We use data on Latino children in the United States who have been randomly assigned calculation tests in English or Spanish to check for the so-called bilingual advantage, the notion that knowing more than one language improves individuals’ other cognitive skills. After controlling for different characteristics of children and their parents, as well as children's time in the US, we find a bilingual advantage among children who read or write in English and Spanish but not for those who only speak or understand both languages. In particular, bilingual readers or writers perform one-fourth to one-third of a standard deviation better than monolingual children, equal to learning gains of an additional school year. Applying the Oster test, we find that selection on unobservables would need to be 3–4 times stronger than selection on observables to explain away our results. The bilingual advantage is stronger among children in two-parent households with siblings and for those at the upper end of the ability distribution.

We conduct a large scale experiment to investigate peer effects in computer assisted learning (CAL). Identification relies on three levels of randomization. We find an average 0.17 standard deviation improvement in math scores among primary school students. This average effect is the same for students treated individually or in pairs, implying that peer effects double the learning benefit from a given equipment. Among paired students, poor performers benefit more from CAL when paired with good performers and vice versa. Average performers benefit equally irrespective of who they are paired with. This suggests that the treatment is dominated by knowledge exchange between peers. We also find that CAL treatment reduces the dispersion in math scores and that the beneficial effects of CAL can be strengthened if weak students are systematically paired with strong students.

Considered the epidemic of the 21st century by the WHO, obesity is a global problem that is on the rise and will continue to increase in the coming years. Spain and Andalusia, in particular, are no exception to this pathology, which has tripled since the 1970s, representing a public health challenge. The aim of this study is to analyse the socioeconomic determinants of this pathology, with special emphasis on answering the question of what has a greater influence on overweight, education level, or income. For this purpose, we have used the European Survey of Health in Spain (ESHS-2020), a microdata base, with a total of 22,072 valid individual observations (of which 2,820 belong to the Andalusian population). Results we obtain in our estimations of qualitative response models reveal that, although both income and educational attainment could be effective in the fight against overweight, the social gradient of this health problem is greater with respect to educational attainment. Additionally, there are many other variables and other factors related to the individual’s overweight (mental health, subjective state of health, oral health, among others) which are much less explored and which must be considered in health policies to combat this disease.

The Harmer–Henry pension and tax review resulted in an increase in the common value of the single rate of Age Pension and Disability Support Pension from 25 per cent to 28 per cent of male total average weekly earnings. It also recommended a Resource Super Profits Tax that would have initially taxed mining ‘rents' at 36 per cent, on top of the pre-existing 30 per cent federal tax on profits. These recommendations represent two sides of the same coin: higher federal spending alongside higher federal taxes. The pension rise is likely to reduce participation in the labour force. The proposed tax rise would discourage mining activity as miners considered their options to delay or abandon projects. There is a lot to like at the level of detail in the Harmer–Henry package, but future efforts to reform our tax-transfer system should focus on promoting saving and investment, including investment in human capital.

It has long been accepted that the adequacy of payments is a key objective of any social security system, where adequacy is defined as the ability of a payment to support a basic acceptable standard of living that is consistent with prevailing community standards. The 2009 Harmer Pension Review directed attention to the adequacy of the pension, an issue that has not been systematically examined in Australia for several decades. This article reviews alternative definitions of adequacy and shows that its basic features have been consistently recognised in official reports conducted over a long period. The deprivation approach is then described and shown to produce estimates that have a direct bearing on this conception of income adequacy. Using the results from two recent surveys, conducted in 2006 and 2010, the article compares levels of deprivation among groups defined on the basis of their principal source of income, including those dependent on an Age Pension and several other forms of social security payment. The results indicate that the adequacy of the Age Pension in 2006 was above that of payments awarded on the basis of disability, unemployment or sole parenthood, and also that the pension increase awarded following the Pension Review reduced deprivation among those who received it. However, the increase was not well targeted to those groups who required further assistance, as indicated by the levels of deprivation they were facing. Further application of the deprivation approach would provide new insights into the nature and extent of existing income inadequacies.

The Amish collective objection to high school education and refusal to comply with compulsory schooling laws can be interpreted with a religious-club-good framework. According to the religious-club interpretation, the Amish use the restriction on secular education as a religious prohibition and sacrifice to improve the welfare of sect members. I exploit the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Wisconsin vs. Yoder, which exempts Amish children from compulsory high school education, as a policy shock to test several key predictions of the religious-club explanations. The evidence suggests that the successful restriction on high school education helped the Amish sect exclude individuals with low religious participation, lower members' shadow cost of time, and grow the sect through higher fertility.

We conduct a benefit-cost analysis of a package of early childhood interventions that can improve nutrition outcomes in Haiti. Using the Lives Saved Tool, we expect that this package can prevent approximately 55,000 cases of child stunting, 7,600 low-weight births and 28,000 cases of maternal anemia annually, if coverage reaches 90% of the target population. In addition, we expect these nutrition improvements will avoid 1,830 under-five deaths, 80 maternal deaths and 900,000 episodes of child illness every year. Those who avoid stunting will experience lifetime productivity benefits equivalent to five times gross national income per capita in present value terms, at a 5% discount rate. While previous benefit-cost analyses of this specific package have only estimated the lifetime productivity benefits of avoided stunting, this paper also accounts for reductions in fatal and non-fatal health risks. In the base case scenario, the annualized net benefits of the intervention equal Haitian gourdes 13.4 billion (USD 211 million) and the benefit-cost ratio (BCR) is 5.2. Despite these substantial benefits, the package may not be the most efficient use of a marginal dollar, with alternative interventions to improve human capital yielding BCRs approximately three to four times higher than the base estimate.

This study documents that the electoral cost of major pension reforms is lower in countries where the level of financial literacy is higher. The evidence from data on legislative elections held between 1990 and 2010 in 21 advanced countries is robust when we control for macroeconomic, demographic, and political conditions. Interestingly, these findings are not robust when we use less specific indicators of human capital as general schooling, supporting the view that knowledge of basic economic and financial concepts has distinctive features that may help reduce the electoral cost of reforms having a relevant impact on the life cycle of individuals.

The pension system brings challenges in many high-income countries. While the system was set up at the time of economic growth, policymakers are facing both economic slowdown and aging population. Moreover, there is an incentive mis-match between short to medium term popularity and re-election versus taking necessary decisions to affect long-term sustainability of the system. In a small open economy, the situation is further accentuated by high volatility driven by migrations and cross-borders workers. This paper aims to address the policymakers’ challenges and develops an innovative model, whose main contribution is the way it reflects the cross-border workers’ contribution and impact. Therefore, it allows to not only assess the state liabilities, but also the evolution of the age pyramid with a significant portion of new migrants and cross-border workers, considering the high volatility of workers. It also provides an approach to analyze issues at stake and remove decision biases faced by politicians through policy options and their impact under various economic scenarios. With the model in hand, we analyze three different scenarios for the future evolution of Luxembourg's pension system. In all three scenarios, the results reflect a significant imbalance of the pension system over time (to 2060), going from 1.6% of gross domestic product (GDP) surplus in the best scenario to 14.2% of GDP deficit in the worst scenario. The probability of this worst scenario is related with a worsening of the economic situation, with job destruction and a drop in economic growth impacting cross-border commuters and net migrations.

Numerous primary investigators collected and processed long-termed time series on German educational statistics in the context of their studies. As a result, there are a multitude of quantitative empirical studies. On the one hand, there is the project group on German Educational Statistics.1 Its projects were targeted at describing and analyzing the long-term structural changes of the German educational system on a broad empirical and statistical basis. On the other hand, there are comprehensive data compilations of individual research projects, focusing on a wide variety of special educational research topics. The online database “histat” provides central digital access to these datasets on German educational history. Currently, it offers more than 120,000 long-term time series on the German educational system for a period of 200 years. The striking size of the database shows its key importance for researchers in the field of education. Thus, this paper aims to provide useful insights into the background of the database, the special characteristics of the data compilations and their analytical potential. Additionally, examples are given of how the data have already been used by researchers.

