Forced to be Rich? Returns to Compulsory Schooling in Britain

Do students benefit from compulsory schooling? In an important article, Oreopoulos (2006) studied the 1947 British compulsory schooling law change and found large returns to schooling of about 15% using the General Household Survey (GHS). Reanalysing this dataset, we find much smaller returns of about 3% on average with no evidence of any positive return for women and a return for men of 4-7%. Additionally, we utilize the New Earnings Survey Panel Data-set (NESPD) that has earnings information superior to that in the GHS and find similar estimates: zero returns for women and returns of 3 to 4% for men.Compulsory Schooling, Returns to Education

Forced to be Rich? Returns to Compulsory Schooling in Britain

Do students benefit from compulsory schooling? In an important article, Oreopoulos (2006) studied the 1947 British compulsory schooling law change and found large returns to schooling of about 15% using the General Household Survey (GHS). Reanalysing this dataset, we find much smaller returns of about 3% on average with no evidence of any positive return for women and a return for men of 4-7%. Additionally, we utilize the New Earnings Survey Panel Data-set (NESPD) that has earnings information superior to that in the GHS and find similar estimates: zero returns for women and returns of 3 to 4% for men.

Meeting update: faecal microbiota transplantation––bench, bedside, courtroom?

A group of stakeholders met, under the aegis of the British Society of Gastroenterology, to discuss the current landscape of faecal microbiota transplant- ation (FMT) within the UK and beyond. The meeting covered a wide range of topics, ranging from the practical aspects of establishing an FMT service and regu- latory issues relating to its delivery, to research implications and likely future directions

Job Re-grading, Real Wages, and the Cycle

This paper makes use of the British New Earnings Survey Panel Dataset between 1976 and 2010. It consists of individual-level payroll data and comprises a random sample of 1% of the entire male and female labor force. About two-thirds of within- and between-company moves involve job re-grading (measured at 3-digit occupation level) while one-third of movers retain their job titles. We find that the real wages of both male and female workers who change job titles within companies are significantly more procyclical than job stayers. This lends support to the predicted procyclical real wage effects of the Reynolds-Reder-Hall job re-grading hypothesis. On the extensive margin, title changers and title retainers who move jobs between companies exhibit the same degrees of wage cyclicality and these are considerably greater than for job stayers.real wage cyclicality, spot wages, job moves, job re-grading

Observations of Cavitation on a Three-Dimensional Oscillating Hydrofoil

A test apparatus was designed and constructed to observe the effect of sinusoidal pitching oscillations on the cavitation of three-dimensional hydrofoils. The apparatus is capable of oscillating hydrofoils at a rate up to 50 Hz and provides for adjustments in oscillation amplitude and mean angle of attack. Observations of the effect of pitching oscillation on cavitation have been made for a NACA 64-309 (modified) hydrofoil operating at its designed mean angle of attack of 7 degrees with an oscillation amplitude of 2 degrees. Photographs illustrating the interaction between natural cavity shedding frequencies and the foil reduced frequency are included

High power coupled CO2 waveguide laser array

A hollow-bore ridge waveguide technique for phase locking arrays of coupled CO2 rf excited waveguide lasers was demonstrated. Stable phase-locked operation of two- and three-channel arrays has been demonstrated at the 50 W output level. Preliminary experiments with a five-element array generated an output power of 95 W but phase-locked operation was not conclusively demonstrated

Monopole clusters in Abelian projected gauge theories

We show that the monopole currents which one obtains in the maximally Abelian gauge of SU(2) fall into two quite distinct classes (when the volume is large enough). In each field configuration there is precisely one cluster that permeates the whole lattice volume. It has a current density and a magnetic screening mass that scale and it produces the whole of the string tension. The remaining clusters have a number density that follows an approximate power law proportional to the inverse cube of l where l is the length of the monopole world line in lattice units. These clusters are localised in space-time with radii which vary as the square root of l. In terms of the radius r these `lumps' have a scale-invariant distribution proportional to (dr/r . 1/{r^4}). Moreover they appear not to contribute at all to the string tension. The fact that they are scale-invariant at small distances would seem to rule out an instanton origin.Comment: LaTeX, 31 pages, 11 PostScript figures. Typo in Table 2 correcte

Inlet protein aggregation: a new mechanism for lubricating film formation with model synovial fluids.

This paper reports a fundamental study of lubricant film formation with model synovial fluid components (proteins) and bovine serum (BS). The objective was to investigate the role of proteins in the lubrication process. Film thickness was measured by optical interferometry in a ball-on-disc device (mean speed range of 2-60 mm/s). A commercial cobalt-chromium (CoCrMo) metal femoral head was used as the stationary component. The results for BS showed complex time-dependent behaviour, which was not representative of a simple fluid. After a few minutes sliding BS formed a thin adherent film of 10-20 nm, which was attributed to protein absorbance at the surface. This layer was augmented by a hydrodynamic film, which often increased at slow speeds. At the end of the test deposited surface layers of 20-50 nm were measured. Imaging of the contact showed that at slow speeds an apparent 'phase boundary' formed in the inlet just in front of the Hertzian zone. This was associated with the formation of a reservoir of high-viscosity material that periodically moved through the contact forming a much thicker film. The study shows that proteins play an important role in the film-forming process and current lubrication models do not capture these mechanisms