Maternal smoking, birth weight, and infant health

Recent research into the implications of birth weight for infant health, and the implications of smoking during pregnancy for birth weight, may be plagued with omitted variable bias. In this study, two unique British longitudinal data sets on children and their mothers are used to address this issue. Cross sectional and panel estimates which exploit within-sibling differences in data suggest that improvements in birth weight will produce healthier children especially among women at risk of delivering low birth weight infants. Furthermore, the fixed estimates imply the benefits of smoking cessation among pregnant women are greatly exaggerated by the well-documented cross-sectional estimates. The results suggest that smoking during pregnancy reduces birth weight on average by 100 grams

The returns for education for the United Kingdom

This paper uses data from the General Household Survey to examine the economic returns to education between 1985 and 2003 for men and women in the UK. The evidence suggests that the returns to education have increased for men and declined for women. Quantile regression estimates illustrate that younger workers have come to experience more unequal returns to education across the conditional earnings distribution. The evidence suggests that both time spent in education and educational credentials are important in explaining earnings with higher qualifications always conveying higher earnings, holding years of schooling constant.schooling, earnings, sheepskin effects

Personality, Education and Earnings

This paper examines the effects of social maladjustment in childhood on schooling and earnings using the NCDS. Net of differences in family background and cognitive ability, estimates suggest that early social maladjustment scores are associated with lower labor market earnings and schooling. These results suggest that there are substantial returns to fostering positive social development in childhood.educational economics; social maladjustment

Computer Use and Earnings

This paper uses longitudinal data for the UK to investigate the observed correlation between computer use at work and labor market earnings. Our findings suggest that there are no returns to computer use at work. This is evidence against the productivity interpretation of these returns and supports the view that the premium can be attributed to unobserved characteristics.technological change; earnings

Determinants of International Student Migration

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This paper considers what factors determine the migration of overseas students, when students cross borders for higher education. We utilise a gravity model for international student mobility and derive estimates for a sample of 18 countries of destination and 38 countries of origin over the period 2005-11. Our results confirm that geographical distance and the presence of a common language are powerful in explaining bilateral student flows. Our most interesting finding is that time zone differences have a statistically significant and economically large effect in determining international student flows. Copyrigh

The causal effect of schooling on smoking behavior

This paper, using data for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, examines the hypothesis that there is a causal relationship between schooling and cigarette smoking. Compulsory schooling laws are exploited to isolate for causation. Cohorts who were teenagers before and after the health consequences of smoking were widely known are used to compare the effects of additional schooling in the presence and absence of widespread exposure to health-related information. Although the results for Great Britain indicate no causal role for education either before or after the consequences of smoking for health were widely known, the results for Northern Ireland suggest that, at least among men, schooling affected smoking decisions prior to the public dissemination of knowledge on the dangers of smoking for health

The impact of children on women’s labour supply and earnings in the UK: evidence using twin births

The objective of this article is to investigate the effect of children on women’s labour supply and earnings for the UK. Estimating the causal relationship between family size and economic status is complicated because the same factors that increase family size may also affect the labour market outcomes of women. The birth of twins is used as an instrument to address this problem. Amongst women with children under age 13, the IV estimates indicate that a larger family induced by a twin birth adversely affects women’s labour supply and earnings. Amongst women with older children, the IV results show no evidence of a causal effect, despite significant OLS relationships. Finally, we compare these results to estimates produced using a twins’ sex composition instrument. Estimates using this instrument are very close to the estimates using twin births and imply that the labour market consequences of childbearing disappear over time

Provenance-Aware CXXR

A provenance-aware computer system is one that records information about the operations it performs on data to enable it to provide an account of the process that led to a particular item of data. These systems allow users to ask questions of data, such as “What was the sequence of steps involved in its creation?”, “What other items of data were used to create it?”, or “What items of data used it during their creation?”. This work will present a study of how, and the extent to which the CXXR statistical programming software can be made aware of the provenance of the data on which it operates. CXXR is a variant of the R programming language and environment, which is an open source implementation of S. Interestingly S is notable for becoming an early pioneer of provenance-aware computing in 1988. Examples of adapting software such as CXXR for provenance-awareness are few and far between, and the idiosyncrasies of an interpreter such as CXXR—moreover the R language itself—present interesting challenges to provenance-awareness: such as receiving input from a variety of sources and complex evaluation mechanisms. Herein presented are designs for capturing and querying provenance information in such an environment, along with serialisation facilities to preserve data together with its provenance so that they may be distributed and/or subsequently restored to a CXXR session. Also presented is a method for enabling this serialised provenance information to be interoperable with other provenance-aware software. This work also looks at the movement towards making research reproducible, and considers that provenance-aware systems, and provenance-aware CXXR in particular, are well positioned to further the goal of making computational research reproducible

The impact of children on women’s labour supply and earnings in the UK: evidence using twin births

The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of children on women’s labour supply and earnings for the United Kingdom. Estimating the causal relationship between family size and economic status is complicated because the same factors that increase family size may also affect the labour market outcomes of women. The birth of twins is used as an instrument to address this problem. Among women with children under age 13, the IV estimates indicate that a larger family induced by a twin birth adversely affects women’s labour supply and earnings. Among women with older children, the IV results show no evidence of a causal effect, despite significant OLS relationships. Finally, we compare these results to estimates produced using a twins’ sex composition instrument. Estimates using this instrument are very close to the estimates using twin births and imply that the labour market consequences of childbearing disappear over time

Maternal smoking, birth weight, and infant health

Recent research into the implications of birth weight for infant health, and the implications of smoking during pregnancy for birth weight, may be plagued with omitted variable bias. In this study, two unique British longitudinal data sets on children and their mothers are used to address this issue. Cross sectional and panel estimates which exploit within-sibling differences in data suggest that improvements in birth weight will produce healthier children especially among women at risk of delivering low birth weight infants. Furthermore, the fixed estimates imply the benefits of smoking cessation among pregnant women are greatly exaggerated by the well-documented cross-sectional estimates. The results suggest that smoking during pregnancy reduces birth weight on average by 100 grams