1,721,100 research outputs found
The impact of student loans on educational attainment: the case of a program at the pontifical catholic university of Peru
Get PDFDuring the past decades, the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (known as PUCP) has been giving student loans to some of its students with satisfactory academic performance but who face certain economic problems which might interrupt their studies. Although this program was created more than forty years ago, its results have not been rigorously evaluated. This document attempts to assess to what extent the program has benefited students. Because the collected data come from academic and social records, the completion of this task requires using modern techniques specifically designed to work with non experimental data. After estimating by propensity score matching with multiple treatments, I find a statistically significant impact of this program on the time a student employs to complete the course of study at PUCP (measured in semesters) only when a student was awarded with a loan for 6 semesters or more. That effect is not significantly different from zero when the loan lasts less than 6 semesters. Similar results were found when I analyzed the impact on the probability of degree completion of student loans, where students with loan were more likely to meet all graduation requirements by 6 years and a half after they start studying at PUCP. Again this effect was significant only when the student participates in the program for six semesters or more. However, the impact on that probability was small.Student Loans, Matching, Treatment Effect
Active labor market policy effects in a dynamic setting
Get PDFThis paper implements a method to identify and estimate treatment effects in a dynamic setting where treatments may occur at any point in time. By relating the standard matching approach to the timing-of-events approach, it demonstrates that effects of the treatment on the treated at a given date can be identified even though non-treated may be treated later in time. The approach builds on a "no anticipation" assumption and the assumption of conditional independence between the duration until treatment and the counterfactual durations until exit. To illustrate the approach, the paper studies the effect of training for unemployed workers in France, using a rich register data set. Training has little impact on unemployment duration. The contamination of the standard matching estimator due to later entries into treatment is large if the treatment probability is high.Treatment; program participation; unemployment duration; training; propensity score; matching; contamination bias
Active Labor Market Policy Effects in a Dynamic Setting
Get PDFThis paper implements a method to identify and estimate treatment effects in a dynamic setting where treatments may occur at any point in time. By relating the standard matching approach to the timing-of-events approach, it demonstrates that effects of the treatment on the treated at a given date can be identified even though non-treated may be treated later in time. The approach builds on a "no anticipation" assumption and the assumption of conditional independence between the duration until treatment and the counterfactual durations until exit. To illustrate the approach, the paper studies the effect of training for unemployed workers in France, using a rich register data set. Training has little impact on unemployment duration. The contamination of the standard matching estimator due to later entries into treatment is large if the treatment probability is high.treatment, program participation, unemployment duration, matching, training, propensity score, contamination bias
Asking Retrospective Questions in Household Surveys: Evidence from Vietnam
Get PDFAsking retrospective questions about consumption and income has become an important part of household surveys and research in developing countries. While recall errors in retrospective data may generate estimation biases, the nature and the magnitude of the errors are largely unknown, especially in the context of developing countries. To fill this gap in the existing studies, we collect unique household data from Vietnam, a resurvey of respondents of the Vietnam Health and Living Standard Survey (VHLSS) 2006. This combined data allows us to investigate a variety of errors associated with recall surveys and the size of consumption categories in questionnaires. Our empirical results suggest that asking for total expenditure, rather than categorical expenditure, will cause fewer recall errors in a retrospective survey. This is especially true in the case of purchased or bartered consumption expenditure. Our results also suggest that while recall errors in the categorical sum of expenditure may exhibit mean-reverting patterns, retrospective total expenditure data is less likely to involve problems of mean reverting measurement error.
