A network analysis of student mobility patterns from high school to master’s

Human migration involves the movement of people from one place to another. An example of undirected migration is Italian student mobility where students move from the South to the Center-North. This kind of mobility has become of general interest, and this work explores student mobility from Sicily towards universities outside the island. The data used in this paper regards six cohorts of students, from 2008/09 to 2013/14. In particular, our goal is to study the 3-step migration path: the area of origin (Sicilian provinces), the regional university for the bachelor’s degree, and the regional university for the master’s. Our analysis is conducted by building a multipartite network with four sets of nodes: students; Sicilian provinces; bachelor region of studies; and the master region of studies. By projecting the students’ set onto the others, we obtain a tripartite network where the number of students represents the link weight. Results show that the big Sicilian cities—Palermo, Catania, and Messina—have different preferential paths compared to small Sicilian cities. Furthermore, the results reveal preferential paths of 3-step mobility that only, in part, reflect a south-north orientation in the transition from the region of study for the bachelor degree to that for the master’s.

     

DO HOUSE PRICES DRIVE CONSUMPTION GROWTH? THE COINCIDENT CYCLES OF HOUSE PRICES AND CONSUMPTION IN THE UK

This paper uses a realistic structural lifecycle model of consumption and housing decisions to understand how data might distinguish different mechanisms that explain the correlation between house prices and consumption. The model includes price and earnings shocks estimated from data (the latter including aggregate and idiosyncratic components), and incorporates realistic features of the UK mortgage market. We simulate the model using more than 30 years of realized shocks and under counterfactual scenarios. Our results confirm the intuition of earlier studies: house price shocks should have a larger effect on the consumption of older households and earnings shocks on young households.     

Humps and Bumps in Lifetime Consumption

In this article we argue that the life-cycle model that allows demographics to affect household preferences and relaxes the assumption of certainty equivalence can generate hump-shaped consumption profiles over age that are very similar to those observed in household-level data sources and, in particular, match the differences in shape across different education groups. Liquidity constraints or myopia are not required to explain the empirical features of observed life-cycle patterns.     

MORTALITY,HEALTH STATUS,AND WEALTH

In this paper we use the two waves of the British Retirement Survey (1988/1989 and 1994) to quantify the relationship between socioeconomic status and health outcomes. We find that, even after conditioning on the initial health status, wealth rankings are important determinants of mortality and the evolution of the health indicator in the survey. For men aged 65 moving from the 40th percentile to the 60th percentile in the wealth distribution increases the probability of survival by between 1.0 and 1.9 percentage points depending on the measure of wealth used. A similar effect is found for women of between 1.1 and 1.3 percentage points. In the process of estimating these effects we control for nonrandom attrition from our sample. (JEL: I2, J19)     

Parametric versus semi-parametric models for the analysis of correlated survival data: A case study in veterinary epidemiology

Correlated survival data arise frequently in biomedical and epidemiologic research, because each patient may experience multiple events or because there exists clustering of patients or subjects, such that failure times within the cluster are correlated. In this paper, we investigate the appropriateness of the semi-parametric Cox regression and of the generalized estimating equations as models for clustered failure time data that arise from an epidemiologic study in veterinary medicine. The semi-parametric approach is compared with a proposed fully parametric frailty model. The frailty component is assumed to follow a gamma distribution. Estimates of the fixed covariates effects were obtained by maximizing the likelihood function, while an estimate of the variance component ( frailty parameter) was obtained from a profile likelihood construction.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF HUMAN CAPITAL FORMATION DURING THE EARLY YEARS OF LIFE: THEORY,MEASUREMENT, AND POLICIES

In this paper, I discuss a research agenda on the study of human capital accumulation in the early years, with a particular focus on developing countries. I discuss several methodological issues, from the use of structural models, to the importance of measurement and the development of new measurement tools. I present a conceptual framework that can be used to frame the study of human capital accumulation and view the current challenges and gaps in knowledge within such an organizing structure. I provide an example of the use of such a framework to interpret the evidence on the impacts of an early years intervention based on randomized controlled trial.     

Risk Sharing in Private Information Models With Asset Accumulation: Explaining the Excess Smoothness of Consumption

We study testable implications for the dynamics of consumption and income of models in which first‐best allocations are not achieved because of a moral hazard problem with hidden saving. We show that in this environment, agents typically achieve more insurance than that obtained under self‐insurance with a single asset. Consumption allocations exhibit “excess smoothness,” as found and defined by Campbell and Deaton (1989). We argue that excess smoothness, in this context, is equivalent to a violation of the intertemporal budget constraint considered in a Bewley economy (with a single asset). We also show parameterizations of our model in which we can obtain a closed‐form solution for the efficient insurance contract and where the excess smoothness parameter has a structural interpretation in terms of the severity of the moral hazard problem. We present tests of excess smoothness, applied to U.K. microdata and constructed using techniques proposed by Hansen, Roberds, and Sargent (1991) to test the intertemporal budget constraint. Our theoretical model leads us to interpret them as tests of the market structure faced by economic agents. We also construct a test based on the dynamics of the cross‐sectional variances of consumption and income that is, in a precise sense, complementary to that based on Hansen, Roberds, and Sargent (1991) and that allows us to estimate the same structural parameter. The results we report are consistent with the implications of the model and are internally coherent.     

A segmented regression model for event history data: an application to the fertility patterns in Italy

We propose a segmented discrete-time model for the analysis of event history data in demographic research. Through a unified regression framework, the model provides estimates of the effects of explanatory variables and jointly accommodates flexibly non-proportional differences via segmented relationships. The main appeal relies on ready availability of parameters, changepoints, and slopes, which may provide meaningful and intuitive information on the topic. Furthermore, specific linear constraints on the slopes may also be set to investigate particular patterns. We investigate the intervals between cohabitation and first childbirth and from first to second childbirth using individual data for Italian women from the Second National Survey on Fertility. The model provides insights into dramatic decrease of fertility experienced in Italy, in that it detects a ‘common’ tendency in delaying the onset of childbearing for the more recent cohorts and a ‘specific’ postponement strictly depending on the educational level and age at cohabitation.