Merit Pay for School Superintendents?

Given the important role that school district administrators play in the educational process, one might expect their "performance" to be of fundamental importance in determining both how much students learn and the cost of public education to taxpayers. Yet, while public debate has considered the issue of merit pay plans for teachers, virtually no attention has been directed to the methods by which school administrators are compensated. This paper provides evidence on whether school superintendents are explicitly or implicitly rewarded for their "performance" by higher compensation and/or greater opportunities for mobility. We analyze panel data from over 700 school 'districts in New Ycrk State during the 1978-79 to 1982-83 period. Measures of performance are defined and then entered into salary level, salary change, and mobility equations. While evidence is provided that school superintendents are rewarded for "performance", the magnitude of the rewards appear to be quite small.

Child Care and the Employment Behavior of Single and Married Mothers

This paper examines the relationship between the cost of child care and the employment behavior of married and single mothers. The data used in this paper are from the 1987 SIPP, the first SIPP panel to utilize an improved probing of child care usage and expenditures. A primary contribution of this paper stems from the use of these improved child care data. A second contribution is to provide a clear comparison between single mothers and married mothers. A third contribution of this paper is its detailed discussion of participation elasticities, with a comparison of elasticities derived from different measures of the price of child care. This permits a meaningful comparison between the different child care price elasticities reported by different child care researchers in recent years. The paper's primary estimating equations examine the impact of changes in the market wage and the hourly price of child care on employment and hours of paid child care. The most fundamental result described in this paper is that increases in the market wage significantly increase the probability of labor force participation for married and single mothers, while increases in the price of care reduce the probability of labor force participation.child, care, employment, mothers, Kimmel

Are School Superintendents Rewarded for “Performance”?

[Excerpt] This chapter presents analyses of the compensation and mobility of school superintendents in New York State during the 1978-79 to 1982-83 period. The focus is on school superintendents because they are the chief operating officers of school districts, their salaries are determined through individual negotiations with school boards, and their salary data were made available to us. In contrast, school principals\u27 salary data were not available to us. Especially in large districts, principals tend to be members of a union and their salary increases negotiated collectively, which limits the likelihood of observing individual principals\u27 salaries being related to measures of their school\u27s performance

The application of pesticides to grape bunches

The application of pesticides to grape bunches is complicated by the different shapes and forms of the grape bunch during growth. Initially the grape bunch has a very porous structure, while in later stages the grapes are closely packed. We consider estimates of the flow velocity through the grape bunch, droplet density within the spray, probability of droplet impaction on a bunch or individual grape and the maximum size of drop that can adhere to a grape surface

The Economic Effects of Malaria Eradication: Evidence from an Intervention in Uganda

This study evaluates the economic consequences of a malaria eradication campaign in the southwestern Ugandan district of Kigezi. The project was a joint venture between the WHO and Uganda's Ministry of Health, designed to test for the first time the feasibility of malaria eradication in a sub-Saharan African country. During the years of 1959 and 1960, eradication efforts employing DDT spraying and mass distribution of anti-malarials were implemented, beginning in northern Kigezi. Follow-up studies reported a drop in overall parasite rates from 22.7 to 0.5% in hyperendemic areas and from 12.5 to 0% in mesoendemic areas. We use this campaign as a plausibly exogenous health shock to explore changes in human-capital formation and income. We employ a difference-in-difference methodology to show that eradication produced differential improvements in Kigezi compare to the rest of Uganda in years of schooling, literacy, and primary school completion. In addition, we find suggestive evidence that eradication increased income levels.human capital, malaria, economic development and health

Does Falling Smoking Lead to Rising Obesity?

The strong negative correlation over time between smoking rates and obesity have led some to suggest that reduced smoking is increasing weight gain in the U.S.. This conclusion is supported by the findings of Chou et al. (2004), who conclude that higher cigarette prices lead to increased body weight. We investigate this issue and find no evidence that reduced smoking leads to weight gain. Using the cigarette tax rather than the cigarette price and controlling for non-linear time effects, we find a negative effect of cigarette taxes on body weight, implying that reduced smoking leads to lower body weights. Yet our results, as well as Chou et al., imply implausibly large effects of smoking on body weight. Thus, we cannot confirm that falling smoking leads in a major way to rising obesity rates in the U.S

Using financial data to identify changes in bank condition

An empirical study using an early-warning bank failure prediction model and call-report data to predict deterioration in a bank's condition.Bank supervision ; Bank failures