1,721,020 research outputs found
How Equal Are Educational Opportunities? Family Background and Student Achievement in Europe and the United States
Get PDFThis paper estimates the effects of family-background characteristics on student performance in the US and 17 Western European school systems. Family background has strong effects both in Europe and the United States, remarkably similar in size. France and Flemish Belgium achieve the most equitable performance for students from different family backgrounds, and Britain and Germany the least. Equality of opportunities is unrelated to countries’ mean performance. Quantile regressions show little variation in family-background effects across the ability distribution in most countries.education, equality of opportunity, student performance, family background, TIMSS, equity-efficiency tradeoff, intergenerational mobility
An evaluation of the Swedish system of active labour market programmes in the 1990s
Get PDFThe low unemployment rates traditionally enjoyed by Sweden have often been attributed to the country's extensive system of active labour market programmes, which have thus frequently been regarded as a model for other countries to emulate. However, unemployment grew enormously in Sweden when the country was hit by a most severe recession in the early 1990s. This paper investigates how effective the Swedish labour market programmes have been in improving the opportunities of unemployed individuals over the last decade. The analyses look at the performance of the Swedish system in its entirety, combining all the programmes into one and focusing in particular on the interactions between the unemployment benefit system and the programme system. In fact, a labour market programme in Sweden effectively comes as a bundle of two conflicting components: it is intended to equip job-seekers with marketable skills which should improve their opportunities on the labour market, but at the same time it allows to renew eligibility to generous unemployment compensation, thus reinforcing the work disincentive associated with the unemployment insurance system. Using extensive information on the labour market history of more than 110,000 individuals followed for five years, the presence of short- and long-term programme effects is investigated in terms of a number of outcomes, including employment and unemployment benefit collection. More specifically, the analyses relate to how unemployed individuals joining a programme per-form, on average, compared to a hypothetical state where they would have waited longer job-searching in open unemployment. Overall, the impact of the programme system is found to have been mixed. Unemployed individuals who go sooner on a programme (compared to later or never), though remaining initially locked-in in the unemployment system for around six months, subsequently enjoy a higher probability of being in employment for up to at least five years. By contrast, the fact that programme participation en Titles individuals to renewed unemployment compensation creates strong incentives to remain within the official unemployment system. Individuals who have joined a programme are thus found to be more likely to return to benefit-compensated un- employment, to re-enter more programmes in the future, or to alternate between benefits and program participation over time than if they had searched longer as openly unemployed. The positive effect on employment does in fact arise because the programmes considerably reduce the chances of being unemployed outside the official unemployment system.Active labour market programmes, evaluation
Efficiency and Equity of European Education and Training Policies
Get PDFThis paper reviews empirical evidence, especially from Europe, on how education and training policies can be designed to advance both efficiency and equity. Returns to educational investments tend to decrease over the life cycle. Moreover, they seem to be highest for children from disadvantaged families at early stages and for the well-off at late stages of the life cycle. This creates complementarities between efficiency and equity at early stages and trade-offs at late stages. The paper goes on to discuss specific policies for efficiency and equity at each educational stage, ranging from early childhood education and schools over vocational and higher education to training and lifelong learning. The available evidence suggests that both efficiency and equity can be enhanced by output-oriented reforms properly designed to each stage, where the state generally sets a regulatory framework that ensures accountability and funding and uses the forces of choice and competition to deliver best results. Designed this way, education and training systems can advance efficiency and equity at the same time.education, training, Europe, efficiency, equity, life cycle, trade-off
Culture as regional attraction - migration decisions of highly educated in a Swedish context.
Get PDFRecent research shows that labour market related factors are becoming less important as reasons behind migration in Sweden. Factors that relate to the regional milieu are on the other hand becoming more important. This, together with the fact that culturally active groups in the population (e.g. people with higher education and retirees) are growing, has given rise to the notion that culture is of increasing regional importance. Culture is in some political contexts assumed to attract residents, tourists and firms and thus increase the quality of life, employment as well as the creativity of the population. It's also thought to strengthen the regional identity. There are however processes that complicates this line of reasoning. People are becoming more mobile; they commute over longer distances, they travel more and they often reside in more than one place. Culture on the other hand is becoming more easily accessible through different electronic media thus over bridging geographical distances. Both these processes challenge the role of the regional. The objectives of the paper are: 1) to investigate the importance of the cultural infrastructure in relation to other regional and individual conditions when people choose home region and 2) to study the complexity of this choice, not only considering individual preferences but also exploring the importance of work, mobility and recreational activities. The paper presents a theoretical model of what factors are of importance when people choose home region. The theoretical framework is in part based on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of economic, social and symbolic (cultural) capital. The nature and magnitude of these individual assets are thought to be of importance when choosing home region. The paper further more recognizes that these forms of capital can be more or less geographically embedded. Geographically embedded assets has in migration literature been called insider advantages, a concept discussed and developed in the paper. Insider advantages are assets that are impossible or costly to bring, replace or make use of in another region, e.g. real estate property, friends, work colleagues, the local choir or knowledge about a place. The larger insider advantages a person has got, the larger the cost of moving. The study is based on a questionnaire sent to 3,000 persons, 30 to 35 years residing in Sweden 2001. The study involves people with degrees in civil engineering, fine arts, media-communication, teaching (upper-secondary schoolteachers) and an additional group of people with upper secondary education as highest education. The paper argues that the capacity to attract people by offering a good quality of life is of crucial importance for regional competitiveness. In studying regional attractiveness, it's important not only to consider what makes people move to a certain region but also what makes people willing to stay. It further more argues that the explanations should be sought in a mix of individual and regional factors as well as in the social and geographical context of the individual.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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