Factors affecting the schooling performance of secondary school pupils - the cost of high unemployment and imperfect financial markets

This paper investigates the implications of major ¯nancial markets crises for the human capital accumulation decisions of households. We use data for Argentinean households over the period 1995-2002 to examine households' response to negative idiosyncratic income shocks in di®erent macroeconomic scenarios. In particular we study how teenagers' school progress responds to household head unemployment during periods of high economic growth and compare it to the response during recession years, when families are more likely to be ¯nancially constrained. After accounting for the potential endogeneity of household head unemployment we ¯nd that school failure in response to unemployment shocks increases during periods of economic instability and that, at least for boys, this results from a greater involvement in labor market activities. Our results add to the existing literature on the long term cost of macroeconomic crises.imperfect credit markets, human capital, parental unemployment

Media Exposure and Internal Migration -Evidence from Indonesia

This paper investigates the impact of television on internal migration in Indonesia. We exploit the differential introduction of private television throughout the country and the variation in signal reception due to topography to estimate the causal effect of media exposure. Our estimates reveal important long and short run effects. An increase of one standard deviation in the number of private TV channels received in the area of residence reduces future inter-provincial migration by 1.7-2.7 percentage points, and all migration (inter and intra-provincial) by 4-7.4 percentage points. Short run effects are slightly smaller, but still sizeable and statistically significant. We also show that respondents less exposed to private TV are more likely to consider themselves among the poorest groups of the society. As we discuss in a stylized model of migration choice under imperfect information, these findings are consistent with Indonesia citizens over-estimating the net gains from internal migration.Information; Migration decisions; Television

Does Increasing Parents' Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation? Evidence Based on Conditional Second Moments

This paper investigates the degree of intergenerational transmission of education for individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Rather than identifying the causal effect of parental education via instrumental variables we exploit the feature of the transmission mechanism responsible for its endogeneity. More explicitly, we assume the intergenerational transfer of unobserved ability is invariant to the economic environment. This, combined with the heteroskedasticity resulting from the interaction of unobserved ability with socioeconomic factors, identifies this causal effect. We conclude the observed intergenerational educational correlation reflects both a causal parental educational effect and a transfer of unobserved ability.intergenerational mobility, endogeneity, conditional correlation

Does increasing parents' schooling raise the schooling of the next generation? Evidence based on conditional second moments

This paper investigates the degree of intergenerational transmission ofeducation for individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth1979. Rather than identifying the causal effect of parental education viainstrumental variables we exploit the feature of the transmissionmechanism responsible for its endogeneity. More explicitly, we assume theintergenerational transfer of unobserved ability is invariant to the economicenvironment. This, combined with the heteroskedasticity resulting from theinteraction of unobserved ability with socioeconomic factors, identifies thiscausal effect. We conclude the observed intergenerational educationalcorrelation reflects both a causal parental educational effect and a transferof unobserved ability.Intergenerational mobility, endogeneity, conditional correlation

A Parametric Control Function Approach to Estimating the Returns to Schooling in the Absence of Exclusion Restrictions: An Application to the NLSY

We estimate the return to education using a sample drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). Rather than accounting for the endogeneity of schooling through the use of instrumental variables we employ a parametric version of the Klein and Vella (2006a) estimator. This estimator bypasses the need for instruments by exploiting features of the conditional second moments of the errors. As the Klein and Vella (2006a) procedure is semi-parametric it is computationally demanding. We illustrate how to greatly reduce the required computation by parameterizing the second moments. Accounting for endogeneity increases the estimate of the return to education by 5 percentage points, from 7.6% to 12.7%.return to education, heteroskedasticity, endogeneity

A Parametric Control Function Approach to Estimating the Returns to Schooling in the Absence of Exclusion Restrictions: An Application to the NLSY

An innovation which bypasses the need for instruments when estimating endogenous treatment effects is identification via conditional second moments. The most general of these approaches is Klein and Vella (2010) which models the conditional variances semiparametrically. While this is attractive, as identification is not reliant on parametric assumptions for variances, the non-parametric aspect of the estimation may discourage practitioners from its use. This paper outlines how the estimator can be implemented parametrically. The use of parametric assumptions is accompanied by a large reduction in computational and programming demands. We illustrate the approach by estimating the return to education using a sample drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Accounting for endogeneity increases the estimate of the return to education from 6.8% to 11.2%.return to education, heteroskedasticity, endogeneity

Rental Housing Discrimination and the Persistence of Ethnic Enclaves

We conduct a field experiment to show that discrimination in the rental market represents a significant obstacle for the geographical assimilation process by immigrants. We employ the Internet platform to identify vacant rental apartments in different areas of the two largest Spanish cities, Madrid and Barcelona. We send emails showing interest in the apartments and signal the applicants' ethnicity by using native and foreign-sounding names. We find that, in line with previous studies, immigrants face a differential treatment when trying to rent an apartment. Our results also indicate that this negative treatment varies considerably with the concentration of immigrants in the area. In neighborhoods with a low presence of immigrants the response rate is 30 percentage points lower for immigrants than for natives, while this differential disappears when the immigration share reaches 50%. We conclude that discriminatory practices in the rental housing market contribute to perpetuate the ethnic spatial segregation observed in large cities.immigration, discrimination, spatial segregation

Immigration, family responsibilities and the labor supply of skilled native women

This paper investigates the effects of Spain’s large recent immigration wave on the labor supply of highly skilled native women. We hypothesize that female immigration led to an increase in the supply of affordable household services, such as housekeeping and child or elderly care. As a result, i) native females with high earnings potential were able to increase their labor supply, and ii) the effects were larger on skilled women whose labor supply was heavily constrained by family responsibilities. Our evidence indicates that over the last decade immigration led to an important expansion in the size of the household services sector and to an increase in the labor supply of women in high-earning occupations (of about 2 hours per week). We also find that immigration allowed skilled native women to return to work sooner after childbirth, to stay in the workforce longer when having elderly dependents in the household, and to postpone retirement. Methodologically, we show that the availability of even limited Registry data makes it feasible to conduct the analysis using quarterly household survey data, as opposed to having to rely on the decennial Census.Immigration, Labor supply, Fertility, Retirement, Household services

Immigration and the Informal Labor Market

This paper investigates the relationship between immigration and the size of the informal or underground economy. Exploiting the variation across Spanish provinces we find that the massive immigration wave between 2000 and 2009 is highly correlated to the share of unregistered employment,a proxy for the size of the underground or informal labor market. We estimate that a 10 percentage points increase in the share of immigrants in a province generates between a 3 and 8 percentage pointsincrease in unregistered employment. We also find that the controversial regularization of illegal aliensconducted in 2005 substantially reduced the number of illegal workers but did not affect the relationshipbetween immigration and informality. In contrast, we do find that this relationship becomes stronger during the economic recession inaugurated in 2008