Study Day

Postcard from Mai Doan, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program in Aix-en-Provence, Franc

Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Redlining

The practice of Emergency Management in Michigan raises anew the question of whose knowledge matters to whom and for what reasons, against the background of what projects, challenges, and systemic imperatives. In this paper, I offer a historical overview of state intervention laws across the United States, focusing specifically on Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws. I draw on recent analyses of these laws to develop an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic redlining, which, I suggest, is a form of group-based credibility discounting not readily countenanced by existing, ‘culprit-based’ accounts of epistemic injustice. I argue that epistemic redlining plays a crucial role in ongoing projects of racialized subordination and dispossession in Michigan, and that such discounting tends to have structural causes that can be difficult to identify and uproot. Contrary to the general thrust of recent work on the topic, I argue that epistemic redlining ought to be understood as a form of epistemic injustice

Labour Market Returns to Higher Education in Vietnam

This paper employs the Ordinary Least Squares, Instrumental Variables and Treatment Effect models to a new dataset from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) to estimate return to the four-year university education in 2008. Our estimates reveal that the return to university education is about 17% (annualized) and robust to the various estimators. The return to higher education has significantly increased since the economic reform in late 1980s.economic transition; returns to higher education; IV model; Vietnam

Do returns to schools go up during transition? The not so contrary case of Vietnam

A key stylized fact about transition economies is that the returns to schooling rise as economic reform progresses. Existing research suggests that Vietnam is an exception to this pattern, with a decrease in males’ return from 1992 to 1998, and little increase in the return to females’ education (Liu, 2006). This exception may be because of the gradual economic reform applied in Vietnam, whilst in Eastern European countries the “Big Bang” transformation was conducted. Therefore to see whether Vietnam is still a counter example, we re-examine the trend in the rate of return to schooling in Vietnam over the 1998-2004 period, where the reforms have had a longer time to have an effect