The study uses a multivariate approach to investigate the effects of state education policies on grade repetition. The policies are: Head Start expenditures, provision of public pre-school handicapped programs, current school expenditures per pupil, provision of special education services, and grade school entrance dates. The effects of these policies are contrasted with the magnitude and significance of individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics. After holding constant state fixed effects, the state-to-state variations in overall school expenditures, special education enrollments of 6-15 year olds, handicapped preschool enrollments, and Head Start allocations are not found to have a significant impact on whether a child repeats a grade. School entrance month has a very large and significant impact on individual students' probability of having repeated a grade. This impact is due, almost entirely, to the relative age of the student. Thus, overall, variations in state policies are not found to have an impact on rates of school failure. In contrast, individual, family and neighborhood characteristics are all found to have large and significant effects on the probability that a child will repeat a grade. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
In this paper, I estimate the elasticity of student disability rates with respect to the generosity of state reimbursements. The classification response is identified from policy-induced variation in the amount of state aid generated by serving a disabled student across local school districts in Texas from 1991-1992 through 1996-1997. My central estimates imply that fiscal incentives can explain nearly 40% of the recent growth in student disability rates in Texas. The magnitude of the institutional response varies by district size and enrollment concentration, student race/ethnicity and the level of fiscal constraint.
This paper asks: What are the dynamic effects of disability on earnings? Unlike most of the previous literature, it uses panel data, and fixed effects methods are used to assess how the earnings of disabled workers depart from expected levels over many years before and after the date of onset of their disability. The paper also examines how worker characteristics affect earnings losses from disability, with particular attention paid to the age at which the person suffers onset. Disabled men are found to experience sharp drops in earnings that predate the measured date of onset. Earnings recover rapidly soon after onset, with much of the immediate reduction made up in the first two post-onset years. A modest downward trend follows, resulting in significant long-term losses in expected annual earnings of about 12 percent per year. Being older at onset, nonwhite, more chronically disabled, and less educated cause the losses from disability to be larger and the recovery smaller. A large portion of these differences across groups appear to derive from industry affiliation after onset. The Paper argues the facts are all consistent with a simple human capital explanation of the disability process.
Recent research concerning the incidence of reported work-limiting disabilities in the married population indicates a degree of interdependence between spouses' disabilities. This pattern is consistent with several hypotheses. Spouses tend to share many lifestyle traits that might lead to common health outcomes. Alternatively, their joint reports might reflect a shared preference for income benefits or workplace accommodations available to disabled individuals. Another possibility is that disabled individuals tend to be matched in the process of marital formation. This paper investigates the latter hypothesis. Taking advantage of a unique data set from the Swedish population, we select a sample of recently married couples and trace them back in time to their single years. Our analysis indicates nonrandom matching on the basis of disability status. After controlling for observed traits such as age and education, we find a residual correlation between future spouses that is positive and strongly significant. The magnitude of the correlation is within the range of residual correlations obtained from other studies that address marital matching in the contexts of education and earnings.
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