SOCIAL INTERACTIONS AND COLLEGE ENROLLMENT: EVIDENCE FROM THE NATIONAL EDUCATION LONGITUDINAL STUDY

This paper uses nationally representative data on high school students to test for several types of social influences on the decision to enroll in college. An instrumental variable strategy is used in order to manage the well‐known reflection problem in social interactions research. Additionally, I am able to incorporate several usually unavailable group‐level factors to reduce the possibility of important group‐level characteristics driving the relationships. I present evidence that a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of high school classmates who attend college is predicted to increase an individual's probability of attending college by approximately 2–3 percentage points. (JEL I2, J24, J18)     

DOES IMPROVING SCHOOL QUALITY REDUCE THE PROBABILITY OF UNEMPLOYMENT?

The authors investigate the relationship between high school quality and the probability of extended unemployment among noncollege-bound men during three periods: the first two years, two to four years, and seven to nine years after high school. They find that larger high schools and schools with lower pupil–teacher ratios tend to decrease the probability of being unemployed for noncollege-bound men in the period shortly after high school graduation. However, no effect is found of high school quality on unemployment probabilities approximately a decade after high school completion. (JEL I21 , J64 )     

Detracking Swedish compulsory schools: any losers, any winners?

In this article, I use within-school variation to estimate the effect of tracking. I exploit the fact not only that different tracking policies were practiced simultaneously in Swedish compulsory schools but also that tracking policies changed overtime within schools. I estimate not only if being in a tracked math environment had any effect on the probability of graduating from high school but also if tracking status had any impact on the math grade in high school. The results show that there are no significant average effects of tracking. However, there are effects in the lower part of the grade distribution. Students with a low-educated family background are more likely to fail math at high school if they have attended a compulsory school that practiced tracking compared to similar students in a non-tracked environment.     

Laying the Tracks for Successful Science,Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education: What Can We Learn from Comparisons of Immigrant–Native Achievement in the USA?

This paper examines the immigrant–native achievement gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in college in the USA. Using student survey data from the Beginning Postsecondary Longitudinal Studies 2004/09, I find that on average immigrant students have significantly higher rates entering and persisting in STEM fields compared to their native counterparts. There is, however, considerable variation across immigrant generations and race and ethnicity. The immigrant attainment advantage is particularly large among first‐generation Asian and white immigrant students who attended foreign K–12 schools. I explore the channels leading to the achievement gap, including socioeconomic status, individual preferences, and academic preparation in math and science. Results suggest that the immigrant STEM advantage is largely due to better academic preparation in math and science in high school. This indicates that improvements in students' college STEM attainment may depend crucially on policy efforts devoted to strengthening the quality of high school math and science education.     

Parental risk attitudes and children's academic test scores: evidence from the US panel study of income dynamics

Using a sequence of questions from the 1996 US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we explore the implications of interpersonal differences in parent's attitudes towards risk for the academic test scores of their children focusing on information drawn from the 1997 Child Development Supplement of the PSID. In addition, we explore whether parental risk preference influences whether the child subsequently attends college. Our findings suggest that a parent's degree of risk aversion is inversely related to the academic test scores of their children as well as being inversely related to the probability of attending college post high school.     

Estimating the effect of early-childhood citizenship on education using policy changes as instruments

This article investigates the effect of early-childhood citizenship status on secondary school education of immigrant offspring. Given the potential endogeneity of naturalization decision, I instrument for citizenship by using a German reform that introduced exogenous variation in the age of naturalization. The reform provides powerful instruments, significantly raising the likelihood of possessing a German passport in childhood. I find that citizenship status increases the probability of attending the highest school track, which gives access to academic education. The effects are of a similar magnitude for boys and girls.     

The negative consequences of school bullying on academic performance and mitigation through female teacher participation: evidence from Ghana

Exploiting data from Ghanaian schools’ eighth grade students collected in 2011, we estimate the causal effects of school bullying on academic achievement and gender-based mitigating approaches by using propensity score matching (PSM) and doubly robust (DR) estimator approach. We find that students victimized by bullying score at least 0.22 standard deviation lower than their peers in a standardized mathematics examination. Meanwhile, we document that the effect of bullying is significantly attenuated in the presence of female teachers in the classroom. These results hold through a set of robustness checks including placebo regressions and matching quality test. We explain the results through gender difference in teaching paradigm and conclude that a feminine management approach in class is required to reduce the effect of bullying.     

