Balancing family and work: The effect of cash benefits for working mothers

The aim of this paper is to measure the potential effect of a family policy introduced in Spain in 2003 that provides working mothers with a monthly cash benefit of 100 euros per child aged under 3 years. We explore the effect of the policy on eligible women's labour market participation. In the tradition of the policy evaluation literature we use a difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) estimation approach. Our results support a small but significant positive effect of the policy. We find that since the implementation of the policy the labour market participation rate for mothers of children aged under 3 has risen by 3 percentage points compared to the rate for non-policy-eligible females. This represents 5% of their average labour market participation in 2002, the year before the policy was implemented. This overall policy effect is dominated by the effect of the policy among high school educated females.     

幼儿自我保护能力的调查研究

本文采用结构访谈法,以3-6岁的120名幼儿为研究被试,探讨了幼儿自我保护能力的现状。结果表明,从总体上来看,幼儿自我保护能力良好,从各维度上来看,幼儿的游戏活动自护、意外防护能力较好,生活活动自护能力次之,心理自护能力较差,城乡差异和年级差异在某些维度上也是存在差异的;中班是进行幼儿自我保护教育的关键时期。     

Estimating intergenerational schooling mobility on censored samples: consequences and remedies

In this paper we estimate the impact of parental schooling on child schooling, focus on the problem that children who are still in school constitute censored observations, and evaluate three solutions to it: replacement of observed with expected years of schooling, maximum likelihood approach, and elimination of all school‐aged children. Using intergenerational data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study we test how the three correction methods deal with censored observations. The one that treats parental expectations as if they were realizations seems to fix the censoring problem quite well. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic treatment effect analysis of TV effects on child cognitive development

We investigate whether TV watching at ages 6–7 and 8–9 affects cognitive development measured by math and reading scores at ages 8–9, using a rich childhood longitudinal sample from NLSY79. Dynamic panel data models are estimated to handle the unobserved child‐specific factor, endogeneity of TV watching, and dynamic nature of the causal relation. A special emphasis is placed on the last aspect, where TV watching affects cognitive development, which in turn affects future TV watching. When this feedback occurs, it is not straightforward to identify and estimate the TV effect. We develop a two‐stage estimation method which can deal with the feedback feature; we also apply the ‘standard’ econometric panel data approaches. Overall, for math score at ages 8–9, we find that watching TV during ages 6–7 and 8–9 has a negative total effect, mostly due to a large negative effect of TV watching at the younger ages 6–7. For reading score, there is evidence that watching no more than 2 hours of TV per day has a positive effect, whereas the effect is negative outside this range. In both cases, however, the effect magnitudes are economically small. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do dropouts suffer from dropping out? Estimation and prediction of outcome gains in generalized selection models

In this paper we describe methods for predicting distributions of outcome gains in the framework of a latent variable selection model. We describe such procedures for Student‐t selection models and a finite mixture of Gaussian selection models. Importantly, our algorithms for fitting these models are simple to implement in practice, and also permit learning to take place about the non‐identified cross‐regime correlation parameter. Using data from High School and Beyond, we apply our methods to determine the impact of dropping out of high school on a math test score taken at the senior year of high school. Our results show that selection bias is an important feature of this data, that our beliefs about this non‐identified correlation are updated from the data, and that generalized models of selectivity offer an improvement over the ‘textbook’ Gaussian model. Further, our results indicate that on average dropping out of high school has a large negative impact on senior‐year test scores. However, for those individuals who actually drop out of high school, the act of dropping out of high school does not have a significantly negative impact on test scores. This suggests that policies aimed at keeping students in school may not be as beneficial as first thought, since those individuals who must be induced to stay in school are not the ones who benefit significantly (in terms of test scores) from staying in school. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

School calendars,child care availability and maternal employment

A year-round calendar redistributes schools days around the year. This paper studies how this redistribution of school days, and therefore child care days available through school, affects maternal employment. The presence of year-round calendars in a district could be correlated with other district level attributes that might affect female employment rates. I therefore use a differencing method that compares the influence of district year-round enrollment on the employment rates of women with school-aged children relative to women whose eldest child is pre-school-aged. Unobserved district factors should affect employment rates of women with school-aged and pre-school-aged children similarly, yet only women with school-aged children should be directly impacted by school calendar. I find that redistributing child care days available through school into shorter intervals over time negatively impacts maternal employment. Among those women with school-aged children, those also having pre-school-aged children have the hardest time adjusting to differences in existing availability.     

