growth of literacy between 1911 and 1921. We discuss some of the channels through which the new legislation affected primary schooling and literacy, with important implications for long-term economic growth.     

School quality and educational attainment: Japanese American internment as a natural experiment

In 1942, the United States incarcerated all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, including children, in internment camps. Using non-West Coast Japanese Americans and non-Japanese Asians as control groups, I estimate the effect of attending a War Relocation Authority school on educational attainment. Non-linear difference-in-differences estimates suggest that attending school within the internment camps decreased the probability of receiving a post-collegiate education by approximately 4 to 5 percentage points and decreased the probability of receiving a college degree by between 2 and 7 percentage points. I find some evidence that attending a WRA school may have decreased the returns to education as well. By using un-incarcerated birth cohorts and races, placebo tests find no evidence that the identifying assumptions are violated.     

Does Education Still Pay Off in Rural China： Revisit the Impact of Education on Off-farm Employment and Wages

The present study considers how education affects off-farm job participation and wages. We use a nationally representative dataset from a survey conducted in 5 provinces, 101 villages and 808 households by the authors in early 2005. The empirical results show that educational attainment, skill training and years of experience of rural residents have positive, statistically significant effects on off-farm employment. The average return to a year of education is 7percent, which is higher than those observed in previous studies. We also find the return to an additional year of schooling to be higher for post-junior high schooling than for junior high and below schooling： 11.8 versus 3.2 percent. We conclude that not only does education still pays off in rural China, but also the rate of return to education is increasing over time.     

人口统计学因素对管理人员情绪劳动影响的实证研究

文章通过实证研究的方式,研究了中国情境下人口统计学因素对管理人员情绪劳动的影响,得到了以下结论：学历对情绪劳动的影响有整体性差异,表现为拥有大专及以上学历的管理人员情绪劳动显著高于高中（中专）学历的管理人员;管理人员情绪劳动整体在性别、年龄和婚姻状况上没有显著性差异,但在其三个维度上有所差异。并以此为基点,提出了相应的管理建议。     

对外贸易与国内产业地理：来自新经济地理学的研究综述

一国的对外贸易往往是塑造国内产业地理的重要力量。本文基于新经济地理学的视角综述了对外贸易与国内产业地理的相关研究,着重从理论渊源、城市经济、地区差距等角度分析一国贸易开放后国内制造业分布的空间变化,并对中国的对外贸易与东中西部产业空间结构的文献做了评述。在总结目前研究进展的基础上,文章最后得出了相关研究启示。     

Returns to education in China: Evidence from the great higher education expansion

China experienced a near 5-fold increase in annual Higher Education (HE) enrolment in the decade starting in 1999. Using the China Household Finance Survey, we show that the Great HE Expansion has exacerbated a large pre-existing urban-rural gap in educational attainment underpinned by the hukou (household registration) system. We instrument the years of schooling with the interaction between urban hukou status during childhood and the timing of the expansion – in essence a difference-in-differences estimator using rural students to control for common time trends. We find that the Great HE raised earnings by 17% for men and 12% for women respectively, allowing for county fixed-effects. These Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) estimates, which are robust to additional controls for hukou status at birth fully interacted with birth hukou province, can be interpreted as the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) of education on earnings for urban students who enrolled in HE only because of the Great HE Expansion. For the selected subsample of respondents with parental education information, we find that the 2SLS returns for students from more disadvantaged backgrounds are at least as high as their more advantaged counterparts, for both genders.     

Putting trained labour power to work: the dilemma of education and employment

Demographic factors and educational changes are producing, in many less developed countries, a "pushdown effect" in which recent graduates are forced to take jobs that would earlier have been filled by those with less education. In Indonesia, for example, 1990 senior high school graduates will have to take jobs that were filled by junior high school graduates in 1980 as a result of increases in the supply of educated manpower. While the increase in employment positions in Indonesia is under 5%/year, the number of graduates from junior high school, senior high school, and universities is exceeding this increase. Each year, there is an excess of 2.60 junior high school graduates and 3.83 senior high school graduates/1000 labor force in terms of availability of the types of jobs filled by people with these educational qualifications in 1980. The pushdown effect has further resulted in a fall in the educational differential of income. Between 1976-86, earnings for employees with less than a primary school education quintupled while those for employees with college degrees did not even triple. The presence of large numbers of disillusioned, overqualified workers in the labor force is a potential source of social unrest and there is a need for serious attention to the changing relationship of job and educational status. Possible solutions to this discrepancy include: expansion of the economy; restructuring of economic workers; reorientation of the educational system to enhance the productivity of graduates; raising the status of employment in agriculture and rural small industry; and acceptance by the labor force that the pushdown effect is an inevitable stage of the development process.