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.     

Race/Ethnicity and Education Effects on Employment in High Technology Industries and Occupations in the US, 1992–2002

High technology industries employ higher than average numbers of scientists and engineers when compared to the employment of the same group among all industries. Since these jobs require high levels of skills to undertake creative, cutting edge activities, it is anticipated that employment in these industries will be largely based on the levels of human capital of individuals or merit. This study compares how changes in levels of educational attainment affect employment in science and engineering jobs in high technology industries with those outside for four racial and ethnic groups. Although blacks and Hispanics are under-represented in science and engineering occupations, the study finds that the effects of education vary with the level of education, race/ethnicity, and the industry/occupational group under consideration in ways that suggest that the race/ethnicity of an individual still plays an important role in determining employment.     

Does Education Still Pay Off in Rural China： Revisit the Impact of Education on Off-farm Employment and Wages

The present study considers how education affects off-farm job participation and wages. We use a nationally representative dataset from a survey conducted in 5 provinces, 101 villages and 808 households by the authors in early 2005. The empirical results show that educational attainment, skill training and years of experience of rural residents have positive, statistically significant effects on off-farm employment. The average return to a year of education is 7percent, which is higher than those observed in previous studies. We also find the return to an additional year of schooling to be higher for post-junior high schooling than for junior high and below schooling： 11.8 versus 3.2 percent. We conclude that not only does education still pays off in rural China, but also the rate of return to education is increasing over time.     

Determinants of the Allocation of Volunteer Time: Church-Related versus Other Non-market Activities

This paper analyzes the relative time allocation decisions of individuals who volunteer time to a religious institution. The most important factor influencing the amount of time spent in church ministry relative to other non-market activities is educational attainment. In general, religious volunteers who are college-educated are significantly more likely to spend relatively more time working in church ministry than devoting time to family responsibilities, engaging in spiritual practices, or volunteering time to civic/community organizations. The presence of school-aged children tends to diminish the relative amount of time spent volunteering in church ministry. The findings of this study suggest church ministry perceived as being child-friendly or strengthening one’s spirituality is more likely to attract relatively greater time commitments from its volunteers.

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.     

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.     

Effective labor supply and growth outlook in China

The falling projections of working-age population in China has led to predictions of much slower economic growth. We consider three mechanisms that could contribute to higher effective labor supply growth: further improvement in educational attainment due to cohort replacement and rising college enrollment; improvement in aggregate labor quality due to urbanization; and higher labor force participation due to later retirement. We find that these factors result in a projected growth rate of effective labor input of 0.40% for 2015−2030 compared to −0.60% for working age population. As a result, the projected growth rate of GDP will be 5.80% for 2015–2030 compared to 5.23% if these factors are ignored.     

Income inequality and educational expenditures on children: Evidence from the China Family Panel Studies

Using the data from the China Family Panel Studies from 2010 to 2018, we find that rising income inequality causes parents to spend more on children’s education, both in school and out of school. The impact of income inequality on out-of-school expenditures is significant at intensive and extensive margins, especially for study-related tutoring participation. Furthermore, we find some empirical evidence suggesting that in response to rising inequality, mothers spend more time on children’s education and there exists a substitution effect between time and money. Further analysis suggests two potential reasons for the rising education spending: (1) a higher income inequality resulting from rising skill premium strengthens parents’ long-lasting cultural attitude towards education to higher levels, inducing them to spend more on educational investment, and (2) a higher income inequality increases the value of higher education, leading to a stronger demand for better educational opportunities, and then, more intense education competition, forcing parents to invest more in education.     

Participation in further education in England and Wales: an analysis of post-war trends

The paper examines the time-series evidence relating to participationrates in further education in England and Wales and, using cointegrationanalysis, identifies a long-run statistical relationship inthe data consistent with an augmented human-capital model. Therecent rapid growth of participation is largely attributableto the improvements in GCSE attainment, coupled with the expansionof higher education, of the last decade. Fluctuations in labourdemand play a significant role in determining the movementsof participation rates over time, and the substantial rise inyouth unemployment of the early 1990s contributed to the growthin participation at this time.     

The impact of education on income inequality and intergenerational mobility

This paper analyses the effects of innate ability, compulsory education (grades 1–9), and non-compulsory education (grades 10–12 and higher education) on inequality and intergenerational mobility of income, by constructing a four-period overlapping-generation model. We find that innate ability and family investment in early education play important roles in explaining income inequality and intergenerational income mobility. Though children from the wealthiest families are only 1.36 times ‘smarter’ that those from the poorest, the gap in human capital expands to 2.35 at the end of compulsory education and to 2.89 at the end of non-compulsory education. One important reason for the increase is that poor families invest relatively less in children's early education than do wealthy families; therefore, their children attend lower-quality schools, which results in them being much less likely to participate in higher education. By simulating policy experiments for different types of government education expenditure, we find that direct subsidies to poor parents are the most efficient and effective policy for mitigating poor families' budget constraints with regard to early-education investment in their children.     

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.     

