PROTESTANTISM AND EDUCATION: READING (THE BIBLE) AND OTHER SKILLS

During industrialization, Protestants were more literate than Catholics. This paper investigates whether this fact may be led back to the intrinsic motivation of Protestants to read the bible and to what extent other education motives might have been involved as well. We employ a historical data set from Switzerland which allows us to differentiate between different cognitive skills: reading, numeracy, essay writing, and Swiss history. We develop an estimation strategy to examine whether the impact of religious denomination was particularly large with respect to reading capabilities. We find support for this hypothesis. However, we also find evidence which is consistent with the view that Protestants' education motives went beyond acquiring reading skills. (JEL I20)     

‘THE RAIN IN SPAIN STAYS MAINLY IN THE PLAIN’

As is known, ‘the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ is a famous line from George Bernard Shaw's play, Pygmalion (1912), a witty and highly entertaining study of Victorian class distinctions and social conventions. Broadly speaking, my aim is to exploit the cultural credentials of both the work and its celebrated rhyme by using them as a rhetorical device from which to stake out the position of cultural studies within the Spanish university. The approach I will advance tries to take account of the principles listed by Cary Nelson in his cultural manifesto (1996, pp. 273–86), even though it derives more directly from the immediate conditions of higher education in Spain and specifically from my own experience as a university teacher. As I hope to demonstrate, several connections may be established between ‘the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ and the difficulties that arise in trying to speak/write about cultural studies. Likewise, the rhyme as well as certain details in the comedy's plot can serve as useful cultural analogies for some of the ‘meta-problems’ faced by cultural studies in the Spanish context. And more crucially, the famous line can be put to use in the classroom as a helpful, eye-opening exercise for future cultural agents or ‘producers’ (Striphas, 1998: 457). I shall therefore move from problems of discourse, to inherent power structures and finally unto the actual practice of cultural studies.     

THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON FERTILITY: EVIDENCE FROM TAIWAN

This study investigates the impact of women's education on fertility. For identification, we use the 1968 compulsory education law change in Taiwan, which generated a regression discontinuity design (RDD) setting. We use the whole population of women from the 1980 and 2010 Population Censuses. Results of our RDD estimation using the exact date of birth suggest that the law change was effective in boosting women's education, but it did not have any impact on fertility. This is in stark contrast to most previous studies using only the birth year as the running variable or using it to construct instruments, which find that women's education depresses fertility. This study demonstrates that using a discrete running variable in RDD may generate a false discontinuity for an otherwise continuous regression function. (JEL J13, C21, I2)     

COMPETITION FOR UNIVERSITY PLACES AND PARENTAL TIME INVESTMENTS: EVIDENCE FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM

Across the industrialized world college‐educated parents invest more time in their children relative to noncollege‐educated parents. Yet, the reason for the education gradient in parental time investments is not well understood. Using 24‐hour diary surveys since the 1970s we document an inverse U‐shape in the education gradient in the United Kingdom. Theories unfolding gradually and monotonically cannot easily explain this pattern. Using an exogenous increase in the number of students going on to university in the 1980s, we show that an alternative explanation based on competition for university places can explain the temporal and spatial variation in the education gradient. (JEL J13, J24)     

RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES AND REGIONAL HIGH‐TECH FIRM START‐UP AND EXIT

If localized knowledge spillovers are present in the university setting, higher rates of both start‐up and/or survival would be observed in areas that are geographically proximate to the university. Using a detailed industry data set for Texas for 1999:3–2005:2, we analyze start‐up and exit rates for high‐tech firms. Based on a Poisson quasi‐maximum likelihood estimation, we find evidence that the level of R&D and proximity of a research institution positively affects the likelihood of technology start‐ups. However, using both the Cox proportional hazards model and Kaplan–Meier approach, our results suggest that geographic proximity to knowledge centers does not reduce hazard rates. (JEL R12, R53, O18)     

GETTING INTO THE WEEDS: DOES LEGAL MARIJUANA ACCESS BLUNT ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN COLLEGE?

