绝对教育年限与相对教育位置的收入效应——对教育生产功能和信号功能的检验

文章利用中国国家统计局2000年进行的全国范围内的城镇住户调查数据,考察了中国劳动者绝对教育数量和相对教育位置这两者的收入效应,从而分别度量出教育经济收益中的生产成分和信息成分.实证结果发现,中国劳动力市场中教育一方面具有显著地促进劳动者劳动生产率的生产功能,另一方面还具有显著地反映劳动者劳动生产率的信息功能.     

Child care availability and first-birth timing in Norway

Both sociological and economic theories posit that widely available, high-quality, and affordable child care should have pronatalist effects. Yet to date, the empirical evidence has not consistently supported this hypothesis. We argue that this previous empirical work has been plagued by the inability to control for endogenous placement of day care centers and the possibility that people migrate to take advantage of the availability of child care facilities. Using Norwegian register data and a statistically defensible fixed-effects model, we find strong positive effects of day care availability on the transition to motherhood.     

Social class and workers’ rent, 1983–2001

Sociologists and economists continue to seek explanations for the growth of earnings inequality since the late 1970s. In this article, we draw upon the structural tradition of labor market analysis in sociology in order evaluate the conjecture that selective rent destruction is a source of the recent increase in earnings inequality. In empirical analysis of the Outgoing Rotation Groups of the Current Population Surveys from 1983 to 2001, we demonstrate that (1) the earnings of workers at the bottom of the class distribution have declined relative to the earnings of those at the top and (2) the variance of wage premia associated with employment in alternative industries has declined relatively more for those at the bottom of the class distribution. Adopting the position from both the sociology and labor economics literatures that these industry wage premia are reasonable measures of industry rents, we conclude that the results support the rent destruction conjecture and, by implication, that structural models of labor markets can explain some of the increase in earnings inequality.     

A note on the four-colourability of pedigrees and its consequences for probability calculations

A graph representing the probabilistic dependences between genotypes of individuals in a pedigree is shown to be four-colourable. The consequences of this for computation of probabilities, using both exact and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, is discussed. A four-colouring and triangulation of an inbred section of a pedigree of Red-Crowned Cranes is illustrated.     

A DIAGNOSTIC ROUTINE FOR THE DETECTION OF CONSEQUENTIAL HETEROGENEITY OF CAUSAL EFFECTS

Least squares regression estimates of causal effects are conditional-variance-weighted estimates of individual-level causal effects. In this paper, we extract from the literature on counterfactual causality a simple nine-step routine to determine whether or not the implicit weighting of regression has generated a misleading estimate of the average causal effect. The diagnostic routine is presented along with a detailed and original demonstration, using data from the 2002 and 2004 waves of the Education Longitudinal Study, for a contested but important causal effect in educational research: the effect of Catholic schooling, in comparison to public schooling, on the achievement of high school students in the United States.     

RUNAWAYS: JURISDICTION, DYNAMICS, AND TREATMENT

New research indicates more clearly than ever that running away from home is indeed a family affair. Understood as such, the implications for society's jurisdictional response and for effective treatment planning are deep and far-reaching. The "status offender" legal jurisdiction over runaways needs to be changed and new alternatives for dealing with runaways and their families developed. The planning and implementation of these alternatives need to be informed with the perspectives of a family therapeutic approach sensitive to the intergenerational forces of loyalty, legacy, and trust operating within families.