Despite the extensive literature on the determinants of child labor, the evidence on the consequences of child labor on outcomes such as education, labor, and health is limited. We evaluate the causal effect of child labor participation among children in school on these outcomes using panel data from Vietnam and an instrumental variables strategy. Five years subsequent to the child labor experience we find significant negative impacts on education, and also find a higher probability of wage work for those young adults who worked as children while attending school. We find few significant effects on health.
The paper examines the relationship between the signaling role of education and direct screening measures adopted by employers using a matched employee-employer data set drawn from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey for Great Britain. It identifies which firms use personality/attitude and/or performance/competency tests during the hiring process and, by combining this and other firm level information with employee level characteristics, investigate whether such tests affect the signaling role of education. The results suggest that hiring tests inhibit the signaling role of education, and that a failure to control for such tests may bias estimates of the returns to education.
This paper investigates the relationship between education and employer– provided training, both on-the-job and off-the-job, using a unique dataset drawn from a survey of Thai employees conducted in the summer of 2001. The authors find a negative and statistically significant relationship between educational attainment and on-the-job training (OJT) and a positive and statistically significant relationship between education and off-the-job training. Since the marginal monetary returns to OJT increase with education, the negative relationship between education and OJT suggests that the marginal costs of OJT are higher for the better educated, perhaps because the opportunity costs of the time spent receiving OJT increase with educational attainment.
I explore the effects of education on nonmarket outcomes from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Examples of outcomes considered include general consumption patterns at a moment in time, savings and the rate of growth of consumption over time, own (adult) health and inputs into the production of own health, fertility, and child quality or well-being reflected by their health and cognitive development. I pay a good deal of attention to the effects of education on health because they are the two most important sources of human capital: knowledge capital and health capital. There is a large literature addressing the nature of their complementarities. In the conceptual foundation section, I consider models in which education has productive efficiency and allocative efficiency effects. I then modify these frameworks to allow for the endogenous nature of schooling decisions, so that observed schooling effects can be traced in part to omitted third variables such as an orientation towards the future. An additional complication is that schooling may contribute to a future orientation. The empirical review provides a good deal of evidence for the proposition that the education effects are causal but is less conclusive with regard to the identification of specific mechanisms.
The paper reconsiders the analysis of the effect of education on income by Angrist and Krueger (1991). In order to account for possible endogeneity of the education spell, the authors use quarter of birth to form valid instruments. Angrist and Krueger apply a classical method, two-stage least-squares (2SLS), and consider results for data sets on individuals from all states of the US. In this paper the research by Angrist and Krueger is extended both in a methodological and an empirical way. Classical as well as Bayesian methods are used. Bayesian results under the Jeffreys prior are emphasized, as these results are valid in finite samples and because in the instrumental variables (IV) regression model the Jeffreys prior is in a certain sense, truly, non-informative. Further, it is considered how results vary between subsets of the data corresponding to regions of the US.
Before 1997, education was a way for young French men to avoid military service in the army. After the abolition of compulsory conscription in 1997, this incentive to stay on in education disappeared. We show that the decrease in the benefit of pursuing education for men was followed by a fall in their educational achievement relative to women and by a decrease in their relative entry wages. These results suggest that high school dropout rates could be reduced by policies increasing the immediate benefits of pursuing education and that it would yield a substantial improvement in early labor market outcomes.
This paper uses data from the Labour Force Survey over the period 1996-2002 to investigate the returns to a detailed list of academic and vocational qualifications. In particular, the analysis focuses on how these returns have varied over the time period considered, how the returns vary over an individual's lifetime using a pseudo cohort analysis, and how the returns vary according to the highest level of qualification obtained at school.
We develop an econometric model where the determinants of working while in school, academic performance, and the decision to drop out are set in the context of two types of high school students: those who prefer schooling and those who are more likely to join the labor market. The likelihood function of this model with heterogeneous preferences for schooling is composed of 48 individual contributions of a standard quadrivariate normal function. Exploiting a unique Canadian microdata set of high school students and school dropouts, we show that being a female student, attending a private school, and living with educated parents are linked to having a strong preference for schooling over the labor market. We also find that working fewer than fifteen hours per week while in school is not necessarily detrimental to success in school. Our results indicate that the decision to drop out is affected by the legal age to access the labor market, high minimum wages, and low unemployment rates. Several policies that aim at reducing the number of high school dropouts are identified.
This article investigates how changing the length of the school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings. I use variation introduced by the West German short school years in 1966–7, which exposed some students to a total of about two thirds of a year less of schooling while enrolled. I find that the short school years increased grade repetition in primary school and led to fewer students attending higher secondary school tracks. On the other hand, the short school years had no adverse effect on earnings and employment later in life.
This article presents a broad overview of human capital theory and presents highlights of the most recent evidence on the private and social returns to education. A distinction is made between the narrow social returns, as traditionally estimated in the economics of education literature, and the wide social returns that include externalities. The distributive implications of particular education finance policies are discussed. It is concluded that the education finance policies most conducive to social welfare are those that give priority to investment in the lower levels of education, including preschool, and the acquisition of general, rather than occupation-specific, skills. (Contains 6 figures and 16 tables.)
This study proposes a model to estimate the demand for higher education. The present model is characterized by an ability-based distribution of high school graduates who choose between entering the labor market and beginning post-secondary schooling. In addition to estimating the demand for higher education, this model also derives a test of the extreme screening hypothesis. Moreover, it provides estimates of human capital accumulation functions for both males and females.
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