Impact of Sibship Size,Birth Order and Sex Composition on School Enrolment in Urban Turkey*

This paper investigates, in a unified framework, the effects of sibship size, birth order and sibling sex composition on children's school enrolment in urban Turkey. We utilize an instrumental variable estimation method to address parents’ joint fertility and schooling decisions using twin births as instruments. We find no causal impact of sibship size on school enrolment. However, there is evidence for a parabolic impact of birth order where middle‐born children fare worse. Sex composition of siblings matters only for female children. Our finding that birth order and sibling sex composition matter more for poorer households suggests that scarce financial resources play an important role in bringing about the sibling composition effects.     

Peer Effects: Evidence from Secondary School Transition in England

We estimate the effect of peers' prior achievement on student progress in secondary school, using administrative data on four cohorts of students in England. Students leaving primary for secondary school experience a big change in their peer group and these changes vary randomly from cohort to cohort. We exploit this variation to identify the effect of new peers on student achievement. We show that peer quality on entry to secondary school has a significant effect on students' subsequent achievement at age 14. The effect sizes are relatively small and are linked to peers' family background and early age achievements.     

Estimates of the return to schooling and ability: evidence from sibling data

We use sibling data on wages, schooling, and aptitude test scores from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) to obtain OLS, family fixed effects, and fixed effects instrumental variable estimates of the return to schooling for a large sample of non-twin siblings. Following recent studies that use identical twin samples, we use sibling-reported schooling as an instrument for self-reported schooling. Controlling for aptitude test scores has a substantial impact on estimated returns to schooling even within families, and there is a large return to test scores that is comparable in size within and between families. We also find that the return to schooling is higher for older brothers than for younger brothers and for women than men. Finally, because the NLSY79 contains multiple sibling reports of education for the same individual, we are able to test and reject the overidentifying restrictions for the validity of sibling-reported schooling as an instrumental variable.     

Who benefits from privileged peers? Evidence from siblings in schools

By comparing siblings attending the same school at different points in time, we investigate whether the effect of peer quality on long-term labor market outcomes varies with parental background. We find that exposure to better peers—who have higher mean parental education—increases lifetime earnings of disadvantaged students, coming from families with low parental education, but penalizes privileged students from better educated families. These results suggest that desegregation policies that allocate disadvantaged students to schools with better peers produce long-term benefits. We discuss mechanisms and show that human capital accumulation, ordinal rank and network effects contribute to explain our findings.     

Using Compulsory Mobility to Identify School Quality and Peer Effects

Education production functions that feature school and student fixed effects are identified using students' school mobility. However, student mobility is driven by factors like parents' labour market shocks and divorce. Movers experience large achievement drops, are more often minority and free meal students, and sort endogenously into peer groups and school types. We exploit an English institutional feature whereby some students must change schools between grades 2 and 3. We find no evidence of endogenous sorting of such compulsory movers across peer groups or school types. Non‐compulsory movers bias school quality estimates downward by as much as 20% of a SD.     

Do Apprenticeships Pay? Evidence for England

The importance of apprenticeships for early labour market transitions varies across countries and over time. In recent times, there has been a policy drive to increase the number of people undertaking apprenticeships in England. This is regarded as important for addressing poor productivity. We investigate whether there is a positive return to undertaking an apprenticeship for young people. We use detailed administrative data to track recent cohorts of young school leavers as they transition to the labour market. Our results suggest that apprenticeships lead to a positive average earnings return (at least in the short run), although there is stark variation between sectors. This is an important driver of the gender gap in earnings.     

An Analysis of the Value Added by Secondary Schools in England: Is the Value Added Indicator of Any Value?*

This paper argues that the value added score published for all publicly funded secondary schools in England is an unreliable indicator of school performance. A substantial proportion of the between‐school variation in the value added score is accounted for by factors outside the school's control. These factors include several pupil‐related variables such as the proportion of pupils on free school meals, the authorized absence rate of pupils and the proportion of pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds. The value added score is also related to several school characteristics such as the school's admission policy and its subject specialism. The main policy recommendation of this paper is that the value added score should not be used as a performance indicator, but should be used to gain a better understanding of why the value added score varies between schools.     

