Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Making Sense Of Incentives: Taming Business Incentives To Promote Prosperity, Timothy J. Bartik

Timothy J. Bartik

In evaluating incentives, everything depends on the details: how much in incentives it takes to truly cause a firm to locate or expand, the multiplier effects, the effects of jobs on employment rates, how jobs affect tax revenue versus public spending needs. Do benefits of incentives exceed costs? This depends on the details. This book is about those details. What magnitudes of incentive effects are plausible? How do benefits and costs vary with incentive designs? What advice can be given to evaluators? What is an ideal incentive policy? Answering these questions about incentives depends on a model of incentive effects, …

Financial Education And Financial Literacy By Income And Education Groups, Jamie Wagner

Jamie Wagner

This study examines associations between financial education and financial literacy among people with different levels of education and income using a large, national data set, the 2015 National Financial Capability Study. This study estimates whether financial education in high school, college, or through an employer, is associated with a person 's financial literacy score. Results show that people who received any financial education are likely to have higher financial literacy scores compared to those without financial education. Financial education has larger predicted probabilities for those with lower education and income, suggesting that financial education is especially important for this demographic …

What Determines Public Education Expenditures In A Transition Economy?, Inna Verbina, Abdur Chowdhury

Abdur R. Chowdhury

Recent studies suggest that the allocation of expenditures in education matters for growth. Public education spending in many transition economies, however, is often inefficient and inequitable with education outlays misallocated across sectors. This highlights the need for an assessment of the nature of education expenditures in these countries. This paper attempts to fill the gap in the literature by estimating the determinants of education expenditures in the Russian Federation. Results from panel data analysis show that revenue and the student-population ratio have a positive impact on education expenditures while the effect of population density is negative. Three regional variables also …

Development Of A Regional Economic Dashboard, Randall W. Eberts, George A. Erickcek, Jack Kleinhenz

George A. Erickcek

No abstract provided.

Contribution Of Education And Innovation To Productivity Among Mexican Regions: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis, Vicente German-Soto, Luis Gutiérrez Flores

Vicente German-Soto

The Revitalization Of Older Industrial Cities: A Review Essay Of Retooling For Growth, Timothy Bartik

Timothy J. Bartik

No abstract provided.

The Revitalization Of Older Industrial Cities: A Review Essay Of Retooling For Growth, Timothy J. Bartik

Timothy J. Bartik

This review essay debates the policy issues raised by the book Retooling for Growth: Building a 21st Century Economy in America's Older Industrial Areas, edited by Richard M. McGahey and Jennifer S. Vey (Brookings Institution Press, 2008). I argue that the main rationale for adopting policies to revitalize older industrial cities is to improve the per capita earnings of urban residents. Therefore, urban economic development policy should be seen as urban labor market policy. Increasing city residents' earnings requires progress on two fronts: increasing metropolitan labor demand; increasing the quantity and quality of the effective labor supply of city residents …

Worker Signals Among New College Graduates: The Role Of Selectivity And Gpa, Brad J. Hershbein

Brad J. Hershbein

Recent studies have found a large earnings premium to attending a more selective college, but the mechanisms underlying this premium have received little attention and remain unclear. In order to shed light on this question, I develop a multidimensional signaling model relying on college grades and selectivity that rationalizes students’ choices of effort and firms’ wage-setting behavior. The model is then used to produce predictions of how the interaction of the signals should be related to wages, namely that the return on college GPA should fall the more selective the institution attended. Using five data sets that span the early …

Development Of A Regional Economic Dashboard, Randall W. Eberts, George A. Erickcek, Jack Kleinhenz

Randall W. Eberts

No abstract provided.

Intra-Household Allocation Of Family Resources And Birth Order: Evidence From France Using Siblings Data, Stéphane Mechoulan, Charles-François Wolff

Stéphane Mechoulan

No abstract provided.

Livestock Development And Poverty In Pakistan: Evidence From The Punjab Province, Sharafat Ali, Najid Ahmad

Sharafat Ali

Agriculture sector being an important and fundamental sector of the economy is the way of life for more than half of the Pakistan’s population. Its major sector is livestock sector. Livestock sector is the source of income and a safety against the crop failures or drought. Most of the rural population earns their living from this sector. Aspired from the argument that livestock has great importance in the life of the poor households, the present study is an attempt to analyze the impact of livestock sector development on poverty in Pakistan. The cross sectional data of 34 districts of Punjab …

Gender And Race Heterogeneity: The Impact Of Students With Limited English On Native Students' Performance, Tim Diette, Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere

Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere

Automatic Grade Promotion And Student Performance: Evidence From Brazil, Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner

Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner

Relying On The Private Sector: The Income Distribution And Public Investments In The Poor, Katrina Kosec

Katrina Kosec

The Effects Of Shallow Economic Policies On The Value Of Domestic Currency: The Situation Of The Ghanaian Cedi, George E. Ekeha

George E Ekeha

The local currencies of many emerging markets are going through some challenges today. The value of every currency is dependent upon its command over the local market products. When the goods and services available to the local market have bigger value of the foreign currency than the local currency, the value of the local currency becomes weaker. It is therefore very important for the emerging market economies to make very important policies that brings confidence of investors in the local currency. Unfortunately however, many of these economies such as Ghana have over the years been making decisions that are very …

Were Jews In Interwar Poland More Educated?, Ran Abramitzky, Hanna Halaburda

Hanna Halaburda

Research suggests that Jews have tended to be more educated than non-Jews. We confirm this finding for the case of interwar Poland, but show that it is driven by a composition effect. In particular, most Jews lived in cities and most non-Jews lived in rural areas, and people in cities were more educated than people in villages regardless of their religion. We find that while Jews were more educated than non-Jews in rural Poland, they were less educated than non-Jews in urban Poland.

The Effect Of School Finance Reforms On The Distribution Of Spending, Academic Achievement, And Adult Outcomes, C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker C. Johnson, Claudia Persico

C. Kirabo Jackson

Since the Coleman report, many have questioned whether public school spending affects student outcomes. The school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused dramatic changes to the structure of K–12 education spending in the US. To study the effect of these school-finance-reform-induced changes in public school spending on long-run adult outcomes, we link school spending and school finance reform data to detailed, nationally-representative data on children born between 1955 and 1985 and followed through 2011. We use the timing of the passage of court-mandated reforms, and their associated type of funding formula change, …

Match Quality, Worker Productivity, And Worker Mobility: Direct Evidence From Teachers, C. Kirabo Jackson

C. Kirabo Jackson

I investigate the importance of the match between teachers and schools for student achievement. I show that teacher effectiveness increases after a move to a different school, and I estimate teacher-school match effects using a mixed-effects estimator. Match quality "explains away" a quarter of, and has two-thirds the explanatory power of teacher quality. Match quality is negatively correlated with turnover, unrelated with exit, and increases with experience. This paper provides the first estimates of worker-firm match quality using output data as opposed to inferring productivity from wages or employment durations. Because teacher wages are essentially unrelated to productivity, this is …

Private Returns To Investment In Higher Levels Of Education In Kenya, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] A widespread phenomenon in less-developed countries-has been the rapid growth of schools and institutions of higher learning resulting in a so-called “education explosion." One possible explanation for the education explosion is that education is a profitable personal investment, as evidenced by high private rates of return. The high private returns are translated into demands on politicians for additional schooling spaces. To gain or maintain public favor, each politician uses his influence to try to increase the number of schools in his constituency. By this chain of events, growth of educational systems might be anticipated as long as private rates …

George Brooks: A Personal Reminiscence, David B. Lipsky

David B Lipsky

[Excerpt] In 1961, George joined the faculty of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) at Cornell and Sara was appointed to a position in the School's extension division. George hadn't done much college-level teaching when he joined the ILR School faculty. He quickly established himself as one of the School's most popular and influential instructors. George was certainly an engaging and entertaining lecturer, but it was not only his platform skills that made him so popular with students. Cornell students — especially those who were part of the 1960s generation — were drawn to George's unorthodox views on …

Gender Based Differences In Managerial Experience: The Case Of Informal Firms In Rwanda, Mohammad Amin, Khrystyna Kushnir

Mohammad Amin

The paper contributes to the literature on gender-based disparity in human capital by extending existing results on educational attainment to the number of years of experience that female vs. male managers have among informal or unregistered firms. Using the case of Rwanda, results show that the number of years of experience for female managers is significantly lower equaling 80-88 percent of their male counterparts. We also find that this gender disparity is higher among the relatively older managers and among firms in the relatively less developed city of Butare compared with the more developed city of Kigali.

