Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Learning Consequences Of School Improvement In Mexico: Evidence From A Large Government Program, Carlos Alejandro Noyola Contreras

Undergraduate Economic Review

I study the impact of investment in infrastructure of already existing poor schools and increased school based management on learning outcomes, as measured by student achievement in standardized tests. To that end, I implement a difference-in-differences design to compare schools that received money from a large government program to improve their physical conditions with those that do not, before and after program implementation. Unlike previous studies, I focus on the effect of improving schools that already exist, to see whether the impact is different from that of building schools. I find no evidence of positive impacts on test scores at …

Employment Outcomes Of The Clarksdale Hope Vi Program, Ramona Stone

Public Health Sciences Faculty Publications

The HOPE VI initiative aimed to reshape neighborhoods in terms of their resident socioeconomic characteristics, business activity, levels of community collaboration, and economic growth. The goal of this research was to examine the relationship between education and employment while controlling for the type of housing received at relocation. This paper is part of a larger quasi-experimental research evaluation. Data sources included administrative records, baseline and follow-up surveys. The survey data was collected from the main adult in the family during face-to-face interviews two years apart. The questionnaire collected information about residents’ demographics, socioeconomic, health, housing, and satisfaction with the support …

The Relationship Between College Expansion And Income Inequality, Aidan J. Wang

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper examines the relationship between college expansion and income inequality within a country. Researchers have identified a “composition effect,” “compression effect,” and “dispersion effect.” However, the shape and magnitude of the net relationship remains unclear. I construct a country panel using inequality data from the World Inequality Database and college share data from Barro and Lee. From 0% to 27% college share, the bottom 50% and middle 40% income shares decrease linearly while the top 10% income share increases linearly. The trend shape holds for a sample of only OECD countries, but the magnitude changes, suggesting country-specific factors matter.

Private Universities Of Bangladesh:A Study On Service Quality,Customers’ Perceptions And Satisfaction, Abdul Kader, A. Salam

International Review of Business and Economics

The higher education sector of Bangladesh is divided as private and public sectors in terms of the initiative of establishment. All of them are autonomous where the public universities are owned by the government and the private universities have been developed by the private sector. As the private universities produce services and sell it to the students by a comprehensive marketing effort, we can treat their services as a part of marketing. In this study, we tried to show the quality of services and the subsequent perception and satisfaction level of the stake holders regarding services are being provided by …

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, …

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

Upjohn Press

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, …

Bilingualism: Visualizing The Outcomes For Latinx Students In The United States, Paul Polanco

Teaching and Learning Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I analyzed the outcomes of bilingualism for the growing Latinx community living in the United States. Outcomes were quantitatively analyzed from four different perspectives: educational outcomes, job market participation, income, and social capital engagement. Chapters 1 and 2 cover previous studies about bilingualism, the importance of including outcomes that are not purely related to income, and general characteristics of the Latinx community. To perform the analyses, I used the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002/2012 (ELS:2002) dataset, a nationally representative dataset administered by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) of the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department …

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 …

Volume I | Issue Ii | 2019.Pdf, Dujpew Editorial Board

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Economics and World Affairs

No abstract provided.

Education, Enterprise Capitalism, And Equity Challenges: The Continuing Relevance Of The Correspondence Principle In Japan, Masaaki Takemura

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

This paper revisits the correspondence principle of Bowles and Gintis (1976) – which refers to the mutual mimicking of the capitalist hierarchy in the workplace and the school. The Bowles-Gintis model still appears to be working in the context of schooling in Japan. In the international comparative educational assessment called PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), created by OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the association of advanced democratic nations), Japanese students achieve better results than most countries. Japanese students excel in PISA performance, especially in mathematics. Such excellence, however, has negative correlations with students’ creativity, positive attitudes, and …

Kentucky School Districts As Educational Bright Spots, Michael T. Childress

CBER Research Report

Every year a select group of Kentucky school districts perform better than expected on measures of educational achievement. These measures include things like the percentage of elementary students who achieve proficiency or distinguished in reading, or the proportion of less‐advantaged middle school students who show a similar level of competency on the math assessment.

There are wide differences in the learning environments, finances, and student outcomes among and within Kentucky’s 173 school districts. This is not surprising given that the largest school district in the state, Jefferson County, has 97,000 students and 165 schools, while the smallest, West Point Independent …

Using Mini-Grants To Build Multi-Sector Partnerships In Rural Tennessee, Ginny Kidwell, Kristine Bowers, Taylor M. Dula, Randolph F. Wykoff

Journal of Appalachian Health

Rural counties in Tennessee, including those located in Appalachia, face some of the greatest health challenges in the nation. Unpublished data collated by the East Tennessee State University College of Public Health (ETSU) show that Tennessee’s 52 Appalachian counties vary dramatically from its 43 non-Appalachian counties in virtually all socioeconomic, behavioral, and health outcome metrics. Since 2011, the Tennessee Institute of Public Health (TNIPH) has actively encouraged local communities to address behavior change, enhance educational achievement, and improve economic conditions as essential components for improving health and well-being in rural Tennessee.

Three Essays On Food Insecurity In Nigeria, Pimam Manzi Pidalatan

Dissertations

Households experience multiple shocks, among which health-related and agricultural-related shocks are the most frequent shocks in developing economies. Households’ exposure to shocks contributes more to the risk of being food insecure than a poor resource endowment (Azeem et al., 2016). Moreover, in low-income countries about 3.5 million mothers and children under the age of five die every year because they are undernourished FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP AND WHO 2017). Sub-Sahara Africa is the region with the highest prevalence of undernourished people (22 percent) and stunted children (30 percent) (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP AND WHO 2017). Three of the seventeen Sustainable …

Estimating The Payoffs Of K-12 Arts Education, Joseph E. D'Alelio

Honors College Theses

Arts education has been in debate since the United States introduced formal education system. While some argue its lack of significance, others argue its crucial underpinnings to our society. This paper explores the significance of arts education using the Higher Order Thinking (HOT) program in Connecticut schools to measure students’ payoff on statewide standardized testing, namely Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT). The sample includes 20 schools that have either been HOT or have become HOT within a five year period from the 2008-2009 to 2012- 2013 school year. We us a fixed effects Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to estimate …

Does Family Income Determine A Children Future Educational Attainment Level?, Diaisha T. Richards

Applied Economics Theses

Family income and education have been a major concern in a variety of researches, and as a topic in society. These two components are a major concern because they are known to be key elements in determining future success for an individual. Various studies investigated the significance, correlations and impacts these two factors have on one another. It is common for the amount of family income obtained to determine how much education one will receive in the future. This study focuses on testing the hypothesis that family income determines how much education a child will receive in the future. By …

Essays On Paid Family Leave In The United States, Beila R. Leboeuf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1: The first chapter is a literature survey that reviews the empirical research conducted on paid family leave in the United States. This chapter summarizes the documented benefits of paid family leave on women's labor force participation, leave usage, and children's health. Also, evidence that suggests potentially harmful effects of paid family leave is discussed. Possible directions for future research are explored, and the chapter concludes by considering the implementation of a national paid family leave program in the United States.

Chapter 2: The second chapter replicates and extends the results of Rossin-Slater et al. (2013). The purpose of …

The Evolution Of State Higher Education Public Funding Policy, Angela Rogers

Senior Theses

In the past several decades, public colleges and universities have increasingly struggled to fund all of the programs demanded of them as states slowly drain funding from their coffers. This discussion will examine different policies and frameworks that have been used by states to determine funding for their public institutions. Different factors that will be considered include political relationships, governance structures, and accountability models. The political trend of “free college” will also be considered. Then, the discussion will narrow to South Carolina funding policy, how it has changed over the years, and what the current challenges are. A policy proposal …

Illusion Of Gender Parity In Education: Intrahousehold Resource Allocation In Bangladesh, Sijia Xu, Abu S. Shonchoy, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

A target in the Millennium Development Goals—gender parity in all levels of education—is widely considered to have been attained. However, measuring gender parity only through school enrollment is misleading, as girls may lag behind boys in other educational measures. We investigate this with four rounds of surveys from Bangladesh by decomposing households’ education decisions into enrollment, education expenditure, and share of the education expenditure allocated for the quality of education like private tutoring. We find a strong profemale bias in school enrollment but promale bias in the other two decisions. This contradirectional gender bias is unique to Bangladesh and partly …

Essays In The Economics Of Education, Breyon J. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

I examine, separately, the impact of three education programs on student achievement, using difference-in-differences and difference-in-difference-in-differences designs. First, I examine whether spillover benefits on achievement exist from preschool. I estimate the effect of exposure to a South Carolina preschool program that targets disadvantaged four-year-olds on students’ test scores in grades 3 through 5, where exposure means residing in a school district once the program was made available and disadvantaged students are those eligible for free or reduced-price lunch or Medicaid. I find that exposure to the preschool program not only increases the math and reading scores of targeted students, but …

Essays In Applied Microeconomics, Lijuan Feng

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chapter 1 studies the effect of body weight on labor market outcomes. Using longitudinal data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) from 1989 to 2011, and both instrumental variable and fixed effects estimation to control for the endogeneity of body weight, I examine the wage effect of BMI by gender, type of residence area, and occupation. Results from linear OLS regression show a positive relationship between body weight and income for males in both rural and urban areas and females in rural areas, while a negative one for females in urban areas. After controlling for the unobserved individual …

Setting An Agenda For The Future, Sam Allgood, Kimmarie Mcgoldrick

Economics Faculty Publications

Anniversaries are a time for reflection and planning for the future. The fiftieth year of the Journal of Economic Education motivated us to invite those who have been intimately involved with the Journal to provide reflections, which appear within this symposium. In addition to providing a wealth of information about the past, they set the stage for initiatives that support the path forward.

