DO PRIVATE TUTORS ENHANCE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ABILITY? REGRESSION DISCONTINUITY EVIDENCE FROM A POLICY EXPERIMENT IN INDIA

Empirical evidence has shown that returns to English language ability are substantial in India. Research has also focused on the impact of private tutoring in the context of developing economies to find evidence that remedial teaching leads to better student achievement and higher test scores. In this paper I analyze whether private tutoring helps in developing English language ability. Simple OLS estimates suggest statistically significant effects but estimated coefficients are rather small at 0.2 percentage points. Presence of confounders and selection bias may potentially understate the true effects of private tutoring on English language ability. To address this issue, I exploit a unique policy experiment in India in a regression discontinuity framework to identify cohorts eligible for private tutoring and compare their outcomes to the ineligible. I use this potentially exogenous policy variation as an instrument for private tutoring and find significant increases in English language ability estimated at 16 percentage points which is much larger than the simple OLS effects. Since standard academic curriculum is not directed towards improving foreign language ability, private tutoring as an input in the education production function seems to offer high marginal returns. From a policy perspective, this implies that private tutoring should be encouraged for enhancing English ability even though there are concerns that this provides disincentives for teachers to teach in school.     

Education and earnings in urban West Africa

Using a series of comparable labor force surveys in urban West Africa, we estimate the private returns to education among representative samples of workers in seven economic capitals (Abidjan, Bamako, Cotonou, Dakar, Lome, Niamey and Ouagadougou). The data allow us to provide a unique cross-country comparison using rigorously the same variables and methodology for each country. We tackle the issues of endogenous sector allocation (public, formal private and informal sectors) and endogeneity of the education variable in the earnings functions. We find that the returns to schooling are most often enhanced once an endogenous education variable is accounted for. This effect holds particularly true in the informal sector. In most West African cities of our sample, the public sector gives more value to education, followed by the formal private sector and then the informal sector. We also shed light on convex returns to education in all the cities and sectors, including in informal activity. More generally, a major contribution of this paper is to provide evidence of significant effects of education on individual earnings in the informal sectors of the West African cities, even at high levels of schooling.     

PRIVATE EDUCATION IN INDIA: A NOVEL TEST OF CREAM SKIMMING

Students in private schools routinely outperform those in public schools both in the United States and around the world. But do private schools make students better or do they simply cream skim better students? In this article I take advantage of the remarkable fact that in many districts in India a majority of students attend private schools. As the private share of school enrollment increases, cream skimming becomes less plausible as the explanation for a higher rate of achievement in private schools. Evidence for cream skimming is found when the private share of schooling is low, in the range of 0–15%, and thus private schools have a large public pool from which to skim. But the private effect on achievement does not appear to diminish greatly even in districts where more than 70% of students are in private schools. Most importantly, mean scores taken over the entire population of students, private and public, increase with the share of private schooling. These findings support a significant productivity effect of private schools. (JEL I25, I2, L33)     

To Segregate or to Integrate: Education Politics and Democracy

How is the quality of public education affected by the presence of private schools for the rich? Theory and evidence suggest that the link depends crucially on the political system. We develop a theory that integrates private education and fertility decisions with voting on public schooling expenditures. We find that the presence of a large private education sector benefits public schools in a broad-based democracy where politicians are responsive to low-income families but crowds out public education spending in a society that is politically dominated by the rich. The main predictions of the theory are consistent with state-level data and micro data from the U.S. as well as cross-country evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment study.     

What factors drive individual misperceptions of the returns to schooling in Tanzania? Some lessons for education policy

Evidence on educational returns and the factors that determine the demand for schooling in developing countries is extremely scarce. Building on previous studies that show individuals underestimating the returns to schooling, we use two surveys from Tanzania to estimate both the actual and perceived schooling returns and subsequently examine what factors drive individual misperceptions regarding actual returns. Using OLS and instrumental variable methods, we find that each additional year of schooling in Tanzania increases earnings, on average, by 9 to 11%. We find that on average individuals underestimate returns to schooling by 74 to 79% and three factors are associated with these misperceptions: income, asset, poverty and educational attainment. Shedding light on what factors relate to individual beliefs about educational returns can inform policy on how to structure effective interventions in order to correct individual misperceptions.     

