Online Format vs. Live Mode of Instruction: Do Human Capital Differences or Differences in Returns to Human Capital Explain the Differences in Outcomes?

Our paper asks the question: Does mode of instruction format (live or online format) effect test scores in the principles of macroeconomics classes? Our data are from several sections of principles of macroeconomics, some in live format, some in online format, and all taught by the same instructor. We find that test scores for the online format, when corrected for sample selection bias, are four points higher than for the live format, and the difference is statistically significant. One possible explanation for this is that there was slightly higher human capital in the classes that had the online format. A Oaxaca decomposition of this difference in grades was conducted to see how much was due to human capital and how much was due to the differences in the rates of return to human capital. This analysis reveals that 25% of the difference was due to the higher human capital with the remaining 75% due to differences in the returns to human capital. It is possible that for the relatively older student with the appropriate online learning skill set, and with schedule constrains created by family and job, the online format provides them with a more productive learning environment than does the alternative traditional live class format. Also, because our data are limited to the student s academic transcript, we recommend future research include data on learning style characteristics, and the constraints formed by family and job choices.

Human Capital Externalities and Private Returns to Education in Kenya

We use micro data to analyse the effect of human capital externality on earnings and private returns to education. The earnings equations are estimated using the OLS method for a sample of full-time workers. The results show that human capital has a positive effect on earnings, indicating that an increase in education benefits all workers. However, men benefit more from women's education than the women do from men's. The effects of human capital externality on private returns to schooling are shown to vary substantially between rural and urban areas and across levels of the education system.

Is Group Lending A Good Enforcement Scheme for Achieving High Repayment Rates?: Evidence from Field Experiments in Vietnam

Microfinance institutions employ various kinds of incentive schemes but estimating the effect of each scheme is not easy due to endogeneity bias. We conducted field experiments in Vietnam to capture the role of joint liability, monitoring, cross-reporting, social sanctions, communication and group formation in borrowers’ repayment behavior. We find that joint liability contracts cause serious free-riding problems, inducing strategic default and lowering repayment rates. When group members observe each others’ investment returns, participants are more likely to choose strategic default. Even after introducing a cross-reporting system and/or penalties among borrowers, the default rates and the ratios of participants who chose strategic default under joint liability are still higher than those under individual lending. We also find that joint liability lending often failed to induce mutual insurance among borrowers. Those who had been helped or who had repaid a little in the previous round were more likely to default strategically and repay a little again in the current round and those who paid large amounts were always the same individuals.

The causal relationships in mean and variance between stock returns and foreign institutional investment in India

This paper examines the causalities in mean and variance between stock returns and Foreign Institutional Investment (FII) in India. The analysis in this paper applies the Cross Correlation Function approach from Cheung and Ng (1996), and uses daily data for the timeframe of January 1999 to March 2008 divided into two periods before and after May 2003. Empirical results showed that there are uni-directional causalities in mean and variance from stock returns to FII flows irrelevant of the sample periods, while the reverse causalities in mean and variance are only found in the period beginning with 2003. These results point to FII flows having exerted an impact on the movement of Indian stock prices during the more recent period.

Returns to migration : the role of educational attainment in rural Tanzania

Given the migration premium previously identified in an impact evaluation approach, this paper asks the question of why migration is not more prominent, given such high premium associated with it. Using long-term household panel data drawn from rural Tanzania, Kagera for the period 1991-2004, this study aims to answer this question by exploring the contribution of education in the migration premium. By separating migrants into those that moved out of original villages but remained within Kagera and those who left the region, this study finds that, in consumption, the return on investment in education is higher at both destinations. However, whilst the higher return on education fully explains the gains associated with migration within Kagera, it only partly explains those of external migration. These findings suggest that welfare opportunities are higher at the destination and that an individual's limited investment in education plays a major role in preventing short-distance migration from becoming a significant source of raising welfare, which is not the case for long-distance migration. While education plays a role, it appears that other mechanisms may prohibit rural agents from exploiting the arbitrage opportunity when they migrate to the destination at a great distance from the source.

Skill sorting and production chains : evidence from India

This study proposes a new mechanism that explains skill-sorting patterns and skill wage differentials across industries based on the length of the industry's production chain. A simple simultaneous production model shows that when the quality of intermediate inputs deteriorates rapidly along the production chains, high-skilled individuals choose to work in industries with shorter production chains because of higher returns to skill. I empirically confirm this skill-sorting pattern and these inter-industry skill wage differentials in India, where the quality of intermediate inputs is likely to degrade rapidly because of the high number of unskilled laborers, poor infrastructure, and less-advantaged technology. The results remain robust even when considering selection bias, alternative reasons for inter-industry skill wage differentials, and a different period. The results of this study have important implications when considering countries' industrial development patterns.

