Public funding of higher education: who gains, who loses?

This paper analyses the effects of public funding of higher education on the welfare of the different agents. It takes into account the hierarchical nature of the educational system and also the fact that parents always have the possibility to complement basic public education with private expenditures in individual tutoring. It is obtained that although public funding implies a larger access to higher education it is always the case that some of the agents that gain access lose in welfare terms. Moreover, it is shown that the marginal agent to access university would always prefer a pure private funding system. Thus, when studying the effects of public funding of higher education, we can not identify gaining access to University with an increase in welfare. Finally, I consider a funding system where only those that send their o¤spring to university support the funding of higher education.FEDER through the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologi

The Poverty of Linear Nations: Lessons from Taking an AK Model to the Data.

This paper takes an AK model to the PWT data. In the model, intratemporal and intertemporal shocks are reduced forms for different technologies, and determine the variation of the growth rate. Using the policy functions of the model we recover time series for the unobserved technology shock for a panel of countries. We can then evaluate both how well the model fits the data and what the contribution of the different shocks to the variation of growth rates is. We find that the data is largely inconsistent with the AK structure. However, we isolate what we believe are pervasive patterns in macroeconomic models: a negative correlation between intra and intertemporal shocks, and an ever increasing level of technology matched with ever cheaper consumption relative to investment.endogenous growth; technology shocks; investment shocks

More Lessons from Taking an AK Model to the Data.

We take an AK model to the PWT data. In the model both technology (intratemporal) and investment (intertemporal) shocks determine the variation of the growth rate. In earlier work we looked at singular models where we extracted only the technology shock using the policy functions from dynamic optimality. Here we recover time series for both shocks for a panel of countries and we isolate what we believe are pervasive patterns in macroeconomic models and postwar data: a negative correlation between intra and intertemporal shocks, and a somewhat lesser role for the intertemporal shock.endogenous growth; technology shocks; investment shocks

Human Capital Composition, R&D and the Increasing Role of Services

A growth model with endogenous innovation and accumulation of high-tech and low-tech human capital is developed. The model accounts for a recently established fact about human capital composition, which stated that “the richest countries are investing proportionally less than middle income countries in engineering and technical human capital”, due to the consideration of a negative effect of technological development on the accumulation of high-tech human capital. Under this new and reasonable assumption, our model also accounts for other previously established stylized facts. Both the evolution of human capital composition and the transition across stages of development are endogenously determined. We relate an increasing R&D activity and a negative relationship between income and the ratio of high to low-tech human capital, both present in developed countries, to the transition to a services economy. Although all growth rates are optimal, we observe under-allocation of high-tech human capital to industry.N/

Gender Gaps in different Grading Systems

This paper analyses the impact of grading practices on the gender gap in student achievement. We examine the gender difference in the difference between teacher grading and scores on national exams to test whether there are gender differences associated with different grading systems. We use Portuguese data on 21 subjects across humanities and sciences for the whole population of students taking exams at the end of the 6th, 9th, 11th and 12th grades from 2007 to 2016. Results show that the difference in scores between teacher grading and exams is on average positive for boys and girls, but higher for the latter. This is verified across the whole distribution of exam scores. Thus, our results indicate that a grading system based on exams favors boys while one based on classroom evaluation favors girls.N/

Gender gaps in different assessment systems: The role of teacher gender

Previous research has identified a gender gap in the difference between teacher grading and scores on national exams at the end of secondary school. We go a step further and look at how teacher characteristics may influence this gender gap. We find that exams are relatively more favorable for boys, regardless of the teacher gender or the gender matching. Results suggest that having a male teacher tends to increase the assessment gap for all students through a greater decrease from teacher grades to exam scores, the impact being less for boys.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Tax dividend evaluation of major urban renewal projects