This paper examines the effect of legal access to marijuana on student performance stemming from a voter-approved initiative legalizing marijuana for those 21 and older in the State of Washington. Using panel data from a medium-sized public university, we use a within-student and within-class estimator to show that legalization reduces students' grades, with an effect size about one-half the impact of gaining legal access to alcohol. Consistent with how marijuana consumption affects cognitive functioning, we find that students' grades fall furthest in courses that require more quantitative skills. These effects are largely driven by men and low performers. (JEL I23, I18, K32)     

NUDGING LIFE INSURANCE HOLDINGS IN THE WORKPLACE

Using data from a university, we analyze a policy designed to increase employer‐sponsored life insurance. The university increased basic life insurance holdings, which nudged employees with supplemental coverage to have more life insurance. In large part due to inertia, the nudge increased life insurance holdings one‐for‐one for those who could have undone it. Additionally, we find that expanding coverage options significantly increased total life insurance holdings for new hires who were not subject to inertia. These policy changes reduced uninsured vulnerabilities for two‐thirds of employees. Our findings have important policy implications for addressing widespread disparities in life insurance coverage. (JEL D31, G22, D03, J32, J33, J38, H20)     

HIGH SCHOOL CHOICES AND THE GENDER GAP IN STEM

Women are less likely than men to graduate with a degree in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM). We use detailed administrative data for a recent cohort of Ontario high school students, combined with data from the province's university admission system, to analyze the sources of this gap. We show that entry to STEM programs is mediated through an index of STEM readiness that depends on end‐of‐high school courses in math and science. Most of the gender gap in STEM entry can be traced to differences in the share of college entrants who are STEM‐ready; only a small share is attributable to differences in the choice of major conditional on readiness. We then use high school course data to decompose the gender gap in STEM readiness into two channels: one reflecting the gap in the fraction of high school students with the necessary prerequisites to enter STEM, the other arising from differences in the overall fractions of females and males who enter university. The gender gap in the fraction of males and females with STEM prerequisites is small. The primary driver of the gap in STEM readiness is the low rate of university entry by nonscience‐oriented males. (JEL I21, 28, I20)     

THE GREAT OVERESTIMATION: TAX DATA AND INEQUALITY MEASUREMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1913–1943

Historical measures of income inequality in the United States must grapple with the challenge of data quality. We examine one such problem affecting the well-known estimates of income inequality produced by Piketty and Saez (2003) using the records of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Prior to 1943, incomes were self-reported. Combined with lax enforcement on the part of the IRS, self-reporting of incomes could provide a misleading portrait of the income distribution. To test the accuracy of IRS records, we compare them to independently tabulated state income tax returns between 1919 and 1945 from states with more comprehensive and rigorously enforced tax collection procedures. State income tax records show lower overall levels of income inequality than IRS records. However, we still find that top income concentrations declined across the period between 1929 and World War II. These findings attest to the sensitivity of distributional estimation to the reporting selectivity and economic quality of underlying tax data, suggesting that the existing IRS-derived series systematically overstates top-income concentration in the interwar period. (JEL H2, N32, D31, E01)     

IQ IN THE PRODUCTION FUNCTION: EVIDENCE FROM IMMIGRANT EARNINGS

We show that a country’s average IQ score is a useful predictor of the wages that immigrants from that country earn in the United States, whether or not one adjusts for immigrant education. Just as in numerous microeconomic studies, 1 IQ point predicts 1% higher wages, suggesting that IQ tests capture an important difference in cross‐country worker productivity. In a cross‐country development accounting exercise, about one‐sixth of the global inequality in log income can be explained by the effect of large, persistent differences in national average IQ on the private marginal product of labor. This suggests that cognitive skills matter more for groups than for individuals. (JEL J24, J61, O47)     

