In the United States, parents are offered free public education in the mainstream culture but must pay the full cost of tuition if they educate their children privately. This creates strong economic incentives for remaining within the public system, which promotes the assimilation of minorities. A Pareto improvement can be achieved by subsidizing private education in exchange for modifying its social content so as to reduce polarization. Popular opposition to voucher programs that facilitate school choice without regulating cultural content may partly reflect voters' concerns that such programs threaten to erode the common ground created by public education.
This paper investigates the impact of attending college in a state on the probability of working in the state. I use information on the set of colleges students applied to as a way to account for selection in college-attendance patterns. For two samples of U.S. undergraduate students, I find a modest link between attending college in a state and working in the state. The magnitude of the effect raises doubts that location-choice considerations alone can justify state merit-scholarship programs, an increasingly popular form of student financial aid. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
In an effort to understand why so many college graduates are leaving western Pennsylvania, recent college graduates from three Pittsburgh-area universities were surveyed about their career and location decisions. The results indicated some increase in those staying between 1994 and 1999. A logistic regression analysis showed that an improving economy, low housing costs, and ample opportunities for continuing education were the major reasons. However, the region is still losing disproportionate numbers of minorities and graduates in high-tech fields and is attracting few immigrants. The major competition was from neighboring states rather than the Sun Belt. Low salaries and lack of advancement opportunities, especially for women, minorities, and two-career couples, were the primary reasons. The results suggest several policy recommendations to help retain recent area graduates and to attract more highly skilled workers to the region.
Uncovering the effects of school racial composition on achievement is difficult, because racial mixing in the schools is not an accident but instead represents a complex mixture of government and family choices. While the goals of the integration of schools legally inspired by Brown v. Board of Education are very broad, here we focus more narrowly on how school racial composition effects scholastic achievement. Our evaluation, made possible by rich panel data on the achievement of Texas students, disentangles racial composition effects from other aspects of school quality and from differences in student abilities and family background. The results show that a higher percentage of Black schoolmates has a strong adverse effect on achievement of Blacks and, moreover, that the effects are highly concentrated in the upper half of the ability distribution. In contrast, racial composition has a noticeably smaller effect on achievement of lower ability blacks, of whites, and of Hispanics -- strongly suggesting that the results are not a simple reflection of unmeasured school quality.
The economic performance of U.S. immigrants differs substantially from that of natives in ways that pose difficulties for standard theories of migration. In particular, immigrants cluster geographically and are often employed together. Immigrant earnings differ by origin and time spent in the United States, even after controlling for education and experience. A large fraction of immigrants eventually returns home, even to low-wage countries. This article offers a theory of international migration based on assortative matching under imperfect information that accounts for a broad range of these empirical regularities.
This paper offers new evidence on the sources of cross-country income differences. It exploits the idea that observing immigrant workers from different countries in the same labor market provides an opportunity to estimate their human-capital endowments. These estimates suggest that human and physical capital account for only a fraction of cross-country income differences. For countries below 40 percent of U.S. output per worker, less than half of the output gap relative to the United States is attributed to human and physical capital.
This paper considers two measures of educational attainment that firms may used as 'screens' of a worker's future productivity level. Results suggest that both private and out-of-state public college graduates receive significant wage premiums over similar in-state public college graduates.
I examine the determinants of inter-state migration of adults within western Germany, using the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2000. Migrants who do not change employers represent one-fifth of all migrants and have higher education and pre-move wages than non-migrants. Skilled workers thus have a low-cost migration avenue that has not been considered in the previous literature. Other migrants are heterogeneous and not unambiguously more skilled than non-migrants. I confirm that long-distance migrants are more skilled than short-distance migrants, as predicted by theory, and I show that return migrants are a mix of successes and failures. Most repeat migration is return migration.
If higher education is publicly funded by local (sub-federal) jurisdictions, while skilled labor is heterogeneous in responding to wage differentials between jurisdictions, the spillovers that result give rise to a disparity between the centralized output-maximizing allocation of resources to higher education and decentralized equilibria. Generally, decentralization leads to under-provision, which can be offset by inter-jurisdictional subsidies based on gross migration flows. But the extent of the discrepancy depends on the local balance of political forces. Indeed, when the welfare of native-born emigrants is highly valued while new immigrants carry little political weight, over-provision in equilibrium is possible.
We investigate whether recent changes in welfare policy affect the migration of low-educated unmarried mothers. Estimates indicate that welfare reform is associated with an increase in employment-related intrastate migration, and a decrease in non-employment related migration, both within and between states. The net effect was a small increase in intrastate migration and a small decrease in interstate migration. The close link between migration and employment suggests that welfare reform has motivated low-income women to move for economic reasons. In general, welfare policy appears to have a much larger effect on residential location because of its relationship to employment than because of benefit differences between states.
Using the 1994-1998 International Adult Literacy Survey, this paper compares cognitive skills and employment of immigrants in Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States. Immigrants had lower cognitive test scores than natives in each country, with the largest gaps in the US, and small gaps in Canada and New Zealand. Male immigrants in the US were no less likely to work than natives, while in the other countries, male immigrants were less likely to be employed. Female immigrants were less likely in each country to be employed than natives, with an especially large gap for the US.
