The Impact of Education on Wages: Analysis of an Education Reform in Turkey

In 1997 Turkey passed a law making middle school completion compulsory, increasing the mandatory education from 5 to 8 years. At the time of this policy change, only 3-in-5 students were completing middle school in Turkey. In this paper, I investigate the effect of this law on educational attainment, the impact of the increase in education on wages, and explore how this varied across individuals. My results indicate that the fraction of children completing middle school increased more than 20 percentage points as a result of this reform. The effects were especially pronounced for girls (particularly those living in rural areas): I estimate that as a result of the reform, an additional half a million girls attained a middle school diploma. There are also considerable spillover effects into high school completion rates. Despite the large policy-induced increase in educational attainment, I find little evidence of a corresponding increase in labor force participation or full-time work. The results suggest large wage gains of about 14 percent per year of schooling, with these benefits concentrated among females. Taken together, my findings demonstrate that the policy change induced a dramatic change in educational attainment among the youth of this predominantly Muslim developing country, but that the economic benefits of the change were limited to women

High resolution UHPLC-MS characterization and isolation of main compounds from the antioxidant medicinal plant Parastrephia lucida (Meyen)

High-resolution mass spectrometry is currently used to determine the mass of biologically active compounds in medicinal plants and food and UHPLC-Orbitrap is a relatively new technology that allows fast fingerprinting and metabolomics analysis. Forty-two metabolites including several phenolic acids, flavonoids, coumarines, tremetones and ent-clerodane diterpenes were accurately identified for the first time in the resin of the medicinal plant Parastrephia lucida (Asteraceae) a Chilean native species, commonly called umatola, collected in the pre-cordillera and altiplano regions of northern Chile, by means of UHPLC-PDA-HR-MS. This could be possible by the state of the art technology employed, which allowed well resolved total ion current peaks and the proposal of some biosynthetic relationships between the compounds detected. Some mayor compounds were also isolated using HSCCC. The ethanolic extract showed high total polyphenols content and significant antioxidant capacity. Furthermore, several biological assays were performed that determined the high antioxidant capacity found for the mayor compound isolated from the plant, 11- p-coumaroyloxyltremetone