The Cost of Grade Retention

This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro data on the universe of Junior High school students in Uruguay to measure the effect of grade failure on students' subsequent school outcomes. Exploiting the discontinuity induced by a rule establishing automatic grade failure for pupils missing more than 25 days, I show that grade failure leads to substantial drop-out and lower educational attainment even after 4 to 5 years since the time when failure first occurred. Complementary evidence based on a change in the regime of grade promotion leads to very similar conclusions, suggesting that non-random sorting around the discontinuity point is unlikely to drive my results.grade retention, school drop-out, regression discontinuity, sorting

Intergenerational Transfers and Household Structure. Why Do Most Italian Youths Live With Their Parents?

85 percent of Italian men aged 18-33 live with their parents. We argue that Italian parents like to live with their children and a rise in their income makes it possible for them to offer their children higher consumption in exchange for their presence at home. Children prefer to live on their own but are willing to exchange some independence for extra consumption. We formalize this intuition with a bargaining model between parents and children. We test the predictions of the model by estimating the effect of parental income on the probability that children live with their parents. The key econometric issue is the endogeneity of parental income. In order to identify the causal effect of parental income on children's living arrangements we use changes in parents' retirement age induced by the 1992 reform of the Italian social security as an instrument for parental income. By raising retirement age, this reform forced some fathers to remain in the labor market longer than the cohort immediately preceding them, therefore raising their income. Our instrumental variable estimates indicate that a rise in parents' income significantly raises the children's propensity to live at home: a $500 increase in annual parental income results in a 3 to 3.5 percentage point rise in the proportion of children living with their parents.Family structure, Living Arrangements, Two-Sample IV

Just Cant Get Enough:More On Skill-Biassed Change and Labour Market Performance

It is common to hear the argument that poor labour market performance in OECD countries in recent years is the result of shifts in relative demand against less-skilled workers. But, there is much dispute about whether these trends have been occurring and, if they have, how important they are in quantitative terms. In part these problems come from the absence of a clear conceptual framework in which to think about these issues. In this paper we propose such a framework and a measure of skill mismatch that is independent of the definitions of skill, and demonstrate using data from a number of countries how it can be used to assess the importance in skill-biassed change in understanding labour market changes in recent years. Our findings suggest that while increased skill mismatch does seem to have occurred in the US and UK, it has not occurred in the other European countries in our sample.

Telecommunications performance, reforms, and governance

The authors assess the effects of private capital and independent regulatory agencies on telecommunications performance by using cross-country panel data from 1990 to 2003. In general, they find that having independent regulatory agencies positively affects affordability and labor productivity, but negatively affects quality. Having private capital positively affects access, quality, and labor productivity, but negatively affects affordability. However, reform policies affect industrial and developing countries differently in some cases. The authors also find that governance plays an important role as it affects performance and interacts with reform policies.Country Strategy&Performance,Economic Theory&Research,Infrastructure Regulation,ICT Policy and Strategies,Investment and Investment Climate

Telecommunications Reform and Performance – A Global View

Telekommunikation, Regulierung, Reform, Welt, Telecommunications, Regulation, Reform, World

Regional Imbalances and Aggregate Performance in a Leading Sector Model of the Labour Market: An analysis of Italian data 1977-1991

This paper presents a model in which wages throughout the economy depend only on the labour market conditions in some low-unemployment sector. In equilibrium, a labour demand shift towards the primary sector tends to raise the unemployment rate everywhere else in the economy and leaves wages unchanged. Overall this implies an increase in aggregate unemployment. Based on SHIW micro data for the period 1977-1991 we find that wages in Italy depend only on the tightness of the labour market in the North. We estimate that around 15% of the increase in aggregate unemployment in Italy can be explained by a shift in labour demand in favour of the North not matched by an equal shift in labour supply.

Minimum Wages and Earnings Inequality in Urban Mexico. Revisiting the Evidence

This paper explores the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980 and the late 1990s. In contrast to the view that sees minimum wages as an ineffective redistributive tool in developing countries, we find that the deterioration in the real bite of the minimum wage is responsible for the entire rise in inequality at the bottom of the distribution. Our result challenges the widespread perception that trade induced shocks are the single most important factor behind the recent rise in earnings inequality in several less developed economies.Minimum Wage, Inequality, Informality, Mexico

Government Transfers and Political Support

We estimate the impact of a large anti-poverty program - the Uruguayan PANES - on political support for the government that implemented it. The program mainly consisted of a monthly cash transfer for a period of roughly two and half years. Using the discontinuity in program assignment based on a pre-treatment score, we find that beneficiary households are 21 to 28 percentage points more likely to favor the current government (relative to the previous government). Impacts on political support are larger among poorer households and for those near the center of the political spectrum, consistent with the probabilistic voting model in political economy. Effects persist after the cash transfer program ends. We estimate that the annual cost of increasing government political support by 1 percentage point is roughly 0.9% of annual government social expenditures.Conditional cash transfers, redistributive politics, voting, regression discontinuity

School Proximity and Child Labor Evidence from Rurul Tanzania

Is improved school accessibility an effective policy tool for reducing child labor in developing countries? We address this question using micro data from rural Tanzania and a regression strategy that attempts to control for non-random location of households around schools as well as classical and non-classical measurement error in self-reported distance to school. Consistent with a simple model of child labor supply, but contrary to what appears to be a widespread perception, our analysis shows that school proximity leads to a rise in school attendance but no fall in child labor.Distance to school, child labor, school enrolment

Regional Mismatch and Unemployment: Theory and Evidence from Italy, 1977-1998

This paper describes the functioning of a two-region economy characterized by asymmetric wage-setting. Labor market tightness in one region (the leading-region) affects wages in the whole economy. In equilibrium, net labor demand shifts towards the leading region raise unemployment in the rest of the economy and leave regional wages unchanged, causing an increase in aggregate unemployment. This model has some success in explaining the evolution of regional unemployment rates in Italy during the period 1977-1998. Based on SHIW micro data on earnings and ISTAT data on unemployment rates we find strong evidence that wages in Italy only respond to labor market tightness in the North. We estimate that around one third of the increase in aggregate unemployment in Italy can be explained by regional mismatch, mainly due to an excess labor supply growth in the South.regional imbalances; wage curve; unemployment.