Test scores,educational opportunities,and individual choice

A model combining student preferences for college with university admissions decisions is estimated to provide information on the role of test scores in the determination of post-secondary educational opportunities in the U.S. In contrast to implications of much of the recent criticism of tests and their use, we find that scholastic aptitude test scores are more strongly related to student application and choice of college ‘quality’ than to college admissions decisions. In addition, although there is a substantial correlation between test scores and high school performance, we find that both post-secondary school preferences and ultimate opportunities are related as much to performance in high school as to test scores themselves. Although SAT scores certainly exclude some persons from schools, our findings indicate that they do not represent an overriding constraint on the college opportunities of high school graduates.     

A COHORT ANALYSIS OF US AGE–EARNINGS PROFILES

Aggregate data on US earnings, classified by period and by age, are decomposed into age, period and cohort effects, using the Bayesian cohort models, which were developed to overcome the identification problem in cohort analysis. The main findings, obtained by comparing college and high school graduates, are threefold. First, the age effects show a downward trend for the age group of 45–49 onwards for high school graduates but do not show any such trend for college graduates. Second, the period effects show a downward trend for high school graduates but reveal no such trend for college graduates. Third, the cohort effects are negligible for both college and high school graduates.     

Gordon Tullock and Richard McKenzie. The New World of Economics.

The authors extend the literature on the efficacy of high school economics instruction in two directions. First, they assess how much economic knowledge that California students acquired in their compulsory high school course is retained on their entering college. Second, using as a control group some college students from the state of Washington, where there is no mandate for high school economics instruction, the authors evaluate the impact of California's high school economics mandate on students’ economic literacy when they enter college. The testing instrument is the Test of Economic Literacy (TEL).     

DEMONSTRATED INTEREST: SIGNALING BEHAVIOR IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

In college admission decisions, important and possibly competing goals include increasing the quality of the freshman class and making the school more selective while attaining the targeted size of the incoming class. Especially for high‐quality applicants who receive multiple competing offers, colleges are concerned about the probability that these students accept the offers of admission. As a result, applicants' contacts with admissions offices, such as campus visits, can be viewed positively by the officers as demonstrated interest in the colleges. We provide empirical evidence on the effects of demonstrated interest on admission outcomes. Specifically, we use unique and comprehensive administrative data, which include all contacts made by each applicant to the admissions office of a medium‐sized highly selective university during two admission cycles. We find that an applicant who contacts the university is more likely to be admitted, and that the effect of the contact on the probability of admission is increasing in the applicant's Scholastic Assessment Test score, particularly when the contact is costly to make. We also use a numerical example to explore policies to reduce the inequity associated with the use of demonstrated interest in admission decisions, examining in particular the subsidization of costly demonstrated interest by low‐income students. (JEL D83, I23)     

Post‐secondary education in Canada: can ability bias explain the earnings gap between college and university graduates?

Abstract .  Using the Canadian General Social Survey we compute returns to post-secondary education relative to high school. Unlike previous research using Canadian data, our data set allows us to control for ability selection into higher education. We find strong evidence of positive ability selection into all levels of post-secondary education for men and weaker positive selection for women. Since the ability selection is stronger for higher levels of education, particularly for university, the difference in returns between university and college or trades education decreases slightly after accounting for ability bias. However, a puzzling large gap persists, with university-educated men still earning over 20% more than men with college or trades education.     

The effects of cognitive ability and high school quality on college entry decisions: nonparametric estimation of parameters of interest

The decisions to attend college are analysed and nonparametric predictions compared to those obtained from the widely used logit model. The impacts of measured cognitive ability and proxies for high school quality on the decisions to attend college are examined for a sample of white and black males and females from the USA. Two different parameters of interest which isolate the effects of ability and high school quality on college entry decisions are described and estimated by ‘integrating out’ the effect of other covariates. It is found that measured cognitive ability is an extremely important determinant of college entry for all race and gender groups. At the same point in the ability distribution, blacks are more likely to select into college than whites, and females more likely than males of the same racial group. Proxies for high school quality such as teacher education, student teacher ratios, school enrolment and library size are shown to have little or no effects on the likelihood of college entry for all race and gender groups. Further, predictions obtained from the flexible nonparametric analysis are found to be quite similar to those obtained from the logit model, suggesting that simpler fully parametric binary choice models perform quite well as modelling college entry decisions.     

