Return on investment in higher education : evidence for different subjects, degrees and gender in Germany

Applying an investment perspective to higher education, the paper presents detailed empirical evidence on the rate of return to higher education and its determinants. Employing a sample of 17,180 higher education graduates derived from the German Labor Force Survey 2004, we show considerable variation in the rates of return to higher education across the different subjects, with some subjects on average not representing attractive private investments from an economic point of view. We find that the decision what to study is worth several hundred thousand Euros. Applying regression analysis, we find gender- and degree-specific return advantages only in certain subjects. Comparing the return of an investment in higher education and the production cost of higher education, we show that more expensive subjects (apart from Medicine) yield a lower return. When considering the cost of study, the overall order of attractiveness of the different forms of education remains stable, but the investment in further subjects is no longer clearly attractive. Keywords: Returns to Education, Human Capital, Higher Education Earnings Capacity

Desirable properties for XML update mechanisms

The adoption of XML as the default data interchange format and the standardisation of the XPath and XQuery languages has resulted in significant research in the development and implementation of XML databases capable of processing queries efficiently. The ever-increasing deployment of XML in industry and the real-world requirement to support efficient updates to XML documents has more recently prompted research in dynamic XML labelling schemes. In this paper, we provide an overview of the recent research in dynamic XML labelling schemes. Our motivation is to define a set of properties that represent a more holistic dynamic labelling scheme and present our findings through an evaluation matrix for most of the existing schemes that provide update functionality

Markov chain comparison

This is an expository paper, focussing on the following scenario. We have two Markov chains, $\mathcal {M}$ and $\mathcal {M}'$. By some means, we have obtained a bound on the mixing time of $\mathcal {M}'$. We wish to compare $\mathcal {M}$ with $\mathcal {M}'$ in order to derive a corresponding bound on the mixing time of $\mathcal {M}$. We investigate the application of the comparison method of Diaconis and Saloff-Coste to this scenario, giving a number of theorems which characterize the applicability of the method. We focus particularly on the case in which the chains are not reversible. The purpose of the paper is to provide a catalogue of theorems which can be easily applied to bound mixing times.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/154957806000000041 in the Probability Surveys (http://www.i-journals.org/ps/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Hybridisation for versatile decision-making in game opponent AI

Hybridisation for versatile decision-making in game opponent A

Restructuring of Households in Rural South Africa: Reflections on Average Household Size in the Agincourt Sub-district 1992-2003

South Africa has seen a dramatic decrease in household size over the last decade. In Table 1 we show that over the eight-and-a-half years from October 1995 to March 2004 the average household size has decreased by 20% or 0.74 persons (see also Pirouz 2004). Consequently for a fixed population size there would have been 20% more households in March 2004 than in October 1995. Such a rapid rate of household formation is interesting in and of itself. From the perspective of a policy maker it is particularly vital to understand this process. The new democratic government has committed itself to extending infrastructure and social services to households in deprived communities and now finds that it is trying to catch a moving target. The backlogs are increasing as the services are being rolled out. We will suggest below that there might be a connection between these two processes.

Alternative Compensation Arrangements and Productive Efficiency in Partnerships: Evidence from Medical Group Practice

Although the role of the services sector in the economy has grown increasingly large, and partnerships are a prevalent form of organization in this sector, relatively little is known about the behavior and performance of these firms. In this paper an attempt is made to fill that gap by developing and testing a model of the effect of alternative compensation arrangements on productive efficiency in medical group practices. The technique employed is two-stage production frontier estimation. This technique provides direct estimates of productive efficiency and allows for differences across agents in ability or responsiveness to financial incentives. In the frontier literature productive efficiency is assumed to be exogenously given. In this paper it is determined endogenously, thus a simple econometric technique correcting for this endogeneity in estimating the production frontier is employed. In addition, the measures of efficiency themselves can be made dependent variables for explicit econometric analysis of the determinants of efficiency. Overall, the empirical results are consistent with theoretical work on internal theory of the firm, which predicts that productivity compensation schemes will work well for firms with non-joint production and observable output. These two criteria are met by medical group practices. The treatment of measured efficiency as an endogenous variable is unique and allows some interesting insights into the determinants of productive efficiency. We find that relating compensation to productivity does increase the quantity and efficiency of production, as theory has hypothesized. The number of members in a group decreases both the quantity produced and the efficiency with which that output is produced. Experience does lead to greater productivity and efficiency. Medical groups in general are measured as being no less efficient than an average manufacturing firm, but Health Maintenance Organizations are less efficient than average.

Testing for Rationality with Consumption Data: Demographics and Heterogeneity

In this paper, we introduce a new measure of how close a set of choices are to satisfying the observable implications of rational choice, and apply it to a large balanced panel of household level consumption data. We use this method to answer three related questions: (i) "How close are individual consumption choices to satisfying the model of utility maximization?" (ii) "Are there di¤erences in rationality between di¤erent demographic groups?" (iii) "Can choices be aggregated across individuals under the assumption of homogeneous preferences?" Crucially, in answering these questions, we take into account the power of budget sets faced by each household to expose failures of rationality. To summarize our results we ?nd that: (i) while observed violations of rationality are small in absolute terms, our households are only moderately more rational than the benchmark of random choice; (ii) there are signi?cant di¤erences in the rationality of di¤erent groups, with multi-head households more rational than single head households, and the youngest households more rational than middle age households; (iii) the assumption of homogenous preferences is strongly rejected: choice data that is aggregated across households exhibits high levels of irrationality.#