1,721,112 research outputs found
A Professor Like Me: Influence of Professor Gender on University Achievement
Full text linkMany wonder whether teacher gender plays an important role in higher education by influencing student achievement and subject interest. The data used in this paper helps identify average effects from male and female university students assigned to male or female teachers. In contrast to previous work at the primary and secondary school level, our focus on large first-year undergraduate classes isolates gender interaction effects due to students reacting to instructors rather than instructors reacting to students. In addition, by focussing on university students, we examine the extent to which gender interactions may exist at later ages. We find that assignment to a same-sex instructor boosts relative grade performance and the likelihood of completing a course, but the magnitudes of these effects are small. A same-sex instructor increases average grade performance by at most 5 percent of its standard deviation and decreases the likelihood of dropping a course by 1.2 percentage points. The effects are similar when conditioning on initial ability (high school achievement), and ethnic background (mother tongue not English), but smaller when conditioning on mathematics and science courses. The effects of same-sex instructors on upper-year course selection are insignificant.Teacher Quality, Higher Education, Gender Role Model Effects
Essays in the Economics of Crime
No full textThis thesis collects three papers on various ways to encourage inmates' social reintegration. The first chapter, Can Recidivism Be Prevented From Behind Bars? Evidence From a Behavioral Program, of which I am the sole author, studies the effects of a cognitive-behavioral intervention targeted at adult incarcerated offenders. Using varying propensities in the likelihood of being recommended for the program, I find large effects in the short term: within a year, the participants' risk of recidivism drops by 16 percentage points. I analyze heterogeneity with respect to the group composition, finding that first-time offenders improve the other participants' receptivity to the treatment.
The second chapter, Prison Rehabilitation Programs and Recidivism: Evidence From Variations in Availability, is co-written with Guy Lacroix and Steeve Marchand. We explore the impacts of other programs, such as self-development workshops, addiction interventions and educational activities, on inmates' reintegration. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we show that participation in such programs diminishes reincarceration, while slightly increasing community sentences. This is consistent with participants committing less severe crimes in the future.
In the third chapter, Can Parole Reduce Both Time Served and Crime, co-written with Steeve Marchand, we ask how can inmates be effectively released from prisons. In a context where parolees receive substantial rehabilitation assistance, we find that parole, consistent with papers in other contexts, causes an increase in reincarceration, but a decrease in reoffenses. To interpret these findings, we propose a novel framework for studying criminal justice policies that affect reentry by studying the total time spent in prison. We show that the increase in reincarceration is completely driven by technical violations, as parole successfully reduces total time spent in prison.Ph.D
What Limits College Success? A review and further analysis of Holzer and Baum’s ‘Making College Work’
No full textHolzer and Baum’s recent book, ‘Making College Work: Pathways to Success for Disadvantaged Students,’ provides an excellent up-to-date review of higher education. This book’s review first summarizes its key themes: 1) who gains from college and why? 2) mismatch and the need for more structure; 3) problems with remediation; 4) financial barriers and 5) the promise of comprehensive support. The author critiques the book’s proposed solutions using some of his own qualitative and quantitative data. Some recommendations are worth considering, while others are too expensive or unlikely to make a meaningful difference without addressing the underlying lack of preparedness and motivation of college students. The author argues that making mandatory some existing services, such as application assistance and advice, proactive tutoring and advising, and greater career transition support, has the most immediate potential.Annenberg Institute at Brown Universit
Essays in labour economics
Full text linkDefence date: 21 February 2019Examining Board:
Prof. Andrea Ichino, European University Institute (Supervisor);
Prof. Andrea Mattozzi, European University Institute;
Prof. Andreas Steinhauer, The University of Edinburgh;
Prof. Josef Zweimüller, University of ZuricThe elderly are an ever-growing group of the population of western countries. Increasing their low employment rates is one of the greatest challenges we face in labour market policy today and is the subject of the first chapter of this thesis. I evaluate the labour market effects of partial retirement - that is a scheme that subsidises part-time work for older workers. It was introduced as an attempt to extend working lives by incentivising part-time employment after a certain age. I find that this policy had overwhelmingly negative effects on old-age labour supply as most workers substituted full-time work with part-time work in partial retirement without actually extending their active lives. Chapter 2 of this thesis is a reflection on the labour market situation of young workers with parental backgrounds that make it difficult for them to achieve their potential. When and where they are held back and whether an open labour market can compensate for this disadvantage is the subject of this chapter. I find that after entering the labour force, workers from disadvantaged backgrounds ”catch-up” in terms of wages with respect to their privileged peers with the same educational achievement. I explain this phenomenon in a setup of education signalling with noise and subsequent employer learning. In the third chapter my co-authors and I focus on the consequences of national wage setting mechanisms in countries with large geographic differences in labour productivity. We confront Germany with relatively flexible wage bargaining mechanisms and Italy with very rigid ones. We find that given the large productivity differences in both countries, Italy’s highly centralised bargaining system generates significant inefficiencies and high costs in terms of aggregate earnings and employment particularly in the South
Essays in Labour Economics
Full text linkThis thesis uses novel data sets to examine the process of human capital accumulation at different points in the life cycle.
Chapter 1 decomposes total childhood exposure effects – the causal effect of growing up in a better area – into separate school and neighborhood components. To do so, it brings together two research designs. First, I implement a spatial regression-discontinuity design based on institutional rules that assign different default schools to students of different linguistic backgrounds to estimate school effects. Second, I study students who move across neighborhoods in Montreal during childhood to estimate total exposure effects by exploiting variation in the timing of moves. I focus on measures of long-term educational attainment outcomes such as university enrollment. I find that total exposure effects are large, and that between 50 and 70% of the long-term benefits of moving to a better area are actually due to access to better schools rather than to the neighborhoods themselves.
In chapter 2, joint with Graham Beattie and Philip Oreopoulos, we introduce a novel method for collecting a comprehensive set of non-academic characteristics to explore which measures best predict the wide variance in first-year college performance unaccounted for by past grades. Students whose first-year college average is far below expectations (divers) have a high propensity for procrastination and are considerably less conscientious than their peers. Divers are more likely to express superficial goals, hoping to 'get rich' quickly. In contrast, students who exceed expectations (thrivers) express more philanthropic goals, are purpose-driven, and are willing to study more hours per week to obtain the higher GPA they expect.
Chapter 3 estimates the effect of linguistic enclaves on language skills. Using rich longitudinal data, I find that enclave size significantly impedes language acquisition, albeit the effect is smaller than cross-sectional models suggest. An unusually rich set of variables is used to generate bounds on the effect of enclaves and a complementary instrumental variable approach confirms the robustness of the results. Enclaves are unrelated to formal language course take-up rates, indicating that they affect language learning via social interactions among friends and colleagues rather than through formal education.Ph.D
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Essays on Human Capital, Wage Dispersion and Worker Mobility
No full textThis dissertation is comprised of three papers. In Chapter 1 I analyze if career heterogeneity in terms of life-cycle earnings, occupational mobility and unemployment is predominantly driven by skills acquired prior to labor market entry or by decisions made and shocks accumulated over the working life. My study is based on a Dynamic Discrete Choice model that enriches the proto-typical dynamic Roy-model with a number of potentially important sources of career heterogeneity, such as match heterogeneity and permanent shocks to skills. I find that a large fraction of life-cycle income inequality is driven by match heterogeneity among workers with the same observable and unobservable credentials. Differences in comparative advantages, though quantitatively important as well, have a much smaller impact than what has been found in research that relies on estimates from more restrictive dynamic Roy models. In Chapter 2 I estimate a flexible non-stationary variance components
model of residual earnings dynamics and investigate if recent increases in residual inequality are caused by an increase of the variances of permanent, persistent or transitory shocks. My results suggest that underlying sources of increasing wage inequality are very different across education groups. Most importantly, only the lesser educated experience a large increase in earnings instability. Chapter 1 and 2 utilize a unique administrative data set from Germany that follows workers from the time of labor market entry until twenty-three years into their careers. In the last chapter I investigate empirically if a particular set of pre-labor market
skills – namely university student achievement – can be fostered by assigning male teachers to male students and female teachers to female students. I find that being taught by a same-sex instructor helps students to improve their relative grade performance and the likelihood of completing a course, but the magnitudes of these effects are small.Ph
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Essays on Human Capital, Wage Dispersion and Worker Mobility
Full text linkThis dissertation is comprised of three papers. In Chapter 1 I analyze if career heterogeneity in terms of life-cycle earnings, occupational mobility and unemployment is predominantly driven by skills acquired prior to labor market entry or by decisions made and shocks accumulated over the working life. My study is based on a Dynamic Discrete Choice model that enriches the proto-typical dynamic Roy-model with a number of potentially important sources of career heterogeneity, such as match heterogeneity and permanent shocks to skills. I find that a large fraction of life-cycle income inequality is driven by match heterogeneity among workers with the same observable and unobservable credentials. Differences in comparative advantages, though quantitatively important as well, have a much smaller impact than what has been found in research that relies on estimates from more restrictive dynamic Roy models. In Chapter 2 I estimate a flexible non-stationary variance components
model of residual earnings dynamics and investigate if recent increases in residual inequality are caused by an increase of the variances of permanent, persistent or transitory shocks. My results suggest that underlying sources of increasing wage inequality are very different across education groups. Most importantly, only the lesser educated experience a large increase in earnings instability. Chapter 1 and 2 utilize a unique administrative data set from Germany that follows workers from the time of labor market entry until twenty-three years into their careers. In the last chapter I investigate empirically if a particular set of pre-labor market
skills – namely university student achievement – can be fostered by assigning male teachers to male students and female teachers to female students. I find that being taught by a same-sex instructor helps students to improve their relative grade performance and the likelihood of completing a course, but the magnitudes of these effects are small.Ph
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