University education,homeownership and housing wealth

We utilise the implementation of the 1999 higher education expansion in China as a natural experiment to examine the relationship between university educational attainment, homeownership and housing wealth. Using data from the 2018 China Family Panel Studies, results from our preferred models, which correct for endogeneity, suggest that having a university qualification generates a 3.5–6.3 percentage points increase in the probability of homeownership and a 24.3–51.1 percentage points increase in total housing wealth. We also find that holding a university qualification increases the number of houses one owns and housing wealth for those whose housing wealth is above the median. We find that self-reported social status and entitlement to superannuation are channels through which higher education affects homeownership and housing wealth and that financial literacy is a channel through which higher education affects housing wealth. We find considerable heterogeneity in the impact of higher education on housing outcomes across gender, family income levels, parent education and between urban and rural areas.     

Public Company Audits and City‐Specific Labor Characteristics

Prior research emphasizes the centrality of audit offices in understanding auditing practices, and documents significant interoffice variation in audit outcomes based on industry expertise and office size. Our study examines how two city‐specific labor characteristics also affect audit offices and local audit markets: the city's average educational attainment, and the number of accountants in a city, which proxy for a city's human capital. Our argument draws on the urban economics literature and predicts that the level of human capital in a city is positively associated with an audit office's ability to conduct high‐quality audits. As expected, there is a positive association between audit quality (quality of audited earnings and accuracy of going‐concern reports) and average education level in the city in which the lead engagement office is located. This association is generally significant for both Big 4 and non‐Big 4 offices, but is relatively stronger for non‐Big 4 firms that are more tied to local labor markets. A company is also more likely to choose a non‐Big 4 auditor in cities with higher educational levels and relatively more accountants, and there is evidence of higher non‐Big 4 audit fees as a city's education level increases. Collectively, these results suggest that local labor characteristics affect audit offices, audit quality, and the ability of non‐Big 4 auditors to compete with Big 4 auditors in the audits of public companies.     

Has education led to secularization? Based on the study of compulsory education law in China

Has education led to secularization? Using microdata from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), we take the implementation of the Compulsory Education Law (CEL) in 1986 in China as the instrumental variables (IV) for personal educational attainment. We study the causal effect of education on personal religious beliefs and explore the potential mechanisms. The empirical results show that education can lead to secularization. More precisely, individual religious belief decreases by 1.5% with one additional year of personal education. In addition, the increase in regional urbanization significantly affects religious beliefs by replacing the insurance function of religion and reducing information acquisition costs. Moreover, there is an alternative relationship between religious activities and social activities, and women affected by the CEL experience a higher negative impact on religious beliefs than men.     

Big Fish,Small Pond: The Effect of Rank at Entry on Postsecondary Outcomes

We study whether a student's rank in her program of study in university affects short- and longer-term educational outcomes. Using student-level administrative data from four universities across many cohorts, we show that ranking higher compared to students in the same program in the same year has a positive effect on grade point average and lowers the probability of switching programs at the end of the first year, but has small effects on credit completion, departures, and degree attainment. Our results suggest that being the big fish in the small pond produces moderate advantages in higher education.     

Demographic change,human capital,and economic growth in Korea

We construct a measure of human capital using micro datasets on labor composition of age, gender, education, and wage rate and analyze its role in economic growth for the Korean economy. Over the past three decades, human capital has grown steadily at about 1% per year, contrasting to a continuously declining trend of total work-hours. This growth has been driven by the rise of better-educated baby-boom cohorts. A growth accounting exercise shows that human capital contributes significantly to economic growth; it accounted for 0.5% points of annual GDP growth over the period. Human capital is projected to remain a major growth factor over the next two decades as the increase in educational attainment continues. Increased employment rate of elderly or female workers reduces the aggregate human capital growth while increasing the available labor. Polices to improve human capital of female or elderly workers help to increase aggregate human capital growth.     

Intergenerational education transmission in China: The gender dimension

This paper explores gender differences in intergenerational patterns of education attainment in China. Using the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) survey for 2016, we find that intergenerational ‘persistence’, as reflected in high regression and correlation coefficients between an individual's and their parents' education levels, is higher for females than males for the entire sample and for each of four age cohorts. This result stems primarily from the relative lack of upward mobility among females from families with low levels of education, as confirmed by a series of educational mobility matrices and a multinomial logistic regression analysis. The results offer novel insights into gender differences in the unequal transmission of education across generations, with significant implications for gender inequality more broadly in Chinese society.     

人力资本、社会资本与流动人口就业收入 —基于流动人口正规就业与非正规就业的比较分析

文章通过建立OLS回归方程以及Oaxaca—Blinder的分解方法,实证分析了人力资本、社会资本与我国流动人口就业收入的关系,研究发现：人力资本对流动人口正规就业收入有明显影响而对非正规就业收入影响很小,社会资本是影响流动人口非正规就业收入的主要因素但对正规就业收入影响不大。 Oaxaca—Blinder 的分解表明：流动人口非正规就业者和正规就业者收入差距的50.69％归结于流动人口内部特征上的差异,受教育程度差异是造成其工资收入差异的主要原因。