Generational Dimensions of Neoliberal and Post‐Fordist Restructuring: The Changing Characteristics of Young Adults and Growing Income Inequality in Montreal and Vancouver

There is growing concern over income inequality and its generational dimensions. Post‐Fordist and neoliberal restructuring have reshaped urban labour markets, resulting in growing inequalities that disproportionately afflict younger workers. This article empirically analyses the transition as experienced in Montreal and Vancouver, two Canadian cities that have undergone restructuring in different ways. The study of young adults' changing incomes reveals growing intra‐ and inter‐cohort inequality, and an increasing intergenerational income gap in both cities. Income inequality is greater in Vancouver, with its more pronounced post‐Fordist labour force composition and neoliberalized governance context. Known factors such as occupation and gender affect the earnings structure, but educational attainment has increased the most in terms of its effect on incomes. Inequalities among young adults are expected to magnify in the future due to unevenness in educational attainment. Urban research ought to pay close attention to the role of education in structuring inequalities, and the ways the impact of restructuring is unevenly distributed across generations.     

Racial Differences in Returns to Educational Investment in the South

Abstract . The paper calculates rates of return to educational investment in the South and highlights differences in returns according to race and sex. The results of this investigation are compared with the results of earlier studies, and it appears that there has been a relative increase in the returns to Black education in the South. For most education levels, Blacks still earn lower returns than Whites, but the recent narrowing of earnings rates suggests that southern Blacks have made significant progress in their drive for equality of opportunity.     

The external returns to education: Evidence from Chinese cities

Following Rauch's seminal study, there has been a growing interest among economists in estimating human capital externalities at the individual level [J. Rauch, Productivity gains from geographic concentration of human capital: Evidence from the cities, Journal of Urban Economics 34 (1993) 380–400]. In this paper, we provide a first set of estimates of the external returns to education in Chinese cities. We find that the external returns are at least as high as the private returns to education. OLS estimates of the external returns range from a low of 4.9% to a high of 6.7%. Two-stage least squares estimates indicate that a one-year increase in city average education could increase individual earnings by between 11 and 13%. We also examine the impact of economic reforms on the external returns to education and find suggestive evidence that economic reforms have raised the external returns to education in Chinese cities.     

The status of academic women in the 1990s No longer outsiders, but not yet equals

This paper reexamines the status of women in the academic labor market relative to men to determine how much progress has been made in achieving equity. Two questions will be addressed here: (1) do men and women have equal access to faculty employment in higher education, and (2) are they equally successful with regard to traditional career goals and compensation? Analyses are conducted on the educational attainment of women, their representation among faculty, their time allocation and research productivity, and their success in academia as represented by their rank attainment and earnings. While the results show that women have made considerable strides in entering the academic labor market, there is still an unexplained gap between men and women in terms of their earnings and career progression.     

On compensation for risk aversion and skewness affection in wages

This paper presents extensive empirical testing of the hypothesis that greater post-schooling earnings risk requires higher expected returns. Expanding on this notion, on the basis of utility theory, we predict that workers not only care about risk but also about the skewness in the distribution of the compensation paid: workers exhibit risk aversion and skewness affection. To test these hypotheses, this paper carefully develops various measures of risk and skewness by occupational/educational classification of the worker and finds supportive evidence: for men, wages rise with occupational earnings variance and decrease with skewness, for women only the negative effect of skewness is significant.     

How Does Education Affect the Earnings Distribution in Urban China?*

It is widely believed that investing in education could be an effective strategy to promote higher standards of living and equity. We empirically assess this claim by estimating returns to education across the whole earnings distribution in urban China and find supporting evidence. In particular, we find that returns to education are more pronounced for individuals in the lower tail of the distribution than for those in the upper tail and that returns to education are uniformly larger for women than men. We also find that returns to education increased over time across the whole earnings distribution.     

Does Home Ownership by Parents Have an Economic Impact on Their Children?

This paper uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore the impact of housing on children's productivity through educational attainment and through their housing choices as adults after they leave their parent's home. After controlling for other factors that are normally hypothesized to affect an individual's education and earnings, we find that the average child of homeowners is significantly more likely to achieve a higher level of education and, thereby, a higher level of earnings. We also find that having controlled for the factors traditionally thought to influence an individual's choice of housing tenure, as well as other parental characteristics, the housing tenure of parents plays a primary role in determining whether or not the child becomes a homeowner.     