Can child care policy encourage employment and fertility?: Evidence from a structural model

We develop a structural model of female employment and fertility which accounts for intertemporal feedback effects between these two outcomes. To identify the effect of financial incentives on employment and fertility we exploit variation in the tax and transfer system, which differs by employment state and number of children. Specifically, we simulate in detail the effects of the tax and transfer system, including child care costs. The model provides estimates of the structural preferences of women that can be used to study the effect of various policy reforms. Results show that increasing child care subsidies, conditional on employment, increases the labor supply of all women as well as the fertility rates of the childless and highly educated women.     

Family Arrangements and Children's Education Among Migrants: A Case Study of China

As China is experiencing an urban revolution with massive rural-to-urban migration, millions of children are profoundly affected by their parents’ migration and their decisions about family arrangements. With the discriminatory hukou system and harsh living conditions in cities, the dilemma migrant parents face is whether they should take their children with them to the city or leave them behind. This decision determines the household, school and community environments that children live in, which, in turn, shape their well-being. With a unique strategy of comparing ‘left-behind children’ to ‘migrant children’ and a gendered perspective, this article examines how different family arrangements among migrants and consequent housing conditions and gender dynamics affect children's educational well-being. Our findings demonstrate the complex impact of family arrangements on children, which is conditioned by wage income and the gender of the absent parent and the child. We find that children from less favorable socio-economic backgrounds benefit more from moving to cities. Children living with both parents and those living with their mother or grandparents tend to do better. While the effect of housing conditions is marginal, family arrangements have a gendered effect on children. Related policy recommendations are provided.     

Closing schools in a shrinking district: Do student outcomes depend on which schools are closed?

In the last decade, many cities around the country have needed to close schools due to declining enrollments and low achievement. School closings raise concerns about the possible negative impacts on student achievement, neighborhoods, families, and teaching staff. This study examines an anonymous urban district that, faced with declining enrollment, chose to make student achievement a major criterion in determining which schools would be closed. The district targeted low-performing schools in its closure plan, and sought to move their students to higher-performing schools. We estimate the impact of school closures on student test scores and attendance rates by comparing the growth of these measures among students differentially affected by the closures. We use residential assignment to school as an instrument to address non-random sorting of students into new schools. We also statistically control for the contemporaneous effects of other reforms within the district. Results show that students displaced by school closures can experience adverse effects on test scores and attendance, but these effects can be minimized when students move to schools that are higher-performing (in value-added terms). Moreover, the negative effect on attendance disappears after the first year in the new school. Meanwhile, we find no adverse effects on students in the schools that are receiving the transferring students.     

Does class matter more than school? Evidence from a multilevel statistical analysis on Italian junior secondary school students

This paper assesses the differences in educational attainments between students across classes and schools they are grouped by, in the context of Italian educational system. The purpose is to identify a relationship between pupils' reading test scores and students' characteristics, stratifying for classes, schools and geographical areas. The dataset contains detailed information about more than 500,000 students at the first year of junior secondary school in the year 2012/2013. By means of multilevel linear models, it is possible to estimate statistically significant school and class effects, after adjusting for pupil's characteristics, including prior achievement. The results show that school and class effects are very heterogeneous across macro-areas (Northern, Central and Southern Italy), and that there are substantial discrepancies between and within schools; overall, class effects on achievement tend to be larger than school ones.     