What Should We Teach In Intermediate Macroeconomics?, Dean D. Croushore

Economics Faculty Publications

The major focus of a course in Intermediate Macroeconomics is building and understanding macroeconomic models and how they work. The course is the most analytical course in the curriculum and should lead students to embark on deep thinking about models and equilibrium. Students learn the essentials of a model and develop the concept of how to simplify a model to understand key concepts. Once the core of a model is developed, additional model features can be added to increase realism. Perhaps the most important macroeconomic concept in the course is that of general equilibrium—students learn to go beyond examining initial …

50 Years Of Economic Instruction In The Journal Of Economic Education, Gail M. Hoyt, Kimmarie Mcgoldrick

Economics Faculty Publications

With 2019 marking the fiftieth year of publication of the Journal of Economic Education (JEE), it seems fitting to examine the evolution of economic instruction as portrayed in the Journal. Born of the American Economic Association (AEA), and first edited by members of the AEA’s Committee on Economic Education (Saunders 2012), it is not surprising that the Journal’s focus as chronicler, proponent, and outlet for economic education activity reflects the educational component of the American Economic Association’s mission. The creation of the Journal signaled a self-awareness in the discipline that we needed to be more deliberate in …

Sanitation, Ek Prem Katha: The Impact Of Sanitation On Education In Indian Government Schools, Romanshi Gupta

Scripps Senior Theses

The Total Sanitation Campaign is an initiative launched by the Government of India in 1999 to accelerate sanitation coverage throughout the country. This thesis measures the impact of the Total Sanitation Campaign on education in Indian government schools. I assess whether access to toilets, access to water or access to both toilets and water impact the following parameters of education: literacy, current enrollment in school or completed years of education. Data is sourced from the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2005, sorted for the nineteen major states in India and aggregated at a district level for each state. The analysis …

The Impact Of Four-Day School Weeks And Fifth-Day Programs On Delinquency And Problem Behaviors In Adolescents, Emily Collins

Scripps Senior Theses

In recent years, tightening budgets have forced school districts to find new ways to save money. One way that has become increasingly popular is to shorten the traditional five-day school week to only four-days a week. This change is budget friendly and may act through efficiency wage theory as a recruitment tool for better teachers. Despite the increasing prevalence of districts running on four-day weeks, many of the effects of the shorter week on students are still unclear. Utilizing district-level panel data from the Colorado Department of Education, Study One took a difference-in-differences approach to determine the effect of the …

Analyzing The Impact Of Home Locales On Access To Tertiary Education; Trends In Students’ Access To Bucknell University, Emily Tevebaugh

Honors Theses

Access to postsecondary education has been found in previous studies to be correlated with socioeconomic status as well as with various other indicators, such as parents’ education levels and cultural expectations. However, addressing the impact of home locales and geographical proximity to colleges in addition to these individual characteristics is a crucial part of understanding college access. In this honors thesis, the following questions will be examined: how has access to college and the decision to matriculate changed in recent years? How does distance from colleges and differing characteristics of home locales influence acceptance to a university and the decision …

The Impact Of Regional Return On Education On The Self-Selection Of Mexican Immigrants, Warren Chen

CMC Senior Theses

This paper uses the 2010 Mexican Population and Housing Survey to examine the role of regional return to education on migrant selection. The study uses a standard linear regression model to predict the educational attainment of migrants and compares it to the educational attainment of non-migrants in each Mexican State. It finds evidence of negative selection, that less educated Mexican citizens are more likely to migrate to the United States. It also finds little evidence of the impact of regional return to education on migrant selection. The study offers potential explanations for the lack of impact and suggests avenues for …

Alleviating Poverty In Sub-Saharan Africa, Owen Dubeck

CMC Senior Theses

While most of the world has been able to dramatically reduce extreme poverty rates, Sub-Saharan Africa has failed to do so and is the only region in the world with more people living in extreme poverty than thirty years ago. This thesis will develop a policy framework for alleviating poverty by drawing from countries that are performing surprisingly well and poorly in the region. The thesis concludes with an analysis of whether education, health, or agricultural sectors should be receiving more or less funding based on expected rates of return and the feasibility of policy successes.

A Nuanced Look At Gender Interactions On Informal Employment And Income In Argentina And Uruguay, Teagan Knight

CMC Senior Theses

There are many existing studies characterizing the informal sector in Latin America, but the literature fails to fully examine the interactions between gender and disadvantaging factors on the probability of informal employment and its returns to wage. This analysis uses survey data from Argentina (2001) and Uruguay (2006) to examine the heterogeneous effects of number of children under 5, education, minority status, and migrant status on male and female informal employment and income. Being female interacts with number of children under 5 to create no effect on probability of informal employment, in contrast to a significant negative effect for men. …

The Role Of Quality Education In The Economic Development Of Mexico, Betzayra Perez

CMC Senior Theses

Mexico’s education system ranks among the lowest in terms of quality and achievement levels. Given the importance of education for a country’s economic development, it is crucial to understand how improvements in Mexico’s education quality can result in economic growth for the country. This thesis aims to create awareness about how the quality of learning rather than total schooling can result in improving Mexico’s economic development. First, a general literature review provides significant findings of the quality of education, the difference between learning and schooling, and educational equity, and its effects on economic development. Moreover, a detailed overview of the …