The Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth: 20 Years and Beyond

The Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) follow several cohorts of young Australians as they move through secondary school, into further study, work and other destinations. The LSAY datasets provide an evidence‐based capacity for sophisticated exploration of policy and research questions through insights into individual changes, transitions and trajectories across the life‐course of young Australians. This article aims to provide an update on the progress of LSAY, including its history, evolution of the sample, sample maintenance activities, updates to the information collected, developments to the survey, the many uses that have been made of the data and possible enhancements.     

The Happiness of Young Australians: Empirical Evidence on the Role of Labour Market Experience

Data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth are used to investigate factors that influence young Australians' self-reported levels of 'happiness' during the school-to-work transition, focusing on the role of labour market experience. Panel logit models are fitted to control for individual effects. Fixed individual personality traits and marital status strongly influence reported happiness. There is evidence of declining well-being with duration of unemployment and of the importance of job quality, rather than just having a job. The validity of Clark and Oswald's (1994) assertion that empirical findings from happiness research show that unemployment is involuntary is questioned.     

Can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks?

Income shocks on poor households are known to induce parents to take their children out of school and send them to work when other risk-coping instruments are insufficient. State dependence in school attendance further implies that these responses to short-run shocks have long-term consequences on children's human capital development. Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, where the condition is on school attendance, have been shown to be effective in increasing educational achievements and reducing child work. We ask the question here of whether or not children who benefit from conditional transfers are protected from the impacts of shocks on school enrollment and work. We develop a model of a household's decision regarding child school and work under conditions of a school re-entry cost, conditional transfers, and exposure to shocks. We take model predictions to the data using a panel from Mexico's Progresa experience with randomized treatment. Results show that there is strong state dependence in school enrollment. We find that the conditional transfers helped protect enrollment, but did not refrain parents from increasing child work in response to shocks. These results reveal that CCT programs can provide an additional benefit to recipients in acting as safety nets for the schooling of the poor.     

Take Your Time to Grow: A Field Experiment on the Hiring of Youths

We investigate the effect of spells of no formal employment of young Germans on their chances of entering the labor market through an apprenticeship. We also study whether the potential negative effects of such spells can be mitigated by publicly provided training measures. In a field experiment, the fictitious applications of three young women were sent to firms advertising apprenticeships for the position of office manager. One application was from a fresh school‐leaver and two from applicants who had been out of school for two years, where one of them had participated in a training measure. We find that applicants who have been out of school for two years and have participated in the training are more successful than older applicants without additional training. We do not find a significant difference between older applicants with or without training and fresh school leavers. Our findings show that training measures increase the attractiveness of applicants and that the potential stigma of spells of no formal employment after school are compensated by informal work experience or age or a combination of both.     

School competition and the quality of education: introducing market incentives into public services

Existing research indicates that introducing school choice and competition into the public education system might improve the quality of schooling. Yet, up to date most empirical work on school choice has concentrated on developed countries and it is far from obvious that the experience of these countries can be of any guidance for transition economies. Our work intends to fill this gap. We concentrate on the case of Poland. We argue that in Poland, school choice and competition tends to improve average education quality and efficiency of public education expenditure.     

Effect of goods market segmentation on labor mobility: Evidence from China

This study empirically investigates the effects of goods market segmentation on interregional labor mobility using data from National Population Surveys in China. The findings reveal that a one-standard deviation increase in the goods market segmentation index reduces interprovincial migration by 4.0%. Restraining interregional trade and improving industrial specialization are the two mechanisms at work. Further analysis indicates that the restrictive effect of goods market segmentation is greater on highly educated laborers and the labor flows from poorer to richer regions. The heterogeneous analysis also implies that migrants are more concerned about educational resources and consumption diversity.     

Informality and credit constraints: evidence from Sub-Saharan African MSEs

The attributes of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) influencing access to credit, in particular the level and role of firm informality, are analysed in the article. The puzzle is the push for MSEs to join the formal sector and the tug to avoid the extra burden it places on the firm. It is important to know more clearly what forces are at work and the sources of the causal effects. This study uses data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys for five low-income countries (LICs) in Sub-Saharan Africa. The method is empirical and as we find informality to be endogenous to credit constraints, an instrumental variable approach is estimated. Further, to address the possibility of reverse causality, an instrument for the informality variable is required; not registered with Inland Revenue (tax office) is the chosen instrument variable. The findings reveal that as the probability of a firm operating in the formal sector increases, there is greater access to external credit. The causality relationships are tested providing a strong platform for the formalization of polices to reduce the informality of the MSE sector. These are discussed in the context of the research findings.     

