A student’s peers are often thought to influence his or her educational outcomes. If so, an unequal distribution of advantaged and disadvantaged students across schools (“sorting”) in a community will amplify existing inequalities. This paper explores the relationship between the degree of sorting across schools within a community and educational inequality as measured by the variance of standa...

This paper investigates the causal relationship between education and GDP in a panel of 11 selected oil exporting countries by using panel unit root tests and panel cointegration analysis for the period 1970-2010. A three-variable model is formulated with oil exports as the third variable. The results show a strong causality from oil revenues and economic growth to education in the oil exportin...

The role of human capital composition has been given importance in the most recent endogenous growth models. Assuming that primary as well as secondary education is more suitable for imitation and higher education is more appropriate for innovation, this paper empirically investigates whether the contribution of human capital to productivity growth depends on the composition of human capital an...

The patient was born in Israel of Yemenite Jewish parents, and has lived in England since I962. On 30 August I968, when 23 years old, he experienced squeezing retrosternal pain for 4 hours, and was admitted to hospital. None of his family has suffered from ischaemic heart disease. He smoked IO tO I5 cigarettes a day and followed a conventional Western diet. He worked as a motor mechanic; there ...

Objective: To estimate the economic burden of coronary heart disease in the UK using both direct and indirect costs. Design and setting: A prevalence based approach was used to assess coronary heart disease related costs from the societal perspective. Patients: All UK residents in 1999 with coronary heart disease (ICD 9 codes 410–414 and ICD10 codes I20–I25). Main outcome measures: Direct healt...

It is widely believed that countries with greater levels of income inequality also have lower levels of intergenerational mobility. This relationship, known as the Great Gatsby Curve (GGC), has been prominently cited by high-ranking public policy makers, best-selling authors and Nobel Prize winning academics. Yet relatively little cross-national work has empirically examined the mechanisms thou...

This paper investigates the impact of instructional days on student performance. Because school year length is endogenously determined, I estimate the causal impact of school year length through two quasi-experiments that exploit different sources of variation in instructional days. The first identifies school year length’s effect through weather-related cancellations in Colorado and Maryland. ...

Schoolteachers in developing countries frequently offer for-profit tutoring to their own students. The teachers have an incentive to teach less during school to increase demand for their tutoring in many cases. Thus, the market for tutoring can have spillover effects even on students who do not partake in tutoring. I model and present empirical evidence on these effects, using survey and test s...

This paper addresses how institutional selectivity influences college preferences and enrollment decisions of Texas seniors in the presence of a putatively race-neutral admissions policy—the top 10% law. We analyze a representative survey of Texas high school seniors as of spring, 2002, who were re-interviewed one year later to evaluate differences in selectivity of college preferences and enro...

This paper looks at the consequences children face when they lose a parent(s). After modeling the representative household’s bargaining process between their biological and orphaned children, the empirical section of this paper looks at the types of activities that children engage in, and the differences in educational outlays of host households between those children who have lost their parent...