Human capital and hierarchy

This paper investigates the relationship between schooling, experience, hierarchy and earnings, using sample data drawn from one of the largest companies in the Indian private sector. A recursive path approach is posited and an analysis of the results indicates that hierarchic status acts as an intervening variable to channel the transmission effect of schooling and experience onto earnings. After controlling for differences in schooling, hierarchic status is shown to rise monotonically, albeit by diminishing increments, with experience, thereby offering support for the marginal productivity theory. In the process, the weak version of the screening hypothesis is also borne out.     

Effects of parental health shocks on children’s schooling: Evidence from Andhra Pradesh,India

This study explores the inter-generational effects of health shocks using longitudinal data of Young Lives project conducted in the southern state of India, Andhra Pradesh for two cohorts of children (younger and older). It is found that health shocks to poorer parents reduce investments in human capital of children thereby reducing their future earnings, and perpetuating poverty and inequality. There is a temporary delay in primary school enrollment in the case of younger cohort, while schooling attainment is reduced by 0.26 years for older children. This paper further contributes to the literature on important dimensions like role of timing of the shocks and the pathways through which they affect human capital investment, differential effects of paternal and maternal shocks on different cohort groups, ability of the children and quality of schooling in schooling attainment.     

Hazardous occupations, illness, and schooling

This initial study of the direct and indirect effects of schooling and direct effects of occupational hazards on health uses a recursive model involving choice of occupation that depends on schooling. Although the model represents only one possible conceptualization and the data on health are not the most desirable, evidence is found that occupational hazards have a strong influence on health independent of education and earnings. In addition, it is found that schooling has no direct effects on work hours lost due to illness and no indirect effects through choice of a safe job. The unimportance of schooling in affecting health may be partially explained by the limited sample which includes only blue-collar employees in very risky occupations.     

Earnings and the decision to return to school

This paper finds that a significant predictor of returning to school is earnings below expected earnings in the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) Young Men sample. These 'unlucky' workers find that the foregone cost of schooling was lower than they thought. At the same time, the low relative earnings of these ‘unlucky’ workers may cause them also to revise their expected value of further schooling. But because they do actually decide to return to school, two interpretations of this revision in the value in further schooling are possible. Either the revision is upward, indicating that they believe that additional schooling will bring earnings up to that expected for persons with further education; or the revision is downward, but that revision must be dominated by a greater reduction in the expected cost of schooling for an economically sensible decision to return to school.     

对高师院校心理健康教育工作的思考

近几年,因心理方面的问题导致心理疾病已经成为大学生休学、退学乃至轻生的主要原因;因心理障碍或精神疾病导致的休学、退学人数约占总休学、退学人数的30%左右。大学生心理疾病已成为突出问题,必须引起社会各界的高度重视。针对高师院校大学生的心理健康状况,从大学生心理咨询的实践出发,高师院校可以从四方面开展心理健康教育工作：一是抓住搞好心理健康教育的关键即领导重视;二是建立心理健康教育四级干预网络系统;三是以心理咨询为心理健康教育的主阵地;四是激活各种教育载体,营造心理健康的氛围。     

Quality of education and economic growth

This paper assesses the impact of school quality on student outcomes, particularly job performance, and subsequently on economic growth. It begins by showing that ‘investment in human capital’ has evolved from being viewed as simply an investment of student time to including interactions between time and monetary resources which may serve to improve school quality. Evidence is provided from studies of both elementary/secondary schooling and post-secondary education, and from studies of developed and less developed nations. It appears that school quality has substantially greater impact on changes in students' cognitive and behavioral outcomes in less developed than advanced countries. Yet school quality seems to effect lifetime earnings of all students regardless of the level of development of their nations. The paper explains why. in some cases, more years and money spent for schooling may not necessarily appear to reflect higher earnings. Explanations are provided for differences in the impact of school quality on student changes. A major one is the fact that there are significantly diminishing returns to expenditures on schooling, along with the fact that expenditure levels are so much lower in the poorer countries. Reasons are provided as to why, if institutional differences do not account for changes in students in wealthier nations, these differences should still account for differences in earnings. Factors such as measurement problems and institutional arrangements come into play in this regard. The paper concludes that improvement in the quality of schooling provided in developing countries may be more important tor the future economic prospects of these nations in the long run than will expanded access to poor quality education.     

Socioeconomic background,education, and labor force outcomes: evidence from a regional US sample

This paper examines the long-term association of family socioeconomic status (SES), educational, and labor force outcomes in a regional US longitudinal sample (N = 2264). The results offer insights into the mechanisms underlying the role of family SES in transitions from secondary schooling to early work experiences. It was found that the academic achievement gap associated with SES widens during secondary schooling due in part to course-level tracking. Family SES relates to college enrollment mainly via its association with academic gains in school, but also through family income and father’s occupational status. Family SES is weakly but significantly related to adult offspring’s earnings but more strongly related to occupational status. Educational qualifications and cognitive skills make independent contributions to the explanation of labor force outcomes.     

The impact of college timing on earnings

Adult students, those 25-yrs-old and over, currently constitute 43% of all college students. This paper investigates the importance of the timing of schooling in determining earnings. It is revealed that those who complete college at a later age receive a significantly smaller initial increase in earnings than those who acquire their education earlier in life. This result is important for both personal human capital investment decisions and policy makers.     

Genetic risk,childhood obesity,and educational achievements

We use the genetic risk exclusively related to body mass index as an instrumental variable to examine the causal effects of childhood obesity on educational achievements. We find that childhood obesity decreases high school GPA by 0.92 grade points (33.0%), GPAs of different subjects by 0.72–1.11 grade points (21.7–42.6%), the probability of college enrollment by 0.37, the probability of college completion by 0.65, and years of schooling by 2.19 years (14.8%). Additionally, we explore potential underlying mechanisms through which childhood obesity adversely influences educational outcomes. Our results indicate that childhood obesity does not have a statistically significant influence on cognitive abilities. Nevertheless, it negatively affects educational achievements via health factors (overall health status, health-damaging behaviors, and psychological well-being), school absenteeism and aggression, college aspirations and expectations, and family dynamics. This research provides evidence that childhood obesity can hinder children's educational progress, potentially affecting adult outcomes and exacerbating economic inequality.     

Private Returns to an University Education: An Instrumental Variables Approach

This article examines the determinants of the salaries that Spanish university graduates earn on the labor market. Different earnings equations are estimated that allow us to measure the economic returns to investment in human capital at the university level, demonstrating that: on the one hand, considering schooling to be an exogenous variable gives a downward bias to the estimations of the private rates of return to an university education; on the other hand, not taking into account the aspects of the demand-side of the labor market in the traditional Mincerian earnings function, even though schooling is considered as an endogenous variable, the rates of return estimated for an university education would be given an upward bias. The problem concerning the endogeneity of schooling has been corrected in this article by using the instrumental variables technique.     

Multigrade schooling in Turkey: An overview

This paper reviews multigrade schooling in Turkey, with an emphasis on its status in the education system, as well as the curriculum practices, teacher training and problems associated with it. It is viewed by the State as an “inevitable” practice that arises through limited number of pupils and classrooms in small and scattered settlement areas where population density is low and is perceived as a system that needs to be abolished. The review concludes, by contrast, that multigrade schooling is advantageous for Turkey as it provides access to at least 5 years of education for thousands of children.     

Schooling of girls and boys in a West African country: the effects of parental education,income, and household structure

This study investigates gender differences in the determinants of several schooling indicators in Conakry, Guinea, using ordered and binary probit models incorporating household-level random effects. Such indicators include grade attainment, current enrollment, and withdrawal from school. The survey, which was conducted on 1725 households, contains detailed information on a wide range of socioeconomic factors such as education, labor force activity and earnings, assets and health. Results indicate that increases in household income lead to greater investments in the schooling of girls than in the schooling of boys. Meanwhile, improvements in the education of fathers raise the schooling of both sons and daughters, while the education of mothers only has a significant impact on the schooling of daughters. These estimates show differences in maternal and paternal preferences for schooling daughters relative to sons. Therefore, the importance of gender, parental education, and household income and composition affect the education of children. However, findings also show that education for girls is unnecessary since they only need to work at home. Moreover, policies that raise household incomes will increase gender equity in schooling, which will also depend on whether and how these policies change the opportunity costs of girls and boys and the labor market returns to female and male schooling.     

The causal effect of education on health: Evidence from the United Kingdom

Numerous economic studies have shown a strong positive correlation between health and years of schooling. The question at the centre of this research is whether the correlation between health and education represents a causal relation. This paper uses changes in compulsory schooling laws in the United Kingdom to test this hypothesis. Multiple measures of overall health are used. The results provide evidence of a causal relation running from more schooling to better health which is much larger than standard regression estimates suggest.     

Smoking, discount rates, and returns to education

Individual time preference determines schooling enrolment. Moreover, smoking behavior in early ages has been shown to be highly related to time preference rates. Insofar as discount rates are uncorrelated to ability, predicting school enrolment by discount rates can get rid of the ability bias in an earnings regression. Accordingly, we use smoking at age 16 as an instrument for schooling. Doing this for Austrian cross-sectional data, we find no evidence of ability bias in a simple earnings regression; the results are more mixed if family background is also included.     