In order to credibly “sell” legitimate children to their spouse, women must forego more attractive mating opportunities. This paper derives the implications of this observation for the pattern of matching in marriage markets, the dynamics of human capital accumulation, and the evolution of the gene pool. A key consequence of the trade-off faced by women is that marriage markets will naturally tend to be hypergamous – that is, a marriage is more likely to be beneficial to both parties relative to remaining single, the greater the man’s human capital, and the lower the woman’s human capital. As a consequence, it is shown that the equilibrium can only be of two types. In the “Victorian” type, all agents marry somebody of the same rank in the distribution of income. In the “Sex and the City” (SATC) type, women marry men who are better ranked than themselves. There is a mass of unmarried men at the bottom of the distribution of human capital, and a mass of single women at the top of that distribution. It is shown that the economy switches from a Victorian to an SATC equilibrium as inequality goes up.

The model sheds light on how marriage affects the returns to human capital for men and women. Absent marriage, these returns are larger for women than for men but the opposite may occur if marriage prevails. Finally, it is shown that the institution of marriage may or may not favour human capital accumulation depending on how genes affect one’s productivity at accumulating human capital.

While state government spending on early education has grown in recent years, accessibility of preschool programs for rural children remains a problem. Using census-tract data from a nationally-representative data set on U.S. children, multinomial logit estimation reveals significant differences in early education experiences between rural and nonrural children. Both rural children and children of less-educated mothers are less likely to participate in preschool. This paper concludes by discussing the appropriate role of local, state, or federal governments in funding rural preschool programs. While early educational investments are being touted as effective economic development tools, the nature of the positive externalities associated with preschool makes it unlikely that any single rural community would invest in high-quality programs without state or federal assistance.

This article studies the possible effect that education may have upon entrepreneurial success. It uses two data bases, one for Spanish, the other for English entrepreneurs. By means of statistical and econometric analysis, we examine the effects on entrepreneurial behaviour of a series of variables, several relating to education. We compare the Spanish with the English sample. The main conclusions are: education indeed has a considerable bearing upon entrepreneurial success; this bearing is much more evident in the English than in the Spanish samples; both educational systems are quite different; and, lastly, family income seems to have little effect either on entrepreneurial success or on the studies of future entrepreneurs.

This paper aims at explaining why countries with comparable levels of education still experience notable differences in terms of R&D and innovation. High-skilled migration, ultimately linked to differences in R&D costs, might be responsible for the persistence of such a gap. In fact, in a model where human capital accumulation and innovation are strategic complements, we show that allowing labor outflows may strengthen educational incentives in the lagging economy if migration is probabilistic in nature, but at the same time reduces the share of innovative production. Income (growth) might be consequently affected, and a positive migration chance is very unlikely to act as a substitute for educational subsidies.

The costs of higher education in the UK have shifted increasingly from the state to the student (and students' families). In 1998, a fee contribution of £1,000 per annum was introduced for new entrants to full-time degree courses. This paper examines its effect on debt, term-time employment and student satisfaction. The analysis uses data from a survey of two cohorts of students and identifies how the impact varied with student and course characteristics. Fees led to an increase in student debt (particularly for disabled students and for students who did not receive financial support from their families) and a decline in student satisfaction. No general impact on term-time employment was identified, but term-time employment increased for students who did not receive financial support from their families. Whilst for these two groups inequality was increased, fees appeared to lead to greater equality, in terms of term-time employment, between children of graduate and non-graduate parents. The paper discusses the implications for the introduction of top-up fees in 2006.

In this paper, we study how, depending on the sociological and technological characteristics of the economy, a “unified” or, on the contrary, a stratified way of communicating may emerge. Communication takes place less efficiently in the stratified case, because people who spend different languages cannot communicate with each other.

The main results of the paper are as follows. First, the equilibrium degree of literacy is suboptimally low because of the “thin market externality” associated with the language. Second, social stratification generates linguistic stratification and the associated output and welfare losses due to communication failure. Third, because of the thin market externality, there is too much stratification. Fourth, specialized technologies are less vulnerable to stratification than flexible ones, or, equivalently, increased flexibility may have adverse effects on output when society is stratified.

This paper outlines a theoretical framework to think about the role of NIT on earnings inequality at a domestic level. Two main ideas inspired a growth model. First, to be connected is only meaningful for people who are already literate. Second internet, like the invention of printing, permits to increase the part of knowledge that an individual can use. The results are obtained in terms of the Lorenz criterion. The role of some key parameters is emphasized like the elasticity of substitution between talent and knowledge. Two forces are at work. On the one hand, the gap between literate and non literate people will increase. On the other hand, the incentive to become literate increases. Policy implications are derived.