REDUCING PUBLIC‐PRIVATE SECTOR PAY DIFFERENTIALS: THE SINGLE SPINE PAY POLICY AS A NATURAL EXPERIMENT IN GHANA

Empirical studies have documented the existence of the public‐private pay differentials in both developed and developing countries. The implementation of policies aiming to reduce this gap has however been mitigated or inconclusive. This paper exploits the Single Spine Pay Policy (SSPP) in Ghana as a natural experiment to examine the effectiveness of wage policies in developing countries. The SSPP was implemented in 2010 by the Government of Ghana to address the public‐private sector wage gap and improve productivity in the public sector. Using a quantile treatment effect approach based on a difference‐in‐difference estimation, we show that the SSPP has yet to reduce the wage gap between the public and private sectors across the entire distribution of earnings in Ghana. The improvement observed is only at the lower tail of the distribution of earnings. However, the SSPP has a larger effect on the earnings of female workers than that of males in the education and health services sectors while male workers have benefited more in the administration sector, suggesting that the policy was successful in reducing the gender wage gap in the education and health services sectors but has widened this gap in the administration sector. Moreover, the SSPP has decreased the productivity of workers across the distribution of earnings, mainly due to a decrease in the effort of female public sector workers in the education and health sectors and male workers in the administration sector. (JEL C31, G15, J24, J31, J45)     

Decolonising the university in 2020

ABSTRACT

We came together as editors of Decolonising the University through a commitment to understanding the university and our place within it; to examine what else might be possible for us, collectively, in the domain of higher education. Although we do not always agree about the university– or, perhaps more specifically, about the possibilities it contains for intervening effectively in the world– we nonetheless coalesced around an idea of ‘decolonising the university’ as an important strategic mode of engagement. Here, we set out the positions that we come from in relation to the broader debates about the university and its political possibilities and offer responses also to the reviews. These are not our final words on the matter, but words shaped by the political possibilities that present themselves at the outset of 2020 and which, we hope, will contribute to the increasingly necessary dialogues on this topic.     

VOLUNTARY ACTIVITIES AND DAILY HAPPINESS IN THE UNITED STATES

This article analyzes differences in daily happiness between those individuals in the United States who perform voluntary activities during the day and those who do not. Using the Well‐Being Module of the American Time Use Survey 2010, we find that those who devote any time to voluntary activities during the day report higher levels of daily happiness than those who do not. Comparing the happiness obtained from a range of activities, we find that volunteering is among the most enjoyable, indicating that time spent on voluntary activities is utility‐enhancing. We document that the effect of voluntary activities on the experienced utility of individuals can be decomposed into a “time‐composition” effect and an “activity” effect, with the latter explaining between 11% and 46% of the observed difference. (JEL D13, J16, J22)     

THE HOME MARKET EFFECT IN INTERNATIONAL ARMS TRADE

I show that military spending contributes to international arms proliferation through a push effect: large demand encourages production growth in the domestic market if transport costs are non‐negligible. Under increasing returns to scale, the country can then supply weapons on the global market at low prices. This is a manifestation of the home market effect (HME), which states that countries with higher demand for a differentiated good will be net exporters of that good. I construct a monopolistic competition model of international trade that accounts for differences in demand across countries, and test its predictions using post‐Cold War data. (JEL F1, H5, R1)     

BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

In this article, we focus on the analysis of individual decision‐making for the formation of social networks, using experimentally generated data. We analyze the determinants of the individual demand for links under the assumption of agents' static expectations and identify patterns of behavior that correspond to three specific objectives: players propose links so as to maximize expected profits (myopic best response strategy); players attempt to establish the largest number of direct links (reciprocator strategy); and players maximize expected profits per direct link (opportunistic strategy). These strategies explain approximately 74% of the observed choices. We demonstrate that they are deliberately adopted and, by means of a finite mixture model, well identified and separated in our sample. (JEL C33, C35, C90, D85)     

CHILD LABOR AND SCHOOLING RESPONSES TO ACCESS TO MICROCREDIT IN RURAL BANGLADESH

Microcredit has been shown to be effective in reducing poverty in many developing countries. However, less is known about its effect on human capital formation. In this article, we examine the impact of access to microcredit on children's education and child labor using a new and large data set from rural Bangladesh. The results show that household participation in a microcredit program may increase child labor and reduce school enrollment. The adverse effects are more pronounced for girls than boys. Younger children are more adversely affected than their older siblings and the children of poorer and less educated households are affected most adversely. Our findings remain robust to different specifications and methods, and when corrected for various sources of selection bias. (JEL H43, I21, J13, J24, L30, O12)     

THE ROLE OF INFORMATION ON RETIREMENT PLANNING: EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD STUDY

Many households neglect the pivotal task of planning for retirement. Proposals to stimulate employees to save for retirement in the workplace include tax subsidies, which are costly, and using automatic defaults, which may not complement the heterogeneous preferences of savers. This randomized field study shows that an information‐based intervention increases reported retirement plan participation, emergency savings, and using a budget. Employees offered access to education increased actual retirement deferrals by $26 per month. These results suggest that retirement education programs may be an effective strategy to increase retirement planning and saving behavior. (JEL J26, D14, D91)     

R&D AND CREDIT RATIONING IN SMEs

We study the effects of credit rationing on research and development (R&D) investment using survey and accounting data on a large representative sample of manufacturing small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). Our econometric model accounts for the endogeneity of our credit rationing indicator and employs an innovative theory‐based identification strategy. We find that credit rationing has a significantly negative effect on both the probability to set up R&D activities and on the level of R&D spending (conditioned on the R&D decision), but the overall estimated reduction in R&D spending is largely to be associated with the first effect. (JEL G21, D82, O32, C35)     

EVALUATING A BILINGUAL EDUCATION PROGRAM IN SPAIN: THE IMPACT BEYOND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

Bilingual education programs, which consist of doing a substantial part of the instruction in a language different from the native language of the students, exist in several countries like the United States, India, and Spain. While the economic benefits of knowing a second language are well established, the potential effects over the learning of other subjects have received much less attention. We evaluate a program that introduced bilingual education (in English and Spanish) in primary education in a group of public schools of the Madrid region in 2004. Under this program, students not only study English as a foreign language but also some other subjects (at least Science, History, and Geography) are taught in English. In order to evaluate the program, a standardized test for all sixth grade students in Madrid on the skills considered “indispensable” at that age is our measure of the outcome of primary education. Our results indicate that there is a clearly negative effect on the exam results for the subject taught in English, for children whose parents have less than upper secondary education. This negative effect is a composite of two phenomena: the effect of the program on the student's knowledge of the subject and a reflection of the student ability to do the test in their native language when English is the medium of instruction. Although we are not able to separate quantitatively these two effects, the composite effect has a relevant interest, because the results for exams taken in Spanish are the measures that determine academic progression in the Spanish system. In contrast with the previous result, there is no significant effect for anyone on mathematical and reading skills, which were taught in Spanish. (JEL H40, I21, I28)     

THE GRAVITY MODEL: AN ILLUSTRATION OF STRUCTURAL ESTIMATION AS CALIBRATION

Dawkins, Srinivasan, and Whalley (“Calibration,”Handbook of Econometrics, 2001) propose that estimation is calibration. We illustrate their point by examining a leading econometric application in the study of international and interregional trade by Anderson and van Wincoop (“Gravity with Gravitas: A Solution to the Border Puzzle,”American Economic Review, 2003). We replicate the econometric process and show it to be a calibration of a general equilibrium model. Our approach offers unique insights into structural estimation, and we highlight the importance of traditional calibration considerations when one uses econometric techniques to calibrate a model for comparative policy analysis. (JEL F10, C13, C60)