OCCUPATIONAL AND INDUSTRY SPECIFICITY OF HUMAN CAPITAL IN THE BRITISH LABOUR MARKET

This paper builds on the recent literature on the importance of occupational and industry experience on wages and extends Kambourov and Manovskii's (2002) study using British data. Occupational experience is estimated to make a significant contribution to wage growth, while the evidence on industry specificity is not very supportive. The second contribution of the paper is that it assesses whether there is heterogeneity in the estimated returns to work experience across one-digit industries and occupations. The findings suggest that industry and occupational experience is important for individuals in professional and managerial jobs or jobs in the banking and finance sector.     

Physician behavioural responses to variation in marginal income tax rates: longitudinal evidence

The longitudinal component of the Young Physicians Surveys (1987, 1991) is used to examine the impact of changes in marginal tax rates on key indicators of physician behaviour. Following the federal Tax Reform Act of 1986, many states' marginal income tax rates changed. This variation is used to estimate the responsiveness of work hours, HMO contracting and practice size to changes in taxes.     

ESCAPING POVERTY THROUGH WORK: THE PROBLEM OF LOW EARNINGS CAPACITY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1973–88

This paper documents the changes in earnings capacity poverty that occurred between 1973 and 1088. Families are "Earnings Capacity Poor" if they are unable to generate enough income to lift them out of poverty, even if all working-age adults in the family work full-time, year-round. Data from the March 1974 and March 1989 Current Population Surveys indicate that earnings capacity poverty increased more rapidly than official poverty. Much of this increase can be attributed to the rise in earnings capacity poverty among whites, intact families, and family heads with more than a high school diploma. Most alarming, the percentage of children in earnings capacity poor families is considerably higher than it is among persons over eighteen; in 1988, nearly 15 percent of children under six lived in families that could not have escaped poverty even if the adults in their family were working and earning at their full capacity levels.     

Investment climate,outward orientation and manufacturing firm productivity: new empirical evidence

Drawing on the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, we revisit the link between firm-level investment climate and productive performance for a panel of enterprises surveyed twice in time in 70 developing countries and 11 manufacturing industries. We take advantage of the time dimension available for an increasing number of countries to tackle the endogeneity issue stressed in previous studies. We also use pertinent econometric techniques to address other biases inherent in the data (e.g.measurement errors, missing observations and multicollinearity). Our results reinforce previous findings by validating, with a larger than usual sample of countries and industries, the importance of a larger set of environment variables. We show that infrastructure quality, information & communication technologies, skills and experience of the labour force, cost of and access to financing, security and political stability, competition and government relation contribute to firms’ and countries’ performances gap. The empirical analysis also illustrates that firms which choose an outward orientation have higher productivity level. Nevertheless, outward oriented enterprises are more sensitive to investment climate limitations. These findings have important policy implications by showing which dimensions of the business environment, in which industry, could help manufacturing firms to be more competitive in the present context of increasing globalization.     

Economic policy uncertainty,CEO characteristics and firm R&D expenditure: a Bayesian analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper applies a linear Bayesian regression model to study the effects of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) characteristics on firm Research and Development (R&D) expenditure. We specifically analysed data from 1,163 Chinese companies listed as A-shares from 2008–2016. EPU is believed to curtail firm investments as it causes unexpected market conditions. Yet, our findings obtained with Bayesian analysis show a positive relationship between EPU and firm R&D expenditure. Specifically, we found that some CEO attributes (e.g., age, tenure and marketing/sales experience) led to a negative relationship between EPU and firm R&D expenditure, whereas other attributes (e.g., education, overseas study/work experience, product R&D experience, and process engineering experience) lead to a positive relationship. Our findings provide nuanced insights into how different CEO characteristics influence firms’ R&D expenditure in a context of uncertainty.     

Knowledge sharing in an organization

Managers are always seeking effective policies that encourage employees to share their knowledge with others in an organization. The appropriate organizational incentives are difficult to investigate due to human factors and other institutional complexities affecting sharing behaviors of individuals. Conducting laboratory or field experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of various organizational incentive policies is unrealistic. This work proposes a novel agent-based modeling approach to simulate the actions of knowledge sharing between actors in an organization. Several human and institutional factors in this artificial world were manipulated to understand knowledge sharing. The simulation results produce the following interesting findings. (1) The initial state of actors' action affects the knowledge-sharing action regardless of the adopted strategy. (2) Poorer collective capability among the population lowers the knowledge sharing behaviors. (3) The incentive policy has restricted effects for increasing the sharing action. Rewarding each knowledge-sharing action is more effective than the periodic organizational incentives to encourage actors' knowledge sharing behaviors.     