Black and Hispanic high school students enroll in Advanced Placement (AP) courses at approximately half the rate of white students. This paper develops a microeconomic model of the AP participation decision and finds that low income is the single most important factor behind the minority AP participation gap. In addition, minority students enroll in AP math, science, and English at lower rates than comparable white students. Magnet schools promote AP participation among white students but reduce participation among college-bound black students. Race-matched role models promote AP-taking among high-achieving black males, and AP incentive programs have the potential to dramatically increase minority student participation. Policy implications include reducing the impersonal nature of large high schools by creating smaller "schools-within-a-school" while maintaining flexibility across academic tracks, eliminating magnet programs, hiring qualified AP teachers to actively mentor minority students, and implementing incentive programs that promote teacher training and provide incentives for student achievement.
In the context of an emerging focus on highly skilled migration throughout the OECD area, the question under which circumstances migrants can be expected to be relatively skilled is of particular importance. Borjas has analysed the relation between the income distribution and the skills of migrants. His self-selection model predicts that immigrants from countries with a higher income inequality tend to be negatively selected (i.e., less skilled than the average worker in both host and source countries). According to other models based on the human capital theory of migration, however, migrants can be expected to be relatively skilled. Empirical tests of Borjas' much-disputed negative self-selection hypothesis generally rely on immigration data, particularly to the US, and may therefore be biased due to host-country specifics such as network migration and the impact of migration policy. This paper analyses the relationship between country-specific emigration propensities and each country's score on various indices of income inequality with a rich international microdata set. The main result is that highly-skilled persons are more inclined to migrate, though a higher income inequality attenuates the positive selectivity.
Recent literature has turned to the brain gain effect, instead of the brain drain effect, that emigration may bring to a source country. This paper, however, suggests brain drain remains a likely outcome. Suppose that foreign language skill affects an individual productivity when working abroad. A brain drain may occur when the (exogenously or endogenously determined) probability of immigration is large. We also consider the case that the probability of immigration is determined by a signal, and provide a condition under which the individual will under-invest in education, which results in a brain drain for the source country.
Average education of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Israel declined during the 1990s. We suggest that this is because the returns to investment in Israeli human capital increase in the amount of imported human capital. Thus, the more educated invest more, and therefore have an incentive to spend a longer share of their working life in Israel. This translates into early migration. Using data from the 1995 Israeli Census and the 1995-1998 samples of the Israeli Labor Force Survey, we test our hypothesis and find that being high skilled initiates early migration only for migrants participating in the labor market.
This paper evaluates the behavioral response of college-bound high school seniors to changes in college affirmative action admissions policies during the late 1990s. After the elimination of affirmative action in California and Texas, the gap between the numbers of SAT score reports sent by non-minority and minority students to in-state, public colleges significantly widened. To explain the number of score reports sent to various types of institutions, a count model is estimated as a system of seemingly unrelated regressions using semiparametric generalized least squares. The effect of changes in state policy on the number of reports of minority and non-minority students are simulated and compared to the actual responses. The simulation predicts a large decrease in the number of reports sent by minority students and a large increase in non-minority score reports sent to top-tier public colleges as a result of changes in the students' probabilities of acceptance.
During the late 1990s, several states eliminated affirmative action admissions policies at their public colleges. Some of these states substituted a program that grants admission to the top x% of each high school's graduating class. These new programs were instituted in efforts to restore minority college enrollments to their prior levels. This paper finds that the preferences given to minority applicants under affirmative action are large and that the minority share of admitted students in top-tier institutions would fall substantially after eliminating these preferences. However, there are not sufficient numbers of minorities in the top x% of their high school for the expected recovery from an x% program to be very large. Furthermore, most minority beneficiaries would have been accepted without these programs. As a result, x% programs are unable to replace traditional affirmative action and maintain the share of minority students.
This paper is a theoretical study of rural-urban migration-urbanization-as it has occurred in many low-income economies in the postwar period. This process is viewed as a transfer of labor from a traditional, land-intensive technology to a human capital-intensive technology with an unending potential for growth. The model emphasizes the role of cities as places in which new immigrants can accumulate the skills required by modern production technologies.
This paper uses general-equilibrium simulations to explore the role of residential mobility in shaping the impact of different private-school voucher policies, The simulations are derived from a three-district model of low-, middle-, and high-income school districts (calibrated to New York data) with housing stocks that vary within and across districts. In this model, it is demonstrated that school-district targeted vouchers are similar in their impact to nontargeted vouchers but vastly different from vouchers targeted to low-income households, Furthermore, strong migration effects are shown to significantly improve the likely equity consequences of voucher programs. (JEL I22, I28, H73).
Lifetime measures of return and onward migration that use place of birth may be rather arbitrary, as they may not capture the essence of "home" region and therefore may not adequately represent ties to place, including where an individual grew up or went to school. The recent availability of census data that include information on place of residence five years prior to the census, one year prior, and at the time of the census allow an alternative definition of return and onward migration based upon fixed-interval data. Employing data from the 1996 Canadian census, in this paper I first compare and examine the incidence, composition, and spatial patterns and explanations of return and onward migration through measures of lifetime and fixed-interval data. I then suggest a typology of return migration. Findings indicate that although both measures result in similar patterns and demographic effects, feted-interval measures provide additional detail into the processes at work. Planned returns among younger and older adults that are most likely associated with education or employment and represent 24 percent of returns define two types of return migration. A third type is more consistent with the stereotypical image of a ''failed" migration.
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