GAMING A SELECTIVE ADMISSIONS SYSTEM

A university uses both early-stage selection outcome (high-school affiliation) and late-stage admission test outcome (standardized test scores) to select students. We use this model to study policies that have been proposed to combat inefficient gaming in college admissions. Increasing university enrollment size can exacerbate gaming and worsen the selection outcome. Abolishing standardized tests for university admissions increases gaming targeting high-school admissions and worsens the selection outcome, whereas eliminating high-school ability sorting may improve the university selection outcome under some cost conditions of gaming. Committing to a lower-powered selection scheme can improve the selection outcome by reducing gaming behaviors.     

Structural Challenges to Sustained Economic Growth in China

This essay focuses on three broad sets of issues that may not slow China's GDP growth to under 3 percent a year, but they will almost certainly create major social and physical problems that will be difficult to deal with. The first is the demographic and education challenges featured by a rapidly aging population combined with a large share of the population being under-educated. The second is the environmental challenges China faces in achieving the state goal of carbon neutrality by 2060. The third challenge is low consumption and unprecedentedly high investment, a strategy that has driven China's high growth rates in the past decades but is no longer sustainable. These three challenges are intertwined, making China's adjustment path even more uncertain. What would a sustainable development strategy involve? The clearest need is to shift investment away from energy-intensive housing and infrastructure and toward investment in people.     

Population density,urbanisation and agricultural mechanisation in modern Ghana

Farmers' technological choices take place within farming systems that are shaped by population pressure, connectivity to urban markets and agro-ecological conditions. The relationship between these drivers and agricultural technology use is ambiguous. On the one hand, population growth can increase the supply of labour, driving down wage rates and reducing the incentives for mechanisation. On the other hand, rural–urban movements of people can reduce rural labour supply while simultaneously driving up the demand for food and hence the demand for mechanisation. Past theories of agricultural mechanisation have explained the low adoption of agricultural machinery in land-abundant cereal production systems of SSA in terms of these drivers. However, recent empirical observations find extensive adoption of mechanised ploughing technology by small, medium and large-scale farmers in Ghana. Examining the Ghanaian experience can thus shed new light on theories of mechanisation. A large household survey dataset covering eight districts is combined with geo-spatial data on population, urban proximity and agro-ecological factors to consider whether the existing theories are able to explain farm-level adoption decisions in this context. The analysis finds that a farmer's decision to use agricultural machinery is associated with lower population density and proximity to urban centres. In northern Ghana, these drivers of technological change are as important as farm household characteristics in understanding cross-sectional patterns of machinery adoption.