An analysis of public adaptation to climate change using agricultural water schemes in South America

This paper provides an analysis of public adaptation to climate change using agricultural water schemes in South American farms. Unlike other studies of adaptation, this paper examines the differences between private irrigation and public irrigation schemes based on around 1400 farm surveys collected across seven countries in South America which recorded detailed water schemes. We analyze the choice of water schemes in the first stage and the land values for each scheme in the second stage. We find that public irrigations do not increase in response to a warmer climate, but private irrigations do. On the other hand, we find that public irrigation schemes are provided primarily as a response to water scarcity. Moreover, we find that private irrigations are taken gradually while public irrigations are provided as a lump sum, resulting in either too much or too little provision. Therefore, public adaptations to climate change will likely involve two inefficiencies. No provision of irrigation in a hotter climate may result from a lack of knowledge. Overprovision of irrigation in dry zones may result from a lump-sum provision of a public good.     

ENDOGENOUS TIMING IN A MIXED DUOPOLY AND PRIVATE DUOPOLY –‘CAPACITY‐THEN‐QUANTITY’ GAME: THE LINEAR DEMAND CASE*

We consider a game of endogenous timing of sequential choice of capacity and quantity with observable delay in a mixed duopoly and a private duopoly. In mixed duopoly, we find that a simultaneous play at the capacity stage or at the quantity stage can never be supported as subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE); whereas a simultaneous play at each stage turns out to be the unique SPNE in a private duopoly. In mixed duopoly there is multiplicity of equilibria and all SPNEs require sequentiality at the capacity as well as quantity stage.     

Location of public and private firms under endogenous timing of choices

This paper studies the choices of locations in a mixed duopoly when production costs are endogenously determined and the public firm maximizes a weighted sum of social surplus and its profits. We find that the locations of the two firms are decided simultaneously when the weight of the public firm’s profits in its objective function is high enough. When this is not the case we find that one firm (not always the public firm but sometimes also the private one) behaves as a leader in the choice of location and location decisions are made sequentially. Moreover, in equilibrium, the production cost of the public firm is never higher than that of the private firm.     

Do Gatt Rules Help Governments Make Domestic Commitments?

We investigate empirically whether GATT rules may have helped the US government make trade policy commitments to its private sector. We study choices under two distinct environments. One environment is the determination of sectoral exclusions in the Tokyo Round of GATT negotiations. The other is the determination of tariff responses under GATT's escape clause. In each environment the US government was faced with a similar decision, but only in the former environment did GATT rules serve as a potential commitment device. Comparing decisions made across these two environments, we find evidence that GATT rules did help the US government make domestic trade policy commitments that it could not have made in the absence of these rules.     

An empirical analysis of assortative mating in India and the U.S.

This paper uses a conditional logit model to analyze empirically how individuals sort themselves through marriage into households in India and the U.S. The results support positive assortative mating of spouses with respect to age and schooling. We find no evidence in favor of Becker's theory of labor market specialization in couples. Moreover, while similarity in age is the strongest predictor of marital choice in India, education of a prospective spouse plays a more important role in the U.S. Finally, we find that while dowry increases the likelihood of women marrying men with characteristics dissimilar to their own, availability of a mate has a positive effect on the degree of stratification in India.     

Monopoly pricing in the binary herding model

How should a monopolist price when selling to buyers who learn from each other’s decisions? Focusing on the case in which the common value of the good is binary and each buyer receives a binary private signal about that value, we completely answer this question for all values of the production cost, the precision of the buyers’ signals, and the seller’s discount factor. Unexpectedly, we find that there is a region of parameters for which learning stops at intermediate and at extreme beliefs, but not at beliefs that lie between those intermediate and extreme beliefs.     

PRELIMINARY EVIDENCE ON INTERNAL MIGRATION,REMITTANCES, AND TEEN SCHOOLING IN INDIA

We examine correlations between the receipt of remittances from internal migrants and human capital investment in rural areas of India. We employ a propensity score matching approach to account for the selectivity of households into receiving remittances. We find a positive correlation between remittances received from internal migrants and the schooling attendance of teens. The magnitude of the correlation is greater when focusing on low‐caste households, and male schooling attendance in particular becomes more positive and statistically significant. Our findings provide a basis for establishing future research in the areas of migration and social protection in India. (JEL O15, J24, R23)     

The effects of generalized school choice on achievement and stratification: Evidence from Chile's voucher program

In 1981, Chile introduced nationwide school choice by providing vouchers to any student wishing to attend private school. As a result, more than 1000 private schools entered the market, and the private enrollment rate increased by 20 percentage points, with greater impacts in larger, more urban, and wealthier communities. We use this differential impact to measure the effects of unrestricted choice on educational outcomes. Using panel data for about 150 municipalities, we find no evidence that choice improved average educational outcomes as measured by test scores, repetition rates, and years of schooling. However, we find evidence that the voucher program led to increased sorting, as the “best” public school students left for the private sector.     