DETAILED ESTIMATION OF WORKLIFE EXPECTANCY FOR THE MEASUREMENT OF HUMAN CAPITAL: ACCOUNTING FOR MARRIAGE AND CHILDREN

Abstract Measuring an individual's human capital at a point in time as the present actuarial value of expected net lifetime earnings has a lengthy history. Calculating such measures requires accurate estimates of worklife expectancy. Here, worklife estimates for men and women in the USA categorized by educational attainment, race, marital status, parental status and current labour force status are presented. Race has a much larger impact on the worklife expectancy of men than women. Education is associated with larger worklife differentials for women. The association between marriage and worklife expectancy is significant, but of opposite sign, for men and women: married women (men) have a lower (higher) worklife expectancy than single women (men). Parenthood is associated with a reduction in the worklife expectancy of women; the association is smaller and varies from positive for some education/marital status groups to negative for others for men.     

Education choice under uncertainty: Implications for public policy

We analyse how progressive taxation and education subsidies affect schooling decisions when the returns to education are stochastic. We use the theory of real options to solve the problem of education choice in a dynamic stochastic model. We show that education attainment will be an increasing function of the risk associated with education. Furthermore, this result holds regardless of the degree of risk aversion. We also show that progressive taxes will tend to increase education attainment.     

The Dynamics of Returns to Education in Kenyan and Tanzanian Manufacturing*

We use micro data on manufacturing employees in Kenya and Tanzania to estimate returns to education and investigate the shape of the earnings function in the period 1993–2001. In Kenya, there have been long‐run falls in the returns to education while for Tanzania there is evidence of rising returns in the 1990s. The earnings functions are convex for both countries and this result is robust to endogeneity. Convexity may be part of the explanation as to how rapid expansion of education in Africa has generated so little growth if expansion has been concentrated at lower levels of education.     

The expected real return to equity

The expected return to equity – typically measured as a historical average – is a key variable in the decision making of investors. A recent literature uses analysts' forecasts, investor surveys or present-value relationships and finds estimates of expected returns that are sometimes much lower than historical averages. This study extends the present-value approach to a dynamic optimizing framework. Given a model that captures this relationship, one can use data on dividends, earnings and valuations to infer the model-implied expected return. Using this method, the estimated expected real return to equity ranges from 4.9% to 5.6% . Furthermore, the analysis indicates that expected returns have declined by about 3 percentage points over the past 40 years. These results indicate that future returns to equity may be lower than past realized returns.     

Estimating the Precision of Information on Earnings and Non-earnings Announcement Days,and Its Relation with the Cost of Equity

ABSTRACT

Using daily stock returns, we estimate the precision of information during earnings and non-earnings announcement days, and find that although the precision of information in daily stock returns increases during earnings announcement days, it explains less of the variation in expected returns than the precision of information on non-earnings announcement days. Our findings suggest that the precision of earnings disclosures has a small effect on the cost of equity relative to the precision of information on other days of the year.     

Towards an intelligent country: China’s higher education expansion and rural children’s senior high school participation

Colleges in China were instructed to massively expand their enrollment beginning in 1999, an event referred to as China’s Higher Education Expansion (HEE). As the HEE explicitly enlarged the share of high-skilled labor, there may be a potential positive effect of the HHE on rural children’s willingness to enter senior high schools. This is because their chances to get into colleges are improved. This study found that, after controlling for other observable factors, the probability for rural eligible individuals to participate in senior high schools increased by 0.18 more than their urban counterparts from 2000 to 2005, and this result was indeed caused by the HHE via increased expected gains. Based on the empirical results, the expected returns to education are proven to be critical in educational decisions. To build an intelligent country, the government should raise returns to education by reforming the educational supply and eliminating the distortions and misallocations that depress returns to education.     

Does comprehensive education work for the long-term unemployed?

In this paper we evaluate the effects of comprehensive adult education on wage earnings of long-term unemployed, an essentially unexplored issue. We use register data pertaining to a large sample of long-term unemployed in Sweden who enrolled in upper secondary comprehensive adult education. Estimates with propensity score matching indicate that more than one semester of study results in substantial increases in post program annual earnings for both males and females. According to our rough calculations, the social benefits of offering these individuals comprehensive education surpass the costs within five to seven years.     