The impact of work and non‐work migration on household welfare,poverty and inequality

This article estimates the impact of work migration and non‐work migration on per capita income, per capita expenditures, poverty and inequality in Vietnam using data from the two most recent Vietnam Household and Living Standard Surveys. We find that both work migration and non‐work migration have a positive impact on per capita expenditures of migrant‐sending households. Non‐work migration significantly decreases the incidence, depth and severity of national poverty. The effect of work migration on poverty is much smaller. Still, while work migration does not lift people out of poverty, it makes their poverty less severe. In addition, both work migration and non‐work migration decrease inequality, albeit only very slightly.     

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TRAINING IN THE PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SECTORS: EVIDENCE FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THE UNITED STATES

Formal training programs are one of the main channels through which workers become more productive and experience wage growth. So far, however, most of the results on the effects of employer‐provided training come from studying the training received by private sector workers only. We extend the literature by identifying and comparing the effects of private‐employer‐provided and public‐employer‐provided training in the United States and the United Kingdom. We address this question using two independent data sets from the British Household Panels Surveys and the American National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1979. (JEL J24, J31, J40)     

Complementarity and substitutability between farm and nonfarm activities: Evidence from agricultural households in Tanzania

Increasing evidence shows that farm households in developing countries maintain a portfolio of income-generating activities. Concerns have been raised that household income diversification to include nonfarm activities will stifle farm works, and thus reduce agricultural productivity. On the contrary, some evidence of complementarity between the farm and nonfarm activities in rural areas has been found. This paper uses data from the fourth and the fifth waves of Tanzania's National Panel Surveys to examine whether there exists complementarity or substitutability between farm and nonfarm activities in rural Tanzania. The findings show that participation in off-farm work and nonfarm business activities has no clear relationship to the adoption and use of improved agricultural practices, namely, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Participation in off-farm work and nonfarm business activities does not also seem to directly influence agricultural investments, production, and productivity nor overall household income. These results suggest that the complementary and substitution effects of nonfarm activities offset each other in Tanzania, implying that proper policies are required to unleash the potential impact of nonfarm activities on agriculture.     

The Structure of UK Outbound FDI and Environmental Regulation

In large parts of the world, a lack of home tap water burdens households as the water must be brought to the house from outside, at great expense in terms of effort and time. We here study how such costs affect girls’ schooling in Ghana, with an analysis based on four rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys. We address potential endogeneity issues by building an artificial panel of clusters using GPS coordinates. Our results indicate a significant negative relation between girls’ school attendance and water hauling activity, as a halving of water fetching times increases girls’ school attendance by about 7 percentage points on average, with stronger impacts in rural communities. Our results seem to be the first definitive documentation of such a relationship in Sub-Saharan Africa. They document some of the multiple and wide population benefits of increased tap water access, that are likely to be relevant in many African countries, and elsewhere.     

The impact of a study abroad programme on learning abilities and personality traits: evidence from a randomization

Personality traits are increasingly considered as a powerful predictor of socio-economic success as academic achievement. In this article, we exploit the random assignment of applicants to a programme in order to retrieve unbiased estimates of the impact of studying abroad on both cognitive and noncognitive abilities. Our findings suggest that secondary school students, especially those considered ‘more able’, benefited from a 1-month experience abroad, as it enhanced both personality traits and language proficiency.     

On work and idleness

In this essay we review a number of important historical and everyday conceptions of work, which reveal both the diversity of such conceptions, and also deep tensions, especially between positive (self-fulfilling, sociable) aspects of work and negative (laborious, exploitative) aspects. Due attention to these complexities suggests great caution in deciding how domestic work, including caring work, should be seen in relation to other kinds of work. We also argue that a very broad conception of work including, certainly, domestic and other work outside the market, while not appropriate for all purposes, is essential for considering the appropriate place of work, as opposed to idleness, in the good life. The possible value of idleness, we argue, has been obscured by the productivist ethic embedded in the major Western conceptions of work.     

量子思维对大数据背景下信息决策新思路的启示

随着大数据时代的到来,当前许多信息处理方法和思路都面临着革命性变化。这些变革由于数据庞大,突显出以“4V”为代表的非经典特征,而这些特征导致的复杂性给大数据时代信息决策提出了前所未有的新挑战。20世纪以来,量子力学理论的发展对物理学发展产生了革命性影响,由于其非经典特征而引发的诸多新型思维方式在方法论上可为解决大数据时代到来所引发的复杂问题提供新的可行思路。