DO PEERS AFFECT STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT? EVIDENCE FROM CANADA USING GROUP SIZE VARIATION

We provide the first empirical application of a new approach proposed by Lee (Journal of Econometrics 2007; 140 (2), 333–374) to estimate peer effects in a linear‐in‐means model when individuals interact in groups. Assumingsufficient group size variation, this approach allows to control for correlated effects at the group level and to solve the simultaneity (reflection) problem. We clarify the intuition behind identification of peer effects in the model. We investigate peer effects in student achievement in French, Science, Mathematics and History in secondary schools in the Province of Québec (Canada). We estimate the model using conditional maximum likelihood and instrumental variables methods. We find some evidence of peer effects. The endogenous peer effect is large and significant in Mathematics but imprecisely estimated in the other subjects. Some contextual peer effects are also significant. In particular, for most subjects, the average age of peers has a negative effect on own test score. Using calibrated Monte Carlo simulations, we find that high dispersion in group sizes helps with potential issues of weak identification. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Age at immigration and school performance: A siblings analysis using swedish register data

This article analyzes the role of age at immigration for the school performance gap between native and immigrant pupils in Sweden. The analysis exploits within-family variation in a large set of register data on immigrant siblings (and native children) graduating from compulsory school (normally at age 16) between 1988 and 2003. The critical age at arrival is about nine, above which there is a strong negative impact on performance. The slopes of these age-at-immigration performance profiles are similar for boys and girls as well as for children from different family backgrounds, but they vary widely by region of origin. Moreover, the estimated profiles are flatter for Mathematics than for a range of subjects taken together. This demonstrates the importance of Sweden-specific skills. A comparison of sibling-difference and cross-sectional estimates reveals that they are strikingly similar.     

Knowledge Spillovers and Alliance Formation

Our study examines the conditions under which firms enter into strategic alliances subsequent to knowledge spillovers. We propose that spillovers serve as signals of knowledge dependence and potential complementarity, encouraging alliance formation to enable better learning and limit appropriation. We posit that the likelihood of a knowledge alliance subsequent to a spillover is contingent on the specialization of each of the firms in the knowledge involved in the spillover. We also hypothesize that the effects of such specialization on knowledge alliance formation are moderated by technological ties and geographic distance between the dyad involved in the spillover. Our results demonstrate significance for the effects of specialization, supporting learning and appropriation motivations. Technological ties strengthen while geographic distance weakens the relationship between specialization and alliance formation.     

Ethnic enclaves in the classroom

We use data on elementary-school students to investigate how the home language and other characteristics of a student's same-grade schoolmates influence that student's academic achievement. We exploit the availability of multiple cohorts of data within each school to control for endogenous selection by incorporating school fixed effects in the model. We also exploit the longitudinal structure of the data to estimate value-added models of the educational production function. We find that attending an “enclave” school provides a slight net benefit to Chinese home-language students and a large net cost to Punjabi home-language students. The results are consistent with a simple peer effects mechanism in which the academic achievement or behavior of peers is much more important than their home language.     

Regulation in education

This paper analyses inefficiencies in community composition resulting from peer group effects in education. We depart from the existing literature in two essential ways. Firstly, we introduce heterogeneity between communities (one community is more productive than another if its school produces the same educational quality at lower cost), and secondly, we introduce informational asymmetries by assuming that education, in each community, is financed by local public funds and produced by a school which has private information about its cost when it is privatized.     

Racial Fractionalization and School Performance

The literature on racial “peer effects” suggests that diversity improves at least some students' school performance. However, a literature in economic development posits that diversity may negatively affect school performance by undermining the efficient provision of education. This article empirically tests this claim, which we call the “public goods channel,” by examining the relationship between racial diversity and student performance in Ohio's school districts. We find that moving from a completely homogenous school district to one in which two racial groups have equal population shares is associated with a 7–17.5 percentage point decline in the passage rate on the state math exam, holding per pupil spending across districts constant. These results suggest that racial diversity is negatively associated with school performance but that the public goods channel is not responsible for this relationship.     

Reexamining the time-varying volatility spillover effects: A Markov switching causality approach

This paper intends to examine the volatility spillover effect between selective developed markets including U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan and Hong Kong over the sample period from 1996 to 2011. We introduce a Markov switching causality method to model the potential instability of volatility spillover relationships over market tranquil or turmoil periods. This method is more flexible as no prior information on the changing points or size of sample window is needed. From the empirical results, we find the evidence of the existence of spillover effects among most markets, and the bilateral volatility spillover effects are more prominent over turmoil or crisis episodes, especially during Asia crisis and subprime mortgage crisis periods. Moreover, the distinct role of each market is also investigated.     

