School Resources and Student Outcomes: An Overview of the Literature and New Evidence from North and South Carolina

This paper reviews and interprets the literature on the effect of school resources on students' eventual earnings and educational attainment. In addition, new evidence is presented on the impact of the great disparity in school resources between black and white students in North and South Carolina that existed in the first half of the 20th century, and the subsequent narrowing of these resource disparities. Following birth cohorts over time, gaps in earnings and educational attainment for blacks and whites in the Carolinas tend to mirror the gaps in school resources.

Zero-bias autoencoders and the benefits of co-adapting features

Regularized training of an autoencoder typically results in hidden unit biases that take on large negative values. We show that negative biases are a natural result of using a hidden layer whose responsibility is to both represent the input data and act as a selection mechanism that ensures sparsity of the representation. We then show that negative biases impede the learning of data distributions whose intrinsic dimensionality is high. We also propose a new activation function that decouples the two roles of the hidden layer and that allows us to learn representations on data with very high intrinsic dimensionality, where standard autoencoders typically fail. Since the decoupled activation function acts like an implicit regularizer, the model can be trained by minimizing the reconstruction error of training data, without requiring any additional regularization

Would the Elimination of Affirmative Action Affect Highly Qualified Minority Applicants? Evidence from California and Texas

Between 1996 and 1998 California and Texas eliminated the use of affirmative action in college and university admissions. At the states' elite public universities admission rates of black and Hispanic students fell by 30-50 percent and minority representation in the entering freshman classes declined. In this paper we ask whether the elimination of affirmative action caused any change in the college application behavior of minority students in the two states. A particular concern is that highly qualified minorities - who were not directly affected by the policy change - would be dissuaded from applying to elite public schools, either because of the decline in campus diversity or because of uncertainty about their admission prospects. We use information from SAT-takers in the two states to compare the fractions of minority students who sent their test scores to selective state institutions before and after the elimination of affirmative action. We find no change in the SAT-sending behavior of highly qualified black or Hispanic students in either state.

Labor Market Effects of School Quality: Theory and Evidence

This paper presents an overview and interpretation of the literature relating school quality to students' subsequent labor market success. We begin with a simple theoretical model that describes the determination of schooling and earnings with varying school quality. A key insight of the model is that changes in school quality may affect the characteristics of individuals who choose each level of schooling, imparting a potential selection bias to comparisons of earnings conditional on education. We then summarize the literature that relates school resources to students' earnings and educational attainment. A variety of evidence suggests that students who were educated in schools with more resources tend to earn more and have higher schooling. We also discuss two important issues in the literature: the tradeoffs involved in using school-level versus more aggregated (district or state-level) quality measures; and the evidence on school quality effects for African Americans educated in the segregated school systems of the South.

Sorting in the Labor Market: Do Gregarious Workers Flock to Interactive Jobs?

This paper tests a central implication of the theory of equalizing differences, that workers sort into jobs with different attributes based on their preferences for those attributes. We present evidence from four new time-use data sets for the United States and France on whether workers who are more gregarious, as revealed by their behavior when they are not working, tend to be employed in jobs that involve more social interactions. In each data set we find a significant and sizable relationship between the tendency to interact with others off the job and while working. People's descriptions of their jobs and their personalities also accord reasonably well with their time use on and off the job. Furthermore, workers in occupations that require social interactions according to the O'Net Dictionary of Occupational Titles tend to spend more of their non-working time with friends. Lastly, we find that workers report substantially higher levels of job satisfaction and net affect while at work if their jobs entail frequent interactions with coworkers and other desirable working conditions.

Impact of Government on Growth and Trade

In this paper we attempt to test the development economist's perceptions of the negative contributions of governmental activities, as well as the positive contributions of other activities, to growth. This paper provides evidence on the importance of government behavior for economic growth and, in so doing, attempts to start building a bridge between the development economics literature and the new growth theory. The focal point is the recognition that governments do more than spend and tax in manners that maximize social welfare functions: they influence incentives and regulate in ways that affect private behavior, and their spending, even on infrastructure, is not always optimal.

Institutionalizing alternative economic spaces? An interpretivist perspective on diverse economies

This article offers an approach that helps geographers and others to carefully and critically reexamine prospects for diverse economies. We propose an interpretative institutionalist perspective is useful for elucidating overlooked opportunities for creating alternative economic visions and practices by revealing the process of ‘meaning making’ undertaken by actors in the process of developing policy responses to various dilemmas. We explore this notion in the context of de-growth or post-growth. De-growth is a way of thinking about the economy in ways that are not growth oriented, or fixated on GDP, but on the redistribution of wealth and living within the Earth’s ecosystems