Early Smoking,Education, and Labor Market Performance

This study investigates the effects of early smoking on educational attainment and labor market performance by using mixed ordered and mixed proportional hazard models. The results show that early smoking adversely affects educational attainment and initial labor market performance, but only for males. The probability to finish a scientific degree is 4%-point lower for an early smoker. The effect of early smoking on initial labor market performance is indirect through educational attainment. Once the indirect effect is controlled for there is no direct effect. Moreover, for males only, early smoking has a negative effect on current labor market performance even after conditioning on educational attainment. The probability to have an academic job is 4%-point lower for an early smoker. For females neither education nor labor market performance is affected by early smoking.     

The Contribution of Associate's Degree Holders to U.S. Earnings,Labor Quality,Productivity, and Overall Economic Growth

There is substantial evidence on the importance of education as a driver of earnings, productivity, and economic growth. However, knowledge of the specific role of associate's degrees in U.S. economic growth is limited. We analyze the sources of U.S. economic growth and identify the contribution of associate's degree holders to improvements in earnings, labor quality, productivity, and overall economic growth. We find evidence that substitution toward workers with associate's degrees has increased U.S. earnings, aggregate labor quality, and productivity, and that these effects are concentrated in the health care, trade, and government sectors. While the average educational attainment of people entering the labor force has plateaued, our results suggest that shifting workers from some college to associate degrees could improve earnings, the quality of the workforce, productivity, and growth, potentially without more time spent in school.     

Actual age at school entry, educational outcomes, and earnings

This paper reports on the effect of actual age measured by month at school entry on test scores, eventual educational attainment, and labor market outcomes, using school test score data and a labor force survey of Japan. Japan is an ideal country for examining the pure effect of actual age at school entry on eventual years of education because the length of compulsory education does not vary by birth month and legal administrations assure that almost all children follow a fixed schedule of grade progress. Older children of both sexes in a school cohort obtain higher test scores and more education years than their younger counterparts. This better academic performance translates into higher annual earnings among males.     

MEASURING THE IMPACT OF EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTIONS ON THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE OF ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT STUDENTS IN SECOND‐YEAR MICROECONOMICS

This paper analyses the impact of educational interventions made in the first‐ and second‐year microeconomics courses on academic development students' final mark in the second‐year course. It also addresses issues of methodology, specification, and statistical analysis with respect to other studies in the field. The results suggest that the educational interventions in the first‐year had a positive impact on the academic performance of the academic development cohort, relative to the mainstream cohort for the first period (2000‐2002). The results also suggest that the educational interventions introduced in the second period (2003‐2005), in the form of voluntary workshops, improved the academic performance of the academic development and mainstream cohorts.     

Race, culture, and skill: Interracial wage differences among African Americans, Latinos, and whites

This article examines the interrelationships among race, culture, skill, and the distribution of wages. I utilize a three-equation system to explore this process: skill is a multidimensional productive attribute measured by years of education and work effort; educational attainment is a function of class background and individual effort; and individual wage rates are a function of skill and class background. By further assuming that effort is differentially distributed across individuals and social groups, I am able to estimate reduced form equations for educational and earnings attainment, where both equations are functions of the class backgrounds and race of individuals. The collective results of this article challenge the conventional wisdom among economists that African American and Latino job skills are of a lower quality than white job skills. To the extent that effort is an important element of worker skill, our results suggest that neither African American nor Latino labor is of lower quality than white labor. The results regarding differences between African Americans and whites in educational attainment, i.e., African Americans are able to translate a given level of resources into higher levels of educational attainment, reaffirm previous findings in the literature. The results on Latino versus white educational attainment are novel. Additionally, unlike previous research, this article connects racial differences in the skill acquisition process to the economics of discrimination.     

Adolescent Depression and Adult Labor Market Outcomes

This article uses recently released data from a national longitudinal sample to present new evidence of the longer term effects of adolescent depression on labor market outcomes. Results suggest reductions in labor force attachment of approximately 5% and earnings reductions of approximately 15% for individuals with depressive symptoms as an adolescent. These effects are only partially reduced when controlling for channels operating through educational attainment, adult depressive symptoms, or co‐occurring illnesses. Further, the unique structure of the data allows for high‐school fixed effects as well as suggestive evidence using sibling comparisons, which allows controls for potentially important unobserved heterogeneity. Overall, the results suggest that the links between adolescent depression and labor market outcomes are quite robust and important in magnitude, suggesting the need for further investments in treatment options and opportunities during adolescence, which will likely result in long term returns.     