Analysis of children’s interest in books and their reading levels depending on the education status of family

The reading rate is an important indicator of the development level of a country. The fundamental condition of being a developed country is having a sufficiently educated workforce, which, in turn, is directly related to reading abilities and habits. In modern society, which has been termed the “information age”, the fastest way to acquire knowledge is through reading. Reading habits are initially formed within the family. Subsequently, the desired reading objectives can be achieved through the positive contribution of the school and the child’s environment. A child with developed reading skills will have the targeted accumulation of knowledge and will be suitably positioned to attain success in their future education and professional lives. The ability to reach this objective easily is directly related to the guidance and encouragement of families in this regard. The results of this study indicate that there is a strong correlation between the levels of education of parents in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the reading habits that are given to children. For example, the results revealed that the children of 27 families with university and higher education levels read a total of 115 books, which is an average of 4.25 books per child on a monthly basis, whereas this figure was found to be 42 books, or an average of 1.82 in the 23 families with an education at high school level or below. The general purpose of the study is to determine the relationship between the reading habits of children and the education levels of their parents as well as the level of awareness of families in this respect. This is a qualitative study. The aim is to obtain in-depth and detailed data. The research is based on a case study, which is a qualitative research model. The examined case is that of North Cyprus.     

Programme Evaluation with Unobserved Heterogeneity and Selective Implementation: The Mexican PROGRESA Impact on Child Nutrition

This paper considers the impact of Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación ( PROGRESA ), a large Mexican rural anti-poverty programme that had an evaluation sample in which overall treatment was randomly assigned to some communities but not others, on child nutrition. When we examine the impact of PROGRESA based on the presumption of randomized allocations, we find that PROGRESA had no or even a negative impact on child nutrition. However, not all children designated to receive nutritional supplements actually did so. Our preferred estimates – child fixed-effects estimates that control for unobserved heterogeneity that is correlated with access to the supplement – indicate a significantly positive and fairly substantial programme effect of the nutritional supplements on children 12–36 months. They imply an increase of about a sixth in mean growth per year for these children and a lower probability of stunting. Effects are somewhat larger for children from poorer communities but whose mothers are functionally literate. The long-term consequences of these improvements are non-trivial; its impact working through adult height alone could result in a 2.9% increase in lifetime earnings.     

Born on the wrong day? School entry age and juvenile crime

Kindergarten entry age is known to impact schooling outcomes. Less is known, however, about the role of school starting age on economic outcomes outside of the classroom. In this paper we use administrative data from Louisiana to analyze the effect of school starting age on juvenile crime. We find that late school entry by one year reduces the incidence of juvenile crime for young black females, particularly in high crime areas. The mediating effects of late school entry for this subgroup appear to be driven by reductions in non-felony offenses. We propose age related differences in human capital accumulation as a potential explanation for our findings.     

Are Short‐lived Jobs Stepping Stones to Long‐Lasting Jobs?*

This article assesses whether short‐lived jobs (lasting one quarter or less and involuntarily ending in unemployment) are stepping stones to long‐lasting jobs (enduring 1 year or more) for Belgian long‐term unemployed school‐leavers. We proceed in two steps. First, we estimate labour market trajectories in a multi‐spell duration model that incorporates lagged duration and lagged occurrence dependence. Second, in a simulation we find that (fe)male school‐leavers accepting a short‐lived job are, within 2 years, 13.4 (9.5) percentage points more likely to find a long‐lasting job than in the counterfactual in which they reject short‐lived jobs.     

An Ontological Turn in Categories Research: From Standards of Legitimacy to Evidence of Actuality

In this Counterpoint to Durand and Paolella, we argue that prior work on categories has neglected processes of category emergence and dissolution. In response, we call for studies of categories that focus on how they emerge and fall out of use and on what they come to mean. We call this an ontological turn in categories research because systems of categorization and their associated meanings capture and reflect what societies view as social realities, or ontologies. As a guide to this broad topic, we develop a framework that relates the effects of categories to the familiarity of (1) occasions and motivations for their usage and (2) meanings and ontologies they carry, and we use this framework to elaborate two paths by which previously unfamiliar categories become accepted as elements of common knowledge. These paths jointly inform the recognition front of the emergence question, an understudied problem in organization studies. Finally, we outline two methodologies – set theoretic analysis and network‐based analysis – that offer particular promise for analysing processes of category emergence and dissolution.     