Differences in education and earnings across ethnic groups in Guatemala

Most of the research on ethnicity in Central America looks at two groups: indigenous and nonindigenous populations. While indigenous people are disadvantaged relative to the nonindigenous group, the many groups that make up the indigenous population are often times not very similar in terms of personal and group characteristics. But the differences within these groups are important for public policy. Ethnic groups' experience depends on many factors besides education and skill levels. These additional factors may include what has come to be known as “ethnic capital.” That is, the socioeconomic performance of today's workers depends not only on parental skills, but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parent's generation. In the United States, when data on ethnic groups is broken down, the black-white comparison may be too simple a characterization. It is argued here that the indigenous-nonindigenous comparison in Guatemala is too simple. Guatemala's household survey, which utilizes two questions to determine an individual's ethnicity (self-perception and language), is used here to examine the question of ethnicity in terms of schooling attainment, earnings and the returns to schooling. The following hypothesis is tested: do higher levels of schooling correspond to higher returns to schooling? Dividing the indigenous sample into the main ethnic groups produces widely different and dramatic results in terms of schooling, earnings and the returns to schooling. Higher levels of schooling correspond to higher returns to schooling by ethnic group. Thus there may be a need to target interventions appropriately to the specific ethnic group in question.     

Bayesian inference in a correlated random coefficients model: Modeling causal effect heterogeneity with an application to heterogeneous returns to schooling

We consider the problem of causal effect heterogeneity from a Bayesian point of view. This is accomplished by introducing a three-equation system, similar in spirit to the work of Heckman and Vytlacil (1998), describing the joint determination of a scalar outcome, an endogenous “treatment” variable, and an individual-specific causal return to that treatment. We describe a Bayesian posterior simulator for fitting this model which recovers far more than the average causal effect in the population, the object which has been the focus of most previous work. Parameter identification and generalized methods for flexibly modeling the outcome and return heterogeneity distributions are also discussed.Combining data sets from High School and Beyond (HSB) and the 1980 Census, we illustrate our methods in practice and investigate heterogeneity in returns to education. Our analysis decomposes the impact of key HSB covariates on log wages into three parts: a “direct” effect and two separate indirect effects through educational attainment and returns to education. Our results strongly suggest that the quantity of schooling attained is determined, at least in part, by the individual’s own return to education. Specifically, a one percentage point increase in the return to schooling parameter is associated with the receipt of (approximately) 0.14 more years of schooling. Furthermore, when we control for variation in returns to education across individuals, we find no difference in predicted schooling levels for men and women. However, women are predicted to attain approximately 1/4 of a year more schooling than men on average as a result of higher rates of return to investments in education.     

Liquidity,earnings management,and stock expected returns

This paper examines the relationships among liquidity, earnings management, and stock expected returns by using a sample of Chinese listed firms to investigate 22,022 firm–year observations from 1998 to 2018. Our study reveals that an increase in stock liquidity is associated with a decrease in the degree of earnings management. This result is robust to the use of alternative measures when endogeneity concerns are controlled for. Moreover, the findings indicate that the stock liquidity component of earnings management is positively associated with future stock returns in Chinese firms. Our results reveal that the stock liquidity component of short-termism in managerial decisions plays a critical role in determining future stock returns.     

A dynamic analysis of educational progression of children of immigrants

This paper uses a parsimonious version of Cameron and Heckman's (2001) dynamic model of educational progression to determine at what stages of their educational careers children of immigrants fall behind their native peers and the magnitude of intergenerational transmission. The analyses are primarily directed towards explaining high dropout rates from vocational upper secondary education, identified as the main barrier to educational attainment. The results corroborate previous findings that family background is an important determinant of educational outcomes but also suggest that differences in endowments alone do not explain the observed gap in educational attainment between natives and ethnic minorities.     

FDI activity and worker compensation: evidence from US non-manufacturing industries

This study examines worker compensation effects of FDI activity in US non-manufacturing industry sectors. A clustered standard error correction is used when estimating wage and non-wage compensation equations, with special attention given to FDI’s effect by worker educational attainment and union status. Wage findings reveal an FDI-wage premium for highly educated non-union workers and FDI-union rent erosion for all educational-gender groups excluding females with low educational attainment. Non-wage compensation analysis reveals FDI activity is generally associated with significantly higher probabilities of workers receiving employer financed non-wage compensation for union and non-union workers regardless of their level of educational attainment.