On the optimal allocation of students when peer effect works: Tracking vs Mixing

The belief that both the behavior and outcomes of students are affected by their peers is important in shaping education policy. I analyze two polar education systems -tracking and mixing- and propose several criteria for their comparison. I find that tracking is the system that maximizes average human capital in societies where the distribution of pre-school achievement is not very dispersed. I also find that when peer effects and individuals’ pre-school achievement are close substitutes, all risk averse individuals prefer mixing.Human Capital; Efficiency; Peer Effects; Tracking, Mixing

Tracking can be more equitable than mixing: peer effects and college attendance.

Parents and policy makers often wonder whether, and how, the choice between a tracked or a mixed educational system affects the efficiency and equity of national educational outcomes. This paper analyzes this question taking into account their impact on educational results at later stages and two main results are found. First, it shows that tracking can be the efficient system in societies where the opportunity cost of college attendance is high or the pre-school achievement distribution is very dispersed. Second, this paper shows that although conventional wisdom suggests that equality of opportunities is best guaranteed under mixing, this is not necessarily the case. In fact, tracking is the most equitable system for students with intermediate levels of human capital required to attend college..Peer Effects, Tracking, Mixing, College attendance gap.

On the optimal allocation of students when peer effect works: Tracking vs Mixing.

The belief that the behaviour and outcomes of compulsory school students are affected by their peers has been important in shaping education policy. I analyze two polar education systems -tracking and mixing- and propose several criteria for their comparison. The system that maximizes average human capital, I find, depends crucially on the level of complementarity between peer effects and individuals' ability. I also find that when mean innate ability is much higher among the rich than among the poor, the system that best maximizes average human capital is mixing. However, there is no unanimity in the overall population so as to which system to choose.Peer effects, Tracking, Mixing.

Tracking can be more equitable than mixing: Peer effects and college attendance

Parents and policy makers often wonder whether, and how, the choice between a tracked or a mixed educational system affects the efficiency and equity of national educational outcomes. This paper analyzes this question taking into account their impact on educational results at later stages and two main results are found. First, it shows that tracking can be the efficient system in societies where the opportunity cost of college attendance is high or the pre-school achievement distribution is very dispersed. Second, this paper shows that tracking is the most equitable system for students with intermediate levels of human capital required to attend college.Peer Effects, Tracking, Mixing, College attendance gap

Dressed coordinates: the path-integrals approach

The recent introduced \textit{dressed coordinates} are studied in the path-integral approach. These coordinates are defined in the context of a harmonic oscillator linearly coupled to massless scalar field and, it is shown that in this model the dressed coordinates appear as a coordinate transformation preserving the path-integral functional measure. The analysis also generalizes the \textit{sum rules} established in a previous work.Comment: 9 pages, Latex2

You survive teletransportation

Suppose that it was possible to teletransport. The teletransporter would destroy your old brain and body and construct an identical brain and body at a new location. Would you survive teletransportation? Many people think that teletransportation would kill you. On their view, the person that emerges from the teletransporter would be a replica of you, but it wouldn't be you. In contrast, I argue that there's no relevant difference between teletransportation and ordinary survival. So, if you survive ordinary life, then you survive teletransportation. Yet my argument may also show that we have little prudential reason to care about our survival in general

The Duty to Disobey Immigration Law

Many political theorists argue that immigration restrictions are unjust and defend broadly open borders. In this paper, I examine the implications of this view for individual conduct. In particular, I argue that the citizens of states that enforce unjust immigration restrictions have duties to disobey certain immigration laws. States conscript their citizens to help enforce immigration law by imposing legal duties on these citizens to monitor, report, and refrain from interacting with unauthorized migrants. If an ideal of open borders is true, these laws are unjust. Furthermore, if citizens comply with their legal duties, they contribute to violating the rights of migrants. We are obligated to refrain from contributing to rights-violations. So, citizens are obligated to disobey immigration laws. I defend the moral requirement to disobey immigration laws against the objection that disobedience to the law is excessively risky and the objection that citizens have political obligations to obey the law

A Dilemma for Buddhist Reductionism

This article develops a dilemma for Buddhist Reductionism that centers on the nature of normative reasons. This dilemma suggests that Buddhist Reductionism lacks the resources to make sense of normative reasons and, furthermore, that this failure may cast doubt on the plausibility of Buddhist Reductionism as a whole