Organizational work–family support as universal remedy? A cross-cultural comparison of China,India and the USA

In both industrialized and emerging countries, organizations increasingly seek to support employees’ efforts to maintain a healthy work–family balance. Research has identified two types of organizational support in this context: formal work–family programs and informal work–family cultures. This study examines the relative effects of work–family programs versus work–family culture on employees’ job satisfaction and performance in various cultural environments. Drawing on the individualism–collectivism cultural dimension introduced by Hofstede, it is argued that employees’ cultural background may affect family models, which in turn determine employees’ need for formal organizational work–family support, but are not related to employees’ need for informal support. In line with this notion, the results from comparisons of an industrialized country (the USA) with two emerging countries (China and India) show that work–family culture has positive effects in all three contexts. However, formal work–family programs positively affect job satisfaction and job performance only in India and the USA, whereas they exhibit no significant effect in the more collectivist setting of China.     

Maximum likelihood estimation of seemingly unrelated stochastic frontier regressions

This paper explores the changes in value added (VA) of a sample of schools for cohorts of students finishing secondary education between 2005 and 2008. VA estimates are based on distance measures obtained from DEA models. These measures are computed for each pupil in each school, and evaluate the distance between the school frontier in a given year and a pooled frontier comprising all schools analysed. The school VA is then computed by aggregating the VA scores for the cohort of pupils attending that school in a given year. The ratio between VA estimates for two consecutive cohorts, that attended the school in different years, is taken as the index of VA change. However, the evolution of school performance over time should consider not only the movements of the school frontier, but should also take into account other effects, such as the proximity of the students to the best-practices, represented by the school frontier, observed over time. For that purpose we developed an enhanced Malmquist index to evaluate the evolution of school performance over time. One of the components of the Malmquist index proposed measures VA change, and the other measures the ability of all school students to move closer to their own school best practices over time. The approach developed is applied to a sample of Portuguese secondary schools.     

Recessionary actions and absence: A workplace-level study

Actions such as work restructuring and wage and employment freezes taken by organizations in response to recessions are widely assumed to decrease employees' job security and detrimentally affect perceptions of management's trustworthiness. We assess whether these effects occur and if, in turn, they affect workplace absenteeism. Using data from Britain's Workplace Employee Relations Survey 2011, we show that the effects on stress-based absence are limited and not as predicted, but the effects on withdrawal-based absence are strong and as predicted. Reductions in well-being or job security's effect on well-being did not affect absence, and while the reduction of trust perceptions' effect was to increase anxiety, anxiety did not increase but reduced absenteeism. The effects on withdrawal absence differ: those of recessionary action through job security reduce absenteeism, while those through trust perceptions increase it, both as predicted. The two effects involving trust perceptions are less pronounced when recessionary actions are accompanied by voluntary layoffs, but not by compulsory layoffs. The implications for management are that they should be more conscious of the effects on absence when planning recessionary actions, and more generally their effects on presenteeism.     

The impact of Chicago’s small high school initiative

This project examines the effects of the introduction of new small high schools on student performance in the Chicago Public School (CPS) district. Specifically, we investigate whether students attending small high schools have better graduation/enrollment rates and achievement than similar students who attend regular CPS high schools. We show that students who choose to attend a small school are more disadvantaged on average, including having prior test scores that are about 0.2 standard deviations lower than their elementary school classmates. To address the selection problem, we use an instrumental variables strategy and compare students who live in the same neighborhoods but differ in their residential proximity to a small school. In this approach, one student is more likely to sign up for a small school than another statistically identical student because the small school is located closer to the student’s house and therefore the “cost” of attending the school is lower. The distance-to-small-school variable has strong predictive power to identify who attends a small school. We find that small schools students are substantially more likely to persist in school and eventually graduate. Nonetheless, there is no positive impact on student achievement as measured by test scores.