Measuring the Impact of Socio-Economic Factors on School Efficiency in Australia

This paper examines the productive efficiency of government schools in New South Wales (NSW) in Australia. The study uses a technical inefficiency effects model applied to a unique three-year panel dataset containing 1235 primary and 371 secondary schools in NSW. A stochastic frontier production function and an inefficiency effects function that control for school socioeconomic and environmental factors are estimated. The dataset contains information on various school inputs, school expenditures by major functional area, parental socioeconomic characteristics, student characteristics, and standardized test scores. We examine the degree to which school and non-school educational inputs influence student achievement scores and find that, overall, primary schools are 88.6% and secondary schools 96.4% efficient. The index describing community socio-educational advantage has the most significant influence on students’ achievement scores.     

Export survival and the dynamics of experience

This paper focuses on developing countries’ pioneer exports to the OECD and obtains several important results on export dynamics, linking export experience and export survival. Using product level data at the SITC 5-digit level for 114 developing countries over the 1962–2009 period, we show that prior export experience obtained in non-OECD markets significantly increases survival of pioneer exports toward the OECD. The experience does not need to last long, as gaining experience for more than two years does not confer any additional benefit. The effect of experience depreciates rapidly with time: a break in export experience prior to entering the OECD reduces the advantage on survival. Finally, the role of prior export experience is particularly relevant for survival in the first two years upon entry into the OECD. The geographic dynamic of export experience reveals that experience is acquired in neighboring, easy to access markets before reaching more distant, richer partners and ultimately serving the OECD with a higher probability of survival.     

Fighting Capital Flight in Africa: Evidence from Bundling and Unbundling Governance

This study investigates the effect of governance on capital flight by bundling and unbundling governance. The empirical evidence is based on 37 African countries for the period 1996–2010 and the Generalised Method of Moments. Governance is bundled by principal component analysis, namely: (i) political governance from political stability and ‘voice and accountability’; (ii) economic governance from government effectiveness and regulation quality and (iii) institutional governance from corruption-control and the rule of law. The following findings are established. (i) Political stability and ‘voice and accountability’ reduce capital flight while the collective effect of political governance is not significant. (ii) Economic governance increases capital flight whereas the individual effects of regulation quality and government effectiveness are not significant. (iii) Corruption-control and institutional governance negatively affect capital flight whereas the impact of the rule of law is not significant. (iv) Taken together, Corruption-control is the most effective governance weapon in the fight against capital flight. (v) Priority in the Washington Consensus is more effective at fighting capital flight compared to the Beijing Model. Policy implications are discussed.     

HOW ENDAs EXTEND THE WORKWEEK: LEGAL PROTECTION AND THE LABOR SUPPLY OF BEHAVIORALLY GAY MEN

Employment Nondiscrimination Acts (ENDAs) have received much political attention in the recent past. Despite the political attention, very little research has investigated the impact of ENDAs. I analyze the impact of ENDAs on labor supplies, which is under‐researched in the policy analysis literature. My work is the first to investigate the labor supply patterns of behaviorally gay men using data that are representative of the entire behaviorally gay population. I show that ENDAs motivate behaviorally gay men to work roughly 15–20 h more per week and increase the probability that behaviorally gay men will supply any labor by approximately 7%. These results suggest that ENDAs increase the labor supply of behaviorally gay workers by increasing workplace tolerance of homosexuality. (JEL J2, J7, J1)     

The Economic Impact of Brexit: Evidence from Modelling Free Trade Agreements

This paper assesses the economic implications of the United Kingdom (UK) leaving the European Union (EU). The basic data on trade in goods and services and investment between the two parties suggest that the cost of “Brexit” could be substantial. Trade between the UK and the EU-27 is large and of a similar order of magnitude as transatlantic trade (between the EU and the U.S.). The precise nature of the (hopefully free) trade agreement UK-EU-27 is still being negotiated. All available studies concur that a significant disruption of trade links will impose economic costs on both sides. However, the EU-27 would bear only a disproportionally small share of the total cost, not just because it is about five times larger than the UK in economic terms, but also for fundamental reasons such as greater market power of its enterprises. Other studies on different free trade arrangements confirm the general proposition that the smaller party has more to gain from eliminating trade barriers (and more to lose from imposing them). This implies that the EU will have a stronger negotiating position.     

Direct and Spillover Effects of Unconventional Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies

This paper explores the direct effects and spillovers of unconventional monetary and exchange rate policies. We find that official purchases of foreign assets have a large positive effect on a country’s current account that diminishes considerably as capital mobility rises. There is an important additional effect through the lagged stock of official assets. Official purchases of domestic assets, or quantitative easing (QE), appear to have no significant effect on a country’s current account when capital mobility is high, but there is a modest positive impact when capital mobility is low. The effects of purchases of foreign assets spill over to other countries in proportion to their degree of international financial integration. We also find that increases in US bond yields are associated with increases in foreign bond yields and in stock prices, as well as with depreciations of foreign currencies, but that all of these effects are smaller on days of US unconventional monetary policy announcements. We develop a theoretical model that is broadly consistent with our empirical results and that highlights the potential usefulness of domestic unconventional policies as responses to the effects of foreign policies of a similar type.