Although Mexico’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program Oportunidades has increased overall school enrollment, many adolescents do not attend school, especially in urban areas. This paper simulates the effects of changes in program design using a simple parametric method based on a simultaneous probability model of school attendance and child labor. The paper also provides alternative non parametri...

Improving the nutritional content of public school meals is a topic of intense policy interest. A main motivation is the health of school children, and, in particular, the rising childhood obesity rate. Medical and nutrition literature has long argued that a healthy diet can have a second important impact: improved cognitive function. In this paper, we test whether offering healthier lunches af...

Using 1996 surveyed data of 1,023 employees in Shenzhen, China, this study estimated the effects of three forms of human capital on employee salary, namely formal education, on-the-job training provided by employers, and adult education pursued by employees. Using a hierarchical linear model, the analysis estimated employee monthly salary growth over a maximum of six years due to (a) such tempo...

The Origins of Intergenerational Associations: Lessons from Swedish Adoption Data We use unique Swedish data to estimate intergenerational associations between adoptees and their biological and adoptive parents. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad pre-birth factors, including genes and prenatal environment, and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad post-b...

Analysing survey data from 32 selected cities across China in 2003, this paper examines parents’ expenditure on their children’s education from two aspects: factors affecting domestic education expenditure and factors affecting expenditure on overseas education. The main findings that emerge from this study are as follows. First, household income has significant effects on the magnitude of the ...

This paper examines the impacts of family inputs — i.e., maternal employment, child care and home learning — on the early development of British children. Using rich longitudinal data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study we estimate cognitive and non-cognitive achievement production functions that allow outcomes to depend on the history of family inputs and unobserved child endowments. We find e...

The effect of military service on subsequent earnings has not been taken into account in the decennial debate on the abolition of military conscription in Western Europe. This paper, using a quasi–natural experiment due to the abolition of military conscription in the UK in 1960, provides evidence of the long–term effects of conscription on subsequent earnings. In particular, we explore whether...

Peer Effects, Unobserved Factors and Risk Behaviours: An Analysis of Alcohol Abuse and Truancy among Adolescents The objective of this paper is to examine the factors which affect alcohol abuse and truancy among adolescents. We propose a new theoretical specification in which alcohol abuse and truancy appear as derived demands, given that they condition peer group and family acceptance, and we ...

Intergenerational Education Mobility among the Children of Canadian Immigrants We analyze the intergenerational education mobility of Canadian men and women born to immigrants. A detailed portrait of Canadians is offered, as are estimates of the degree of generational mobility among the children of immigrants. Persistence in the years of schooling across the generations is rather weak between i...

Understanding the relationship between grading practices and student evaluations is especially important in higher education because of the increasing importance of this instrument in the promotion process. If evaluations can be increased by giving higher grades, then they are a flawed instrument for the evaluation of teaching. Further, this process may be contributing to the inflation of grade...