外商直接投资与管理知识溢出效应:来自中国民营企业家的证据

本文从民营企业家的角度对FDI管理知识溢出效应的存在性进行了实证研究。我们运用中国 1 997、2 0 0 0、2 0 0 2年三次全国民营企业抽样调查数据 ,通过回归分析、TreatmentEffect方法和有限因变量模型 ,研究了中国民营企业家在“三资”企业工作的经历对其企业的经营业绩和管理方法的影响。本文所得到的经验结果显示 ,在企业业绩的最终表现上 ,FDI对中国企业家有一定的培训效果 ,但效果不十分显著 ;同时在“三资”企业的工作经历会带给民营企业家某些、而不是全面的先进管理理念。我们认为要获得更加显著的FDI溢出效应 ,政府应当着眼于制定政策来扶持本地企业 ,通过公平竞争缩小他们与先进企业的距离 ,促使FDI在激烈的市场竞争中带来真正先进的管理经验和知识 ;并通过教育培训投入 ,提高本地管理者对外来的先进管理方法的学习能力。     

The effect of private high school education on the college trajectory

We use the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) to estimate the effect of private secondary schooling on the average college trajectory of a student in the United States, examining college enrollment and degree attainment across the private and public sectors. We provide the first estimates of the effect of private schooling on college degree attainment using the most recent NELS survey. To account for potential non-random selection we exploit the variation in the grade spans of the students’ middle schools. Results indicate that private schooling has a significant, positive effect on college enrollment and degree attainment. The effect on college enrollment diminishes with time, suggesting that private schools influence degree attainment by getting students to college sooner.     

Returns to schooling for urban and migrant workers in China: a detailed investigation

We use a new data set, the 2009 Rural Urban Migration in China (RUMiC) to estimate returns to schooling in China using instrumental variable (IV) estimation. After identifying a set of instruments, we conduct comprehensive validity and relevance testing of different combinations of instruments as well as robustness analysis of our estimates for rural-to-urban migrants and urban residents in China. We find that our point estimates are in the 6–9% range for urban workers compared to 7–8% for migrant workers. Returns for men (at 8–9%) are slightly higher than for women (at 6–7%). Thus, private returns to education in urban China in 2009 were not as high as other transition and developing countries, but substantial and have increased over time. Comparing OLS and IV estimates, we also find that the attenuation bias due to measurement error is generally large and more important in the migrant sample compared to the urban sample.     

Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Curves of the Residential Heating Market: A Microeconomic Approach

In this paper, we develop a microeconomic approach to deduce greenhouse gas abatement cost curves of the residential heating sector. Our research is based on a system dynamics microsimulation of private households’ investment decisions for heating systems to the year 2030. By accounting for household-specific characteristics, we investigate the welfare costs of different abatement policies in terms of the compensating variation and the excess burden. We investigate two policies: (i) a carbon tax and (ii) subsidies on heating system investments. We deduce abatement cost curves for both policies by simulating welfare costs and greenhouse gas emissions to the year 2030. We find that (i) welfare-based abatement costs are generally higher than pure technical equipment costs; (ii) given utility maximizing households a carbon tax is the most welfare-efficient policy and; (iii) if households are not utility maximizing, a subsidy on investments may have lower marginal greenhouse gas abatement costs than a carbon tax.     

税负抑制了公司投资吗?——基于国有股权私有收益的解释

文章分析了税负对公司投资决策的影响.与民营控股股东不同,作为国有企业的最终股东,政府不仅可以获得与股权投资相关的收益,而且可以获得独占性的税收,独占性的税收收入越高,政府控股的私有收益越大.因此,国有企业在投资决策时不仅考虑税后现金流量,而且会关注相关的预期税负,这提高了国有企业的投资?预期税负敏感性;政府对税收的需求越大,国有企业的投资?预期税负敏感性越高.实证结果表明:(1)与民营控股上市公司相比,国有控股上市公司的投资与预期税负之间的负相关关系更弱;(2)随着注册地基础设施投资回报率的增加,国有控股上市公司的投资与预期税负之间的负相关性显著下降.因此,最大化税收收入也是国有企业投资决策的重要考虑因素.文章为我国股权结构在公司财务决策中的作用提供了新的研究视角.     

The Decline of Schooling Productivity in OECD Countries

Based on Baumol's cost-disease model, we develop two alternative measures of the change in the productivity of schooling. Both productivity measures are based on changes in the relative price of schooling. We find that in most OECD countries the price of schooling has increased faster in 1970–94 than would be compatible with constant schooling productivity. In addition, we show that the average performance of pupils has remained constant at best in most OECD countries. Our results imply a larger decline in the productivity of schooling in many OECD countries than in the United States.