This paper proposes a parsimonious methodology to evaluate the impact of large urban renewal projects on public revenues. The impact is largely endogenous, external to projects and may encompass a broad range of instruments, ranging from local to regional to central governments. We look at licence fees, user charges, piggyback levies, excise taxes, social security contributions, and taxation of property, corporate income, personal income, and sales or value added. All these revenues are labelled tax dividends for short. The evaluation of a project?s tax dividends may help governments on their licensing and, above all, on their co-financing decisions. However, the need for rigorous financial evaluations faces too many difficulties in practice, from modelling complexity to information shortages to time constraints to bureaucratic obstruction. The methodology in this paper aims precisely at delivering feasible, fast and reasonably sound assessments that can be computed before or after the projects? accomplishment. Revenue changes spring from the economic effects of renewal projects, which differ across space and time. Spatial effects are not restricted to the renewal site. Very often, they spill over to neighbouring city areas, and may also include region and nationwide outcomes. Most on-site effects are internalised by the developer but generate tax dividends too. The renewal project can also bring important benefits to adjacent city areas, because it either reduces a negative externality?pollution or crime, for example?or creates a positive externality?such as widely appraised amenities?for agents located therein. In the case of really large renewal projects, there may also be non-local effects to account for. In fact, the project?s own expenditure is likely to leak into regional and national suppliers, triggering macroeconomic consequences. Economic effects differ also on time, being temporary or permanent. The former come out of resource acquisition by the developer, and may include expenditure on planning, compulsory purchases, decontamination, demolition, and construction. Permanent effects on output occur because these projects increase the real value of capital in the economy. Real estate rents, on site and on neighbouring areas, capitalise the social net benefits of the renewal project. Hence, temporary effects are spatially diffuse and expand the economy in the short run. The methodology includes a tailored Mundell-Fleming design to quantify these effects. Permanent outcomes expand potential output, are normally restricted to an urban subspace and are quantifiable out of differential rents. The methodology is easily customisable to particular projects. As an example, we include an application to the large ongoing renewal project in Eastern Lisbon, Portugal, triggered by the 1998 world exhibition?Expo?98. Frequently, major renewal projects are prompted by a highly visible event, such as this exhibition or the Olympics. The event itself is likely to cause temporary effects, for example through its impact on the tourism sector? which is likely to boost within the city and its region. Our application shows also how to plug these effects into the analysis.

Technology Adoption in Nonrenewable Resource Management

Nonrenewable resource scarcity has been a traditional concern when designing optimal growth models. Technological change has played an important role in those models, since its presence is assumed to mitigate the depletion effect on extraction paths over time. We formalize the general problem of a competitive nonrenewable resource extracting firm to analyze optimal extraction behavior and technology adoption when adoption is costly, both in a deterministic and a stochastic environment, when the firm either anticipates adoption or not. Based on a quadratic extraction cost function, our results do not support the traditional view according to which the firm will only incur in an adoption cost when the stock is depleted enough.nonrenewable resources; technology adoption; depletion effect; cost of adoption.

Ranking schools: a step toward increased accountability or a mere discriminatory practice?

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of the effects of published school rankings based on average scores obtained by students on national exams. We study the effectiveness of this (low-stakes) accountability mechanism; we analyze whether students react to these rankings, by moving in or out of high-schools according to their scores and examine the movements of closing of schools. Our results suggest that families react strongly to published rankings. We also look at the changes in the socio-economic background of students of poorly performing schools in order to evaluate whether the publication of rankings has increased inequality, as feared by many observers. According to our results, published rankings do in fact reinforce stratification by income.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologi

No country for young kids? The effects of school starting age throughout childhood and beyond

Being the youngest in a cohort entails many penalties. Using administrative data of every public-school student in Portugal, we show that although performance gains from being 1-year older fade quickly from primary education to high school, age-related penalties persist through a combination of grade retention, educational tracking and testing policies. Those that start school younger are more likely to repeat grades and ultimately drop out from school. Older entrants are more likely to enroll in scientific curricula in high school, are more successful at accessing public higher education and enroll in more selective undergraduate courses.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio