The Level of Development and the Determinants of Productivity Growth

We examine the effects of technology on productivity growth by disaggregating total output into sectoral components, exploring the roles of investment and technology on productivity growth for countries in different income groups. We find that for low-income countries, investment is the most important determinant of productivity growth. While investment plays an important role in determining productivity growth in middle-income countries, additional effects resulting from technological change also emerge. Investment ceases to have a significant effect on productivity growth in high-income countries.

Preservice Teacher Preparation in Meeting the Needs of Gifted and Other Academically Diverse Students

The issue of how to respond to the diverse academic needs of students is one of the central challenges of teaching. This project studied how preservice teachers develop an awareness of the needs of academically diverse learners and how they intend to implement and/or modify instruction to meet those needs. Participants all came from one university. As part of the design of the study, the participants were surveyed to investigate (a) their attitudes and beliefs towards academically diverse learners; (b) the teaching practices they would utilize in response to academic diversity in their classrooms; and (c) the confidence they have in their abilities to identify and address these various needs in their classrooms. Several strategies including activities to enhance creativity, cooperative learning, individual instruction, problem-solving activities, and projects were considered noteworthy for the ratings by the preservice teachers as appropriate for all students. Small differences were found based on the preservice teachers' year of placement in the School of Education, indicating that as students progress through this program, they may learn more about different techniques and when and for whom they are appropriate; however, differences across groups were not statistically significant. Results also indicated that across the different years in the program, preservice teachers did not have very high or very low confidence in addressing these issues in their own classrooms. Each grouping fell around the middle level of confidence.

The Congressional Budget Process and the Aggregate Level of Spending

This paper analyzes whether the Congressional budget process (instituted in 1974) leads to lower aggregate spending than does the piece-meal appropriations process that preceded it. Previous theoretical analysis, using spatial models of legislator preferences, is inconclusive. This paper uses a model of interest group lobbying, where a legislature determines spending on a national public good and on subsidies to subsets of the population that belong to nationwide sector-specific interest groups. In the appropriations process, the Appropriations Committee proposes a budget, maximizing the joint welfare of voters and the interest groups, that leads to overspending on subsidies. In the budget process, a Budget Committee proposes an aggregate level of spending (the budget resolution); the Appropriations Committee then proposes a budget. If the lobby groups are not subject to a binding resource constraint, the two institutional structures lead to identical outcomes. With such a constraint, however, there is a free rider problem among the groups in lobbying the Budget Committee, as each group only obtains a small fraction of the benefits from increasing the aggregate budget. If the number of groups is sufficiently large, each takes the budget resolution as given, and lobbies only the Appropriations Committee. The main results are that aggregate spending is lower, and social welfare higher, under the budget process; however, provision of the public good is suboptimal. The paper also presents two extensions: the first endogenizes the enforcement of the budget resolution by incorporating the relevant procedural rules into the model. The second analyzes statutory budget rules that limit spending levels, but can be revised by a simple majority vote. In each case,the free rider problem prevents the groups from securing the required changes to procedural and budget rules.

Corruption and Growth Under Weak Identification

The goal of this paper is to revisit the influential work of Mauro [1995] focusing on the strength of his results under weak identification. He finds a negative impact of corruption on investment and economic growth that appears to be robust to endogeneity when using two-stage least squares (2SLS). Since the inception of Mauro [1995], much literature has focused on 2SLS methods revealing the dangers of estimation and thus inference under weak identification. We reproduce the original results of Mauro [1995] with a high level of confidence and show that the instrument used in the original work is in fact 'weak' as defined by Staiger and Stock [1997]. Thus we update the analysis using a test statistic robust to weak instruments. Our results suggest that under Mauro's original model there is a high probability that the parameters of interest are locally almost unidentified in multivariate specifications. To address this problem, we also investigate other instruments commonly used in the corruption literature and obtain similar results.