THE TIMING OF SIGNALING: TO STUDY IN HIGH SCHOOL OR IN COLLEGE?*

American students study harder in college than in high school, whereas East Asian students study harder in high school than in college. This article proposes a signaling explanation. Signaling may occur over time both in high school and in college, and societies may differ in the timing of signaling. Students work harder in the signaling stage determined by the society as a whole. A testable implication is that high ability workers in East Asia are more concentrated among a few colleges than their U.S. counterparts. This implication is confirmed by top CEO education profile data in the United States and Korea.     

Statistical inference,model selection and research experience: A multinomial model of data mining

The use of the same body of data to select a model and to estimate its parameters leads to an increase in the probability of committing a Type I error. Using a multinomial model of data mining, we show that as research experience increases, the probability of committing a Type I error decreases.     

论高中英语与大学英语的教学衔接

随着社会的发展,英语在我们的学习、工作和生活中发挥的作用愈益显著。然而,英语学习中．特别是高中英语和大学英语教与学中的分化现象日益严重,有不少大学生在大一开始不久就显示英语各方面学习不适应和反感厌倦。基于高中英语教学的经验,从听、说、读、写等四个方面分析高中学生在大学英语学〉-j中会遇到的问题,可以为高中英语与大学英语在教法和学法上的衔接提供了切实可行的思路和举措。     

The role of birth order in child labour and schooling

Does when a child was born relative to his or her siblings affect whether the child attends school or participates in child labour? We investigate this question by estimating the causal effect of birth order on the probabilities of school attendance and child labour participation. To address the potential endogeneity of family size, we use instrumental variable approach where the proportion of boys in the family is used to instrument family size. Using a longitudinal household survey data from Ethiopia, we estimate unobserved effects bivariate probit instrumental variable model of school attendance and child labour choices. The results suggest that the probability of child labour participation decreases with birth order, but we find no evidence that suggests birth order affects the probability of school attendance. However, among children who are going to school, hours spent studying increases with birth order. Results from complementary time-use analysis reveal that there is no birth order effect on hours spent on household chore. However, hours spent on school increases with birth order, where the increase in hours spent on school seems to come from a decrease in hours spent on market work.     

Employer-supported training in Canada and its impact on mobility and wages

Using information on job histories and on two training questions contained in Statistics Canada's Follow-Up to the School Leavers Survey, this paper seeks to answer three basic questions: 1) what are the characteristics of the trainees?; 2) Does the receipt of employer-supported training cause an increase in the wage paid to those young workers?; and 3) Does it improve the degree of job attachment?; I find that more educated young people are somewhat more likely to be trained than high school dropouts although there is strong evidence of selectivity as employers clearly seem to support training for those that have the most “favorable” characteristics. Also, controlling for unobserved individual characteristics, I find that training has a sizeable wage impact for men while the effect is much more modest for women. Finally, results using Chamberlain (1985) fixed-effects hazard model show that the conditional probability of the employment relationship being terminated decreases substantially for trainees, which is consistent with the notion that the skills learned by trainees may have a sizeable firm-specific component. First version received: October 2000/Final version received: February 2002  I would like to thank Nathalie Viennot-Briot for excellent research assistance, as well as Claude Montmarquette and an anonymous referee for useful comments and suggestions. Financial support from Human Resources Development Canada is gratefully acknowledged.     

中国城镇失业决定因素的实证分析——基于CHNS面板数据

采用CHNS面板数据和随机效果单位概率模型分析决定我国城镇失业率的主要因素。16—26岁青年失业率决定因素的实证结果显示：年龄的增加会降低失业概率,年龄对失业概率的边际效果较大;从教育水平变量的估计结果来看,和小学和初中毕业的劳动力相比,高中、中专毕业劳动力的失业概率较高,但是大专以上毕业的劳动力的失业概率却没有什么明显变化。全样本实证结果显示：年龄的增加会降低失业概率,但是降低的幅度会越来越小;男性、未婚、教育水平低、西部、调查失业率高、自雇就业比率和工业占产业比高的地区,劳动力的失业概率相对较高。