Do Retail Firms Favor Female Managers? Evidence From Survey Data In Developing Countries, Mohammad Amin, Asif Islam

Mohammad Amin

Using firm-level data for 87 developing countries, the paper analyzes how the likelihood of a firm having female vs. male top manager varies across sectors. The service sector is often considered to be more favorable towards women compared with men vis-à-vis the manufacturing sector. While our results confirm a significantly higher presence of female managers in services vs. manufacturing, the result is entirely driven by the retail firms with little contribution from other service sectors such as wholesale, construction and other services. We also find that the higher presence of female managers in the retail sector vs. manufacturing is much …

A Classical-Marxian Model Of Education, Growth And Distribution, Amitava Dutt, Roberto Veneziani

Roberto Veneziani

This paper develops a classical-Marxian macroeconomic model to examine the growth and distributional consequences of education. First, the role of education in skill formation is considered and it is shown that an expansion in education will promote growth and have beneficial distributional effects within the working class, but it will redistribute income from workers to capitalists. Second, the model is extended analyze the broader political economic consequences of education on class relations and class conflict. The model suggests the importance of a progressive type of education rather than one which weakens the power workers, for it allows for equitable growth …

A Second Look At Enrollment Changes After The Kalamazoo Promise, Brad Hershbein

Brad J. Hershbein

While previous research has documented how the Kalamazoo Promise, the most prominent and generous place-based college scholarship program, increased enrollment in Kalamazoo Public Schools, this paper qualifies and quantifies the characteristics of students who were induced to enter—or stay—in the district. In particular, it analyzes the origins and destinations, socioeconomic composition, and school-level sorting behavior associated with student flows around the time of the Promise announcement. These dimensions are more subtle than changes in the volume of students or measures of their individual success, but they are equally important to understand for communities exploring the feasibility of place-based scholarships as …

Human Capital And Poverty In Pakistan: Evidence From The Punjab Province, Sharafat Ali, Najid Ahmad

Sharafat Ali

No abstract provided.

Una Evaluación De Los Factores Que Estimulan El Patentamiento Regional En México, Vicente German-Soto, Luis Gutiérrez Flores

Vicente German-Soto

On Estimating The Effects Of Increased Aid To Education, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Richard P. Chaykowski

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, of the National Commission on Excellence in Education decried the state of public education in the United States and suggested a number of reforms. Among their recommendations was increased federal aid for education. The view was that this would lead to desirable outcomes such as reduced class sizes and higher teacher salaries, with the latter aiding in the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers. Somewhat surprisingly, previous research on the economics of education provides us with very few insights about what the effects of such proposals might be. For example, while there …

The Social Security Student Benefit Program And Family Decisions, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

In 1965 Congress established the Social Security Student Benefit Program which provided benefits for children of deceased, disabled or retired workers, who were enrolled in college full—time and were not married, up until the semester they turned age 22. The program grew to be a major financial aid program; at its peak in FY 81 it represented about 20% of all federal outlays on student assistance for higher education. The program was terminated for students newly entering college as of May 1, 1982. Somewhat surprisingly, in contrast to the debate that accompanies most social programs, debate over the student benefit …

My Life And Economics, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Age 51 is a bit early to be writing a retrospective about one's career as an economist and one's life. This is especially true for me since I am not on track to win a Nobel Prize, to be admitted to the National Academy of Science, or even to be elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Nonetheless, as I write this essay during the fall of 1997, I look back on the 28 years I have spent as a PhD economist and see a record of accomplishment of which I am proud and a number of messages worth …

[Review Of The Book Discrimination In Labor Markets], Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] In sum, I consider Discrimination in Labor Markets a fine volume. Anyone who has the slightest interest in the analysis of labor-market discrimination should seriously contemplate purchasing it. The relatively nontechnical nature of the papers will appeal to a wide range of readers, and the book should quickly find its way onto reading lists for undergraduate and graduate courses that discuss the economics of discrimination.