Urban density and pupil attainment

We explore the association between urban density and pupil attainment using three cohorts of pupils in schooling in England. Although—as widely recognised—attainment in dense urban places is low on average, this is not because urban environments disadvantage pupils, but because the most disadvantaged pupils with low average attainments attend the most urbanised schools. To control for this, we exploit changes in urban density faced by pupils during compulsory transition from Primary to Secondary school, and measure educational progress at the end of the Secondary phase, relative to attainment at the end of Primary schooling. Our results suggest that there are small but significant benefits from education in schools in more densely urbanised settings. We detect this density advantage even amongst pupils moving relatively short distances between Primary and Secondary schools within urban areas, so we cannot attribute it to broad urbanisation effects experienced by pupils making rural–urban school moves. A more likely explanation lies in greater school choice and competition between closely co-located educational providers.     

Peer effects and textbooks in African primary education

Textbooks could be a cheap and efficient input to primary school education in Africa. In this paper, we examine the effects of textbooks on student outcomes and separate between direct effects and externalities. Using the rich data set provided by the ‘Program on the Analysis of Education Systems’ (PASEC) for five Francophone, sub-Saharan African countries, this paper goes beyond the estimation of direct effects of textbooks on students' learning and focuses on peer effects resulting from textbooks owned by students' classmates. Using nonparametric estimation methods, we separate the direct effect of textbooks from their peer effect. The latter clearly dominates but depends upon the initial level of textbook availability.     

The Effect of School Size on Exam Performance in Secondary Schools

This paper investigates the relationship between school size and the exam performance of school pupils in their final year of compulsory education. Previous studies of this relationship have been seriously constrained by lack of appropriate data, but the publication of the School Performance Tables for all publicly-funded schools in England since 1992 permits the construction and testing of a multivariate model which includes school size as one of the explanatory variables. After controlling for factors such as type of school, teaching inputs and eligibility for free school meals, the partial effects of school size on exam performance are estimated. The primary result is that there is a non-linear relationship (in the form of an inverted-U) between school size that maximizes the exam performance of schools is estimated to be about 1,200 for 11–16 schools and 1,500 for 11–18 schools. These estimates are considerably higher than the current mean size of schools.     

FDI forward spillover effects in emerging markets: A comparative meta-analysis of China and Eastern Europe

Using two unique datasets of 530 forward estimates from 19 studies on China and 942 forward estimates from 28 studies on Eastern European transition economies, this study quantitatively analyzes foreign direct investment forward spillover effects, accounting for various biases and firm attributes in existing empirical results using a meta-regression analysis. We find that aggregation bias, misspecification bias, endogeneity bias (including simultaneity bias and omitted-variable bias), and publication bias, as well as firm attributes, contribute to the heterogeneity in forward spillover estimates; and that the preferred forward spillover effects are positive but nonsignificant. Interestingly, the preferred forward spillover effect is likely to be much larger in Eastern European transition economies than in China.     

Is bitcoin a safe haven or a hedging asset? Evidence from China

Based on daily data about Bitcoin and six other major financial assets (stocks, commodity futures (commodities), gold, foreign exchange (FX), monetary assets, and bonds) in China from 2013 to 2017, we use a VAR-GARCH-BEKK model to investigate mean and volatility spillover effects between Bitcoin and other major assets and explore whether Bitcoin can be used either as a hedging asset or a safe haven. Our empirical results show that (i) only the monetary market, i.e., the Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate (SHIIBOR) has a mean spillover effect on Bitcoin and (ii) gold, monetary, and bond markets have volatility spillover effects on Bitcoin, while Bitcoin has a volatility spillover effect only on the gold market. We further find that Bitcoin can be hedged against stocks, bonds and SHIBOR and is a safe haven when extreme price changes occur in the monetary market. Our findings provide useful information for investors and portfolio risk managers who have invested or hedged with Bitcoin.     

Publish or teach? Analysis of the professor's optimal career path

This paper analyzes how faculty members dynamically allocate their efforts between improving their research and teaching skills, taking into account the organizational structures and incentives implemented by academic institutions. The model builds on the assumption that organizational structures have an impact on the nature of spillover effects between teaching and research competencies. We analyze the dynamic equilibrium under unilateral and bilateral spillovers, using the no-spillover case as a benchmark. The bilateral spillover case is the most appealing as it achieves the highest overall performance; however, the nature of the equilibrium and the career paths can be quite different depending on the parameters of the problem such as the obsolescence of competencies or the strength of the spillover effect. This finding provides interesting insights on what could be the most productive configuration of a higher education institution.