What Does it Take to Achieve Equality of Opportunity in Education ? An Empirical Investigation Based on Brazilian Data

Roemer s’ 1998 seminal work on equality of opportunity has contributed to the emergence of a theory of justice that is modern, conceptually clear and easy to mobilize in policy design. In this paper, we apply Roemer’s theory to education policy. We first analyze the reallocations of educational expenditure required to equalize opportunities (taken to be test scores close to the end of compulsory education). Using Brazilian data, we find that implementing an equal-opportunity policy across pupils of different socio-economic background, by using per-pupil spending as the instrucment, and ensuring that nobody receives less that 1/3 of the current national average, requires multiplying by 8.6 the current level of spending on the lowest achieving pupils. This result is driven by the extremely low elasticity of scores to per-pupil spending. As such, it implies large reallocations that are probably politically unacceptable. By exploiting our knowledge of the education production function, we then identify ways of reducing financial reallocations needed to achieve equality of opportunity. We show that the simultaneous redistribution of monetary and non-moneary inputs, like peer group quality (i.e. desegregation) and school effectiveness (i.e. equalizing access to the best-run schools), considerably reduces - by almost 50% - the magnitude of financial redistribution needed. Implementing an EOp policy would not come at any particular cost (or benefit) in terms of efficiencyEquality of Opportunity; Education; Formula Funding

Ageing Workforce, Productivity and Labour costs of Belgian Firms

The Belgian population is ageing due to demographic changes, so does the workforce of firms active in the country. Such a trend is likely to remain for the foreseeable future. And it will be reinforced by the willingness of public authorities to expand employment among individuals aged 50 or more. But are employers willing to employ older workers? The answer depends to a large extent on the ratio between older workers’ productivity and their cost to employers. To address this question we tap into a unique firm-level panel data set to produce robust evidence on the causal effect of ageing on productivity and labour costs. Unobserved firm fixed-effects and short-term endogeneity of workforce age pose serious estimation challenges, which we try to cope with. Our results indicate a negative productivity differential for older workers ranging from 20 to 40% when compared with prime-age workers, and these productivity differentials are not compensated by lower relative labour costs. Furthermore, the (now dominant) service sector does not seem to offer working conditions that mitigate the negative age/productivity relationship. Finally, older workers in smaller firms (Ageing, Labour Productivity, Panel Data Analysis

The impact of teachers’ wages on students’ performance in the presence of heterogeneity and endogeneity. Evidence from Brazil.

In this paper we estimate the effect of teachers’ wages on students’ achievement in a developing country. We use test scores of pupils enrolled in the 8th grade of primary school, surveyed in 2001 in Brazil. We regress individual student test scores on gross monthly teacher wages allowing for nonlinearities. Given the strong heterogeneity of Brazilian pupils and teachers, we estimate quantile regressions (QR), which provide, instead of a constant mean coefficient, a detailed characterization of the effect of teachers’ wages on conditional pupils’s scores. For the same reason, we also run separate regressions for private and public schools. We then account for potential endogeneity of teachers’ wages through the estimation of instrumental variables models (IV). Finally, we estimate two-stage least absolute deviation models (2SLAD), that allow us to cope simultaneously with the heterogeneity of the student-teacher relationship and with the endogeneity of teachers’s wages. Our results show that wages of language teachers have a small, but positive and significant effect, on student test scores in private schools, controlling for endogeneity, but that they are insignificant, or even negative, in public schools. We also observe that teacher wages show a decreasing effect as we move along the conditional distribution of scores. The same effects are found for mathematics teachers, but the results are less robust and the coefficients are smaller.economics of education; human capital; resource allocation; eduction production functions; instrumental variables; two-stage least-squares; quatile regression; two-stage least absolute deviation

Inequality of opportunity in educational achievement in Latin America: evidence from PISA 2006-2009

We assess inequality of opportunity in educational achievement in six Latin American countries, employing two waves of PISA data (2006 and 2009). By means of a non-parametric approach using a decomposable inequality index, GE(0), we rank countries according to their degree of inequality of opportunity. We work with alternative characterizations of types: school type (public or private), gender, parental education, and combinations of those variables. We calculate "incremental contributions" of each set of circumstances to inequality. We provide rankings of countries based on unconditional inequalities (using conventional indices) and on conditional inequalities (EOp indices), and the two sets of rankings do not always coincide. Inequality of opportunities range from less than 1% to up to 27%, with substantial heterogeneity according to the year, the country, the subject and the specificication of circumstances. Robustness checks based on bootstrap and the use of an alternative index confirm most of the initial results.Inequality of Opportunity, economics of education, Latin America

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The effect of teachers' wages on student achievement: evidence from Brazil.

Sprietsma, M. & D. Waltenberg, F. (2005). The effect of teachers' wages on student achievement: evidence from Brazil. Les Cahiers de Recherche du Girsef, 43.We evaluate the effect of teachers' wages on pupils' achievement in a developing country (Brazil), using a good quality micro-dataset (the 2001 wave of SAEB). We estimate education production functions to investigate "whether teachers' wages matter", and we also apply quantile regressions to asses "for whom they matter most". Results show that teachers' wages have a small, positive, average effect on pupils' scores in private, but not in public schools, in both Portuguese and Mathematics tests. In private schools, Portuguese teachers' wages have a greater impact on the scores of low-performing than of highperforming pupils, while in Mathematics no clear pattern is revealed. Main results are maintained when instrumental variables and two-stage least absolute deviation estimations are carried out. Our analysis suggests that there is scope for Brazilian public schools to improve their human resources policies, with potential benefits accruing to low-performing pupils

“My name is Nathan Adler”: David Bowie’s performances through his characters

Ao longo dos mais de 40 anos de carreira, David Bowie se tornou um dos artistas mais representativos da cultura pop. Uma das características marcantes na sua performance enquanto artista pop é a construção de personagens que, por vezes, parecem tomar o lugar do músico, funcionando quase como uma máscara. Entendendo os veículos de comunicação como oportunidades para “intervenção estratégica” e a importância da mediação tecnológica na construção da performance, meu objetivo é entender como o álbum de música, principalmente, entendido como formato cultural, entra nesse processo a partir de três personagens criados por Bowie: Ziggy Stardust, do álbum The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, o Thin White Duke, presente em Station to Station e Nathan Adler, personagem principal da trama de 1. Outside.Palavras-chave: performance, álbum de música, David Bowie.In over forty years David Bowie became one of the most remarkable artists in pop culture. A noteworthy characteristic in his construction as a pop artist is the creation of characters that sometimes seem to take the musician’s place, working almost as a mask. Seeing media as sites for “strategic intervention” and the importance of technological mediation in the construction of a performance, my goal in this article is to understand how the music album as a cultural form is embedded in these processes through the presentation and discussion of three of the characters Bowie created: Ziggy Stardust, from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the Thin White Duke, present in Station to Station and Nathan Adler, the main character in 1. Outside’s plot.Keywords: performance, music album, David Bowie

Essential educational achievements as the currency of educational justice

¿Cómo puede definirse la justicia en la educación? Hacerlo de una manera rigurosa requiere la elaboración de algunas alternativas metodológicas importantes. Este artículo, se concentra en la más básica de ellas: los logros educativos esenciales (currency of educational justice). Dado que el nivel en el cual la justicia debe ser valorada es una cuestión sin resolver, se exponen brevemente algunos problemas bien conocidos con puntos de vista normativos que adoptan el ámbito de “macrojusticia”, y explican por qué la perspectiva de “mesojusticia” de Amartya Sen es preferible. Después de mencionar algunas objeciones, se defenderá una versión de “educacionismo” (educationism), en el cual la manifestación relevante de la justicia resulta estar asociada a los logros educativos esenciales, un atributo que es simultáneamente un funcionamiento relevante y un determinante posible de capacidades