From school to work : Muslim youths' education and employment strategies in a community in Uttar Pradesh, India

India's Muslim community, which accounts for 14.4 percent of India’s vast population and is thus the largest of all religious minorities, has been the subject of considerable development discourse as Muslims have the lowest level of educational attainment and standard of living among socio-religious groups in the country. This study addresses the meaning of education and career opportunities for Muslim youths in relation to their educational credentials and social position in the hierarchy of Muslim class and caste groups, with particular reference to a community in Uttar Pradesh. The author contends that the career opportunities, possibilities, and strategies of Muslim youths in Indian society depend on multiple factors: social hierarchy, opportunities to utilize economic resources, social networks, cultural capital, and the wider structural disparities within which the Muslims are situated and wherein they question the value of higher education in gaining them admission to socially recognized and established employment sectors.

Letter from William Tudor to his brother, Henry James Tudor,

In this letter written to his youngest brother from London, Tudor promises when he returns to America, he will protect him from their siblings if they have been picking on him.

Education, migration, and job satisfaction: The regional returns of human capital in the EU. Bruges European Economic Research (BEER) Papers 1/November 2004

The paper looks at the link between human capital and regional economic performance in the EU. Using indicators of educational stock, the matching of educational supply and labour demand, and migration extracted from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), it identifies that the economic performance of European regions over the last few years is generally associated with differences in human capital endowment. However, and in contrast to previous studies, the results highlight that factors such as the matching of educational supply and local labour needs, job satisfaction, and migration may have a stronger connection to economic performance than the traditional measures of educational stock.

Digital workers by design? An example from the on-demand economy. CEPS Working Document No. 414/October 2015 Monday, 19 October 2015

Recent organisational and technological changes à la Uber have generated a new labour market fringe: a digital class of workers and contractors. In this paper we study the case of CoContest, a crowdsourcing platform for interior design. Our objective is to investigate how profitable this type of work can be, also from a cross-country perspective, and why professionals choose to supply work on such a platform. Given the low returns, one might expect to see a pattern of northern employer/southern contractor. Yet analysis reveals a more nuanced pattern, in which designers supply their work even if they live in Italy, which is a high-income country. For these designers work on CoContest can make sense if they are new to the labour market and face high entry barriers, although crowdsourcing does not offer them profitable employment full time. The case of Serbia, the second-largest supplier of designers, is different, however. As a result of differences in purchasing power, if the market grows experienced Serbian designers can expect to make a living from crowdsourced contracts.

ESTOUT: Stata module to export estimation results from estimates table

estout produces a table of regression results from one or several models for use with spreadsheets, LaTeX, HTML, or a word-processor table. eststo stores a quick copy of the active estimation results for later tabulation. esttab is a wrapper for estout. It displays a pretty looking publication-style regression table without much typing. estadd adds additional results to the e()-returns for one or several models previously fitted and stored. This package subsumes the previously circulated esto, esta, estadd, and estadd_plus. An earlier version of estout is available as estout1.

An SDF approach to hedge funds’ tail risk: evidence from Brazilian funds

The main purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology to obtain a hedge fund tail risk measure. Our measure builds on the methodologies proposed by Almeida and Garcia (2015) and Almeida, Ardison, Garcia, and Vicente (2016), which rely in solving dual minimization problems of Cressie Read discrepancy functions in spaces of probability measures. Due to the recently documented robustness of the Hellinger estimator (Kitamura et al., 2013), we adopt within the Cressie Read family, this specific discrepancy as loss function. From this choice, we derive a minimum Hellinger risk-neutral measure that correctly prices an observed panel of hedge fund returns. The estimated risk-neutral measure is used to construct our tail risk measure by pricing synthetic out-of-the-money put options on hedge fund returns of ten specific categories. We provide a detailed description of our methodology, extract the aggregate Tail risk hedge fund factor for Brazilian funds, and as a by product, a set of individual Tail risk factors for each specific hedge fund category.

Abundance estimates for landbirds and seabirds extracted and compiled from annual reports of the Skokholm bird observatory

Long-term ecological data are essential for conservation and to monitor and evaluate the effects of environmental change. Bird populations have been routinely assessed on islands off the British coast for many years and here long term data for one such island, Skokholm, is evaluated for robustness in the light of some 20 changes in observers (wardens) on the island over nearly eight decades. It was found that the dataset was robust when compared to bootstrap data with no species showing significant changes in abundance in years when wardens changed. It is concluded that the breeding bird populations on Skokholm and other British offshore islands are an important scientific resource and that protocols should be enacted to ensure the archiving of records, the continuance of data collection using standardised protocols into the future, and the recognition of such long-term data for science in terms of an appropriate conservation designation.

The muse in exile; poems

Partly reprinted from various periodicals.

Income exempt from tax /

Description based on: 1987; title from cover.