Economic Growth and Investment in Education: How Allocation Matters

This article proposes an approach to answering two questions: first, does investment in education help growth; second, does the allocation of investment in education matter? I develop a model where individual ability is heterogeneous and education both trains students and reveals their suitability for further training. I use UNESCO data on educational enrollments and spending to estimate the efficiency of existing educational allocations in a panel of countries. A cross-country growth decomposition regression shows that the correlation of human capital capital accumulation and GDP growth is not significant in countries with poor allocations but is significant and positive in countries with better allocations.     

Estimation of Censored Regression Model: A Simulation Study

We investigate the finite sample performance of several estimators proposed for the panel data Tobit regression model with individual effects, including Honoré estimator, Hansen’s best two-step GMM estimator, the continuously updating GMM estimator, and the empirical likelihood estimator (ELE). The latter three estimators are based on more conditional moment restrictions than the Honoré estimator, and consequently are more efficient in large samples. Although the latter three estimators are asymptotically equivalent, the last two have better finite sample performance. However, our simulation reveals that the continuously updating GMM estimator performs no better, and in most cases is worse than Honoré estimator in small samples. The reason for this finding is that the latter three estimators are based on more moment restrictions that require discarding observations. In our designs, about seventy percent of observations are discarded. The insufficiently few number of observations leads to an imprecise weighted matrix estimate, which in turn leads to unreliable estimates. This study calls for an alternative estimation method that does not rely on trimming for finite sample panel data censored regression model.     

区域性教育与经济协调发展关系的实证研究

教育与经济发展之间存在着相互制约、相互促进的关系,但这种关系的每个传递环节并不总是必然协调的.本文通过面板数据模型(panel data)对全国31个省份的教育与经济增长的相关关系进行实证分析后发现,中国教育与经济发展的协调性在东、中、西部三个地区的情况各有不同,差别较大.随着经济的增长,不同区域的教育投入均有所增加,而教育投入的增加到教育水平的提高以及教育发展推动经济进一步增长的过程均不协调.     

Public Capital and Economic Growth: A Convergence Approach

This paper estimates dynamic effects of public capital on output per capita. Based on an open economy growth model, I derive a version of the income convergence equation augmented with public capital. This equation is estimated using panel data of United States and Japanese regions. Sensible results are obtained when public capital is disaggregated into components. In both countries, the infrastructure component of public capital turns out to have significantly positive effects. The implied elasticity of output with respect to infrastructure is somewhere around 0.1 to 0.15. This suggests a modest contribution of infrastructure to postwar growth of the two countries.