Does more schooling improve health outcomes and health related behaviors? Evidence from U.K. twins

Several recent studies using instrumental variables based on changes in compulsory school-leaving age laws have estimated the causal effect of schooling on health outcomes and health-related behaviors in the U.K. Despite using the same identification strategy and similar datasets, no consensus has been reached. We contribute to the literature by providing results for the U.K. using a different research design and a different dataset. Specifically, we estimate the effect of schooling on health outcomes (obesity and physical health) and health-related behaviors (smoking, alcohol consumption and exercise) for women through within-MZ twins estimates using the TwinsUK database. For physical health, alcohol consumption and exercise, the within-MZ twins estimates are uninformative about whether there is a causal effect. However, we find (1) that the significant association between schooling and smoking status is due to unobserved endowments that are correlated with schooling and smoking and (2) there is some indication that more schooling reduces the body mass index for women, even once these unobserved endowments have been controlled for.     

Language skills and earnings: Evidence from a pre-industrial economy in the Bolivian Amazon

Among linguistic minorities of industrial nations proficiency speaking the dominant national language increases earnings and wages, but do similar results apply to autarkic linguistic minorities of developing nations? We contribute to studies of the returns to language skills by applying the human-capital approach to a society of hunters, gatherers, and farmers in the Bolivian Amazon (Tsimane’). We use a panel consisting of five consecutive quarters to: (a) estimate the returns to language skills while controlling for schooling, math and writing skills, and other confounders and (b) explore the paths through which language skills might affect earnings. Fluent speakers of Spanish and the local language earned 36.9–46.9% more than monolingual speakers of the local language. Moderate fluency in Spanish bore no strong association with earnings. Spanish-Tsimane’ bilingualism bore a positive association with earnings partly because bilingualism bore a positive association with credit access, use of modern production technologies, and labor productivity.     

Privatization of water supply and human capital accumulation

This study presents empirical evidence that a health improvement program—privatization of municipal water services—in Argentina during the 1990s has had a negative effect on long-term human capital accumulation. Exploiting variations across regions and cohorts, I find that early childhood exposure to the program reduces years of schooling by around 0.5 years. The negative effect is more pronounced for males. I further use the previous census to examine the identical cohorts when they were at school age. I find that they are more likely to drop out of school and participate in the labor force after the program, and the effect is, again, more marked for boys. The finding is consistent with families preferring healthier children to go to work after improvements in health status.     

Bhutan: impressive strides in health and education

This article reports the important developments in adolescent health and education status in Bhutan. These developments consist of a change in the focus of Bhutan's UNFPA-supportive reproductive health services. The country has also included adolescents as a primary target of reproductive health services. Adolescent girls have become the beneficiaries of a school health program developed by the Division of Education, and a comprehensive youth guidance program is under development by the Youth Guidance and Counseling Section of the Education Division. This change is a response to the increasing youth population; over 58% of the total population is aged under 25 years, and over 15% is aged under 15 years. Although initiatives to improve youth status has been undertaken, some problems still remain. These include malnourishment, pregnancy complications, and rise of sexually transmitted diseases, which raises the potential for the spread of HIV/AIDS.     

What determines basic school attainment in developing countries? Evidence from rural China

This paper analyzes recent household survey data from Gansu, a less developed province in Northwest China, to examine school attainment in a poor rural area of China. Censored ordered probit regressions are used to estimate the determinants of years of schooling. Child nutritional status, as measured by height-for-age Z-scores, and household income have positive effects on completed years of schooling. Mothers’ education and attitudes toward children's education also have strong effects. Children of mothers with 6 years of primary education will go to school 1.4 years longer than their counterparts whose mothers who have no education. Science labs in lower secondary schools appear to have positive impacts; providing a science lab is estimated to extend years of schooling by 1.8 years. Finally, teachers’ experience in lower secondary schools also has a strong positive impact on school attainment.     

Overeducation in the labor market: a comment and re-analysis of a meta-analysis

Groot and Maassen van den Brink (International Journal of Manpower 21, 584, 2000a) provide a useful summary of the incidence of overeducation and undereducation. Unfortunately, by combining non-compatible estimates of the impact of surplus schooling (and under schooling) on earnings they potentially bias their estimates downward (upward). This paper bypasses this potential bias by examining only wage estimates that use the “standard” required-surplus-deficit education model of Duncan and Hoffman (1981). The paper also expands the meta-analysis by including approximately 50 additional wage estimates. On average, the literature finds that the premium paid for overeducation is approximately equal to the penalty for undereducation, but lower than the returns associated with an increase in required education. Overeducated individuals earn more than their properly educated co-workers, but less than others with their level of schooling. The paper also examines how different definitions of required education impact the returns from overeducation and undereducation.