Crime and Economic Incentives
Get PDFWe explore the role that economic incentives, particularly changes in wages at the bottom end of
the wage distribution, play in determining crime rates. We use data on the police force areas of
England and Wales between 1975 and 1996. We find that falls in the wages of unskilled workers
leads to increases in crime. We carry out a number of experiments with different wage measures,
including a wage measure that accounts for the effects of changes in the composition of
employment. These reinforce the picture of a strong impact of wages on crime. The result that
incentives play a central role is reinforced further by the strong impact on crime of deterrence
measures and of a measure of the returns to crime
Using a Social Experiment to Validate a Dynamic Behavioral Model of Child Schooling and Fertility: Assessing the Impact of a School Subsidy Program in Mexico
Get PDFThis paper studies the performance of a methodology that can be used to evaluate the impact of new policies that radically depart from existing ones. It uses data gathered from a randomized schooling subsidy experiment in Mexico (i) to estimate and validate a dynamic behavioral model of parental decisions about fertility and child schooling, (ii) to forecast long-term program impacts that extend beyond the life of the experiment, and (iii) to assess the impact of a variety of counterfactual policies. The behavioral model is estimated using data on families in the randomized-out control group and in the treatment group prior to the experiment, both of which did not receive any subsidy. Child wages provide a valuable source of variation in the data for identifying subsidy effects. Using the estimated model, we predict the effects of school subsidies according to the schedule that was implemented under the Mexican PROGRESA program.schooling, child labor, fertility, structural estimation, social experiments
Interjurisdictional Capitalization of a New Metro Line on Housing Values
Get PDFMany governments continue constructing new subway lines with the goal of reducing congestion and pollution in large cities. Besides the potential global effects on reducing negative externalities in the city, there are some local positive effects in terms of lower commuting time and distance for residents living close to the subway stations. These benets of the public transport services should capitalize totally or partially on housing prices. Most of the empirical work has estimated the effects on housing prices after the public transit infrastructure is operating and implicitly assumed homogeneous capitalization across jurisdictions. However, due to differences on local public goods provision and residents' characteristics across jurisdictions, two identical housing units located at the same distance to the nearest metro station but in different local markets would not necessarily have the same degree of capitalization. Using parametric and non-parametric methods and transaction data for Santiago, Chile, we estimate the anticipated capitalization of a new metro line across counties in the city. The results show signicant anticipated effects, between 3.6% and 5.3%, and also large interjurisdictional differences in capitalization degrees, ranging between -6% and 40%.Metro, Capitalization, Housing Prices
Does Health Insurance Coverage Lead to Better Health and Educational Outcomes? Evidence from Rural China
Get PDFUsing 2006 China Agricultural Census (CAC), we examine whether the introduction of the New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) has affected child mortality, maternal mortality, and school enrollment of the 6-16 years olds. Our data cover 5.9 million people living in eight low-income rural counties, of which four adopted the NCMS by 2006 and four did not adopt it until 2007. Raw data suggest that enrolling in NCMS is associated with better school enrollment and lower mortality of young children and pregnant women. However, using a difference-in-difference propensity score method, we find most of these differences are driven by the endogenous introduction and take-up of NCMS, and out method overcomes classical propensity score matching's failure to address the selection bias. While the NCMS does not affect child mortality and maternal mortality, it does help improve the school enrollment of six-year-olds.
A Quantitative Analysis of the Evolution of the U.S. Wage Distribution: 1970-2000
Get PDFIn this paper, we construct a parsimonious overlapping-generations model of human capital accumulation and study its quantitative implications for the evolution of the U.S. wage distribution from 1970 to 2000. A key feature of the model is that individuals differ in their ability to accumulate human capital, which is the main source of wage inequality in this model. We examine the response of this model to skill-biased technical change (SBTC), which is modeled as an increase in the trend growth rate of the price of human capital starting in the early 1970s. The model displays behavior that is consistent with several important trends observed in the US data, including the rise in overall wage inequality; the fall and subsequent rise in the college premium, as well as the fact that this behavior was most pronounced for younger workers; the rise in within-group inequality; the stagnation in median wage growth; and the small rise in consumption inequality despite the large rise in wage inequality. We consider different scenarios regarding how individuals' expectations evolve during SBTC. Specifically, we study the case where individuals immediately realize the advent of SBTC (perfect foresight), and the case where they initially underestimate the future growth of the price of human capital (pessimistic priors), but learn the truth in a Bayesian fashion over time. Lack of perfect foresight appears to have little effect on the main results of the paper. Overall, the model shows promise for explaining a diverse set of wage distribution trends observed since the 1970s in a unifying human capital framework.
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