Returns to scale in producing human capital from schooling

This study examines a crucial assumption in much of the recentwork on endogenous growth, namely, constant returns to scalein producing human capital. A simple model is constructed toshow that the returns to scale in human capital production canbe inferred from the relationship between the wage rate andyears of schooling. A large international micro dataset is usedto estimate this relationship. The empirical evidence indicatesthat human capital production displays significant increasingreturns at low levels of educational attainment, and significantdecreasing returns at high levels of educational attainment.     

AN ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT OF PEDAGOGIC INTERVENTIONS IN FIRST-YEAR ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT AND MAINSTREAM COURSES IN MICROECONOMICS

This paper analyses the impact of pedagogic interventions in first-year academic development and mainstream courses in microeconomics on students' performance in the final examination. The data for six cohorts, covering the years 1999 and 2001-2005, are pooled, and the Heckman two-part procedure is used to account for those students who started the course but did not write the final examination. The results suggest that the pedagogic interventions have a positive impact on the performance of academic development students relative to the mainstream cohort and on the performance of mainstream students.     

Human Capital Attainment,University Quality,and Entry-Level Wages for College Transfer Students

This paper examines the returns to institutional quality for all institutions attended by college transfer students and asks whether such an analysis provides insight into the role of human capital accumulation in determining a college graduate's entry-level earnings. Exploiting panel data techniques, I find that the quality of both a transfer student's initial and graduation universities have significant, positive, and nearly identical effects on his or her future earnings. Such evidence suggests that the return to quality is similar across all institutions attended and thus can be consistent with the human capital theory of educational attainment.     

What Factors Determine Student Performance in East Asia? New Evidence from the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study

This study investigates what factors determine students’ academic performance in 5 major Eastern Asian economies. It does so using data gathered through the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. In a regression analysis, we explicitly consider initial maturity differences, endogeneity of class size and peer effects. We find that a student's individual and family backgrounds are key determinants of educational performance, while institutional and resource variables have a more limited effect. Peer effects are significant in general, but ability‐sorting at the school and/or class levels makes it difficult to interpret these effects in Hong Kong and Singapore.     

Migration,Ethnicity, and the Educational Gradient in the Jakarta Mega-Urban Region: A Spatial Analysis

The Jakarta mega-urban region (MUR) is one of the largest such regions in the world. In this article, we revisit Castles’s seminal 1967 article, based on the 1961 Population Census of Indonesia, on the educational and ethnic composition of Jakarta. Using data from the full-count 2010 Population Census, we examine spatial patterns in the educational gradients of the population across the Jakarta MUR and look to determine whether these patterns can be explained by internal migration and ethnic composition at the kecamatan (subdistrict) level. We find that population movement from the core to the outer areas has softened the historically extremely sharp gradation in educational attainment across the MUR. We show the dominance of the Sundanese and Bantenese ethnic groups in the rural hinterlands of the MUR, where the average educational attainment is relatively low, and note this question of rurality versus ethnicity when interpreting our results.     

Racial Differences in Civic Participation and Charitable Giving: The Confounding Effects of Educational Attainment and Unmeasured Ability

In this paper we use human capital theory to follow the links from educational attainment to civic engagement, and to other pro-social behaviors such as charitable giving and volunteering, and in so doing we offer a cautionary explanation for observed racial differences in civic participation, giving, and volunteering. Our argument is that when, in a racialized society such as the U.S., the costs and benefits of education differ by race, and when innate ability is an unmeasured source of heterogeneity across individuals, controlling for educational attainment and not for ability will create spurious race effects in empirical studies of behaviors that depend on both education and ability. Because (1) blacks at any level of educational attainment are predicted to be of higher average ability than equally educated whites and (2) higher ability is associated with higher levels of civic participation, a regression of civic participation on educational attainment and race will produce a positive coefficient on the dummy variable that takes on a value of one if the subject is African American. Using data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, we find strong support for the interpretation of race effects as spurious artifacts of having included data on educational attainment without measures of innate ability.     

Unexpected opportunity for girls: Earthquake,disaster relief and female education in China's poor counties

The Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 devastated poverty-stricken areas in Sichuan Province, China. This paper examines the long-term effect of a disastrous earthquake on children's educational attainment using China's 2015 Population Census. Our cohort difference-in-differences results show that exposure to an earthquake has an unexpected significant positive impact on girls’ educational attainment in poor counties, but not on boys. We suggest that this surprising educational gain may be attributable to the reconstruction of schools and the reduction in school fees after disaster. In the long run, girls in poor affected counties are more likely to delay marriage, postpone childbearing and become self-employed compared with girls in poor unaffected counties. These findings potentially exhibit the unintended benefits in education from post-disaster interventions in poor areas.     

Family Income and Educational Attainment: A Review of Approaches and Evidence for Britain

It is widely recognized that, on average, children from poorerbackgrounds have worse educational outcomes than their better-offpeers. There is less evidence on how this relationship has changedover time and, indeed, what exactly leads to these inequalities.In this paper we demonstrate that the correlation between familybackground (as measured by family income) and educational attainmenthas been rising between children born in the late 1950s andthose born two decades later. We then consider the extent towhich these associations are due to the causal effects of incomerather than the result of other dimensions of family background.We review the approaches taken to answering this question, drawingmainly on the US literature, and then present our own evidencefrom the UK, discussing the plausible range for the true impactof income on education. Our results indicate that income hasa causal relationship with educational attainment.     

Vertical and Horizontal Educational Mismatches of Female Graduates in Taiwan

This study considers both vertical and horizontal educational mismatches, with the former referring to overeducation and undereducation, and the latter to the mismatch between college major and job. It is found that the wage premium of the vertical educational match is greater than that of the horizontal educational match. A better vertical match augments the wage premium of an improvement in the horizontal match, and vice versa. The horizontal educational mismatch appears to be an extended scenario of overeducation because graduates from colleges with low rankings have a higher probability of being vertically overeducated as well as horizontally mismatched. Graduates from highly‐ranked colleges are privileged to not only have high earnings but also to have low probabilities for the vertical and horizontal mismatches. These low probabilities indirectly raise their earnings. The indirect effects of academic characteristics on earnings are calculated. The approach we propose provides an insight into how academic characteristics comprehensively influence earnings.     

INTRODUCTION TO A STUDY OF INTRAHOUSEHOLD RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION IN RURAL ANDHRA PRADESH,INDIA

In this special issue, we use unique household data which was collected exclusively for our study in Andhra Pradesh, India, with the help of an NGO. We estimate and test the intrahousehold resource allocation rules, incidence of child labor, and the effects of credit constraints on time allocation among household members. Three empirical papers of this issue indicate the overall support for the collective model against the unitary model of households, clarified the role of household structure, and show the nature of mother‐child labor substitution under a binding credit constraint. In addition, a survey paper discussing the recent trends on educational attainment and the empirical strategies in identifyng the policy effects are included.     

New “useless education theory”: Highly educated parents' expectations for their children's education—Evidence from the one-child policy

Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) 2010 and a strictly implemented one-child policy as a quasi-experiment, this paper analyses the changes in parents' educational expectations of their children and the underlying mechanisms in a fuzzy regression discontinuity framework. It was found that one-child policy compliers have lower educational expectations for their children after acquiring an advanced education than those who did not. The finding remains valid after robustness analysis and placebo tests. Combined with an examination of the intergenerational effects of birth, this finding may be related to parents' assessment of and responses to educational returns and equality of educational opportunities. It was also found that parents with lower educational attainment in the high-income group have higher educational expectations than those with higher educational attainment, while for those with lower income, there is no significant difference between higher educational attainment and otherwise, which indirectly verifies the causal inference of this paper. The finding of this study explains the new “useless education theory” and provides a new perspective for understanding the intergenerational transmission of education.     

Effect of Parental Migration on the Academic Performance of Left‐behind Middle School Students in Rural China

China's rapid development and urbanization over the past 30 years have caused large numbers of rural residents to migrate to urban areas in search of work. This has created a generation of children who remain behind in rural areas when their parents migrate for work. Previous research has found mixed impacts of parental migration on the educational achievement of left‐behind children (LBC), perhaps because of methodological deficiencies and lack of recognition of the heterogeneity of this population of children. Our study attempts to examine the impact of six types of parental migration on the academic achievement of a rural junior high school sample. Our study uses a panel of 7148 junior high school students to implement a difference‐in‐difference analysis and finds that parental migration has a negative and significant impact on the academic achievement of junior high school students. Our study suggests that the Chinese Government should implement measures to dismantle barriers to the human capital accumulation of LBC to ensure sustainable economic growth and human capital development in China.     

Educational gender gaps

Cross-country studies reveal two consistent gender gaps in education—underachievement in school by boys and low rates of participation in STEM studies by girls. Recent economics research has shown the importance of social influences on women's STEM avoidance, but male low achievement has been less-studied and tends to be attributed to behavior problems and deficient non-cognitive skills. I revisit the determinants of the gender gap in U.S. educational attainment with a relatively-advantaged sample of young men and women and find that school behavior and measured skills are not very important drivers of gender differences, particularly in the transition to college. Educational aspirations, on the other hand, are strongly predictive of educational gaps and the gender difference in aspirations cannot be explained, even with rich adolescent data that includes parental expectations and school achievement indicators. These results suggest that gender identity concerns may influence (and damage) the educational prospects of boys as well as girls through norms of masculinity that discourage academic achievement.