Adjustment Weights 1891-1911: Weights to adjust entrepreneur numbers for non-response and misallocation bias in Censuses 1891-1911

This paper explains the use of weights to adjust the Censuses 1891-1911 for non-response and misallocation bias. The weights themselves are in a separate file available for download. The weights allow adjustment of observations to ‘correct’ values of when using data from I-CeM or the Entrepreneurs database at UKDA 1851-1911 developed from the ESRC project ES/M010953 Drivers of Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses. The paper provides detailed documentation of how the data base should be adjusted and the weighted data interpreted. More detailed discussion of the difficulties that arise in these three censuses is provided in the paper by Bennett et al. (2018) to which this working paper is linked

Datasets and guide: downloads for reconstructing British census responses 1851-1881 for the BBCE

This paper is a guide to supplementation for the 1851-1881 censuses where responses were incomplete (in not allowing explicit identification of entrepreneur status). The paper provides downloads of the intermediate variables used in England and Wales, and Scotland

Disrupted schooling: impacts on achievement from the Chilean school occupations

Disrupted schooling can heavily impact the amount of education pupils receive. Starting in early June of 2011 a huge social outburst of pupil protests, walk-outs, riots and school occupations called the Chilean Winter caused more than 8 million of lost school days. Within a matter of days, riots reached the national level with hundreds of thousands of pupils occupying schools, marching on the streets and demanding better education. Exploiting a police report on occupied schools in Santiago, I assess the effect of reduced school attendance in the context of schools occupations on pupils’ cognitive achievement. This paper investigates whether or not there is a causal relationship between the protests and school occupations and the standardised test performance of those pupils whose schools were occupied

The square root of negative one: the influence of imaginary numbers on Nicanor Parra’s poem ‘El hombre imaginario’

This article presents a new and necessary explication of ‘El hombre imaginario’, the most well-known poem of Nicanor Parra, by connecting the repetition of the word imaginario, which is central to the poem, to the symbol i—the square root of negative one—used to represent imaginary numbers. In this interpretation, the poem integrates a cold, sterile element of mathematics into the artful world of antipoetry so seamlessly that this element has gone unnoticed by critics—until now. In the poem, Parra, who was well acquainted with the symbol i—something that this paper carefully proves—uses the modifiers imaginario(s)/a(s) to transpose the meaning of words much in the same way that the symbol i, the imaginary unit, transposes the meaning of numbers. Accordingly, this article attempts to reveal the hidden algebra of the poem, opening an avenue for further interpretation

Inter-census record-linked entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs 1851-91 using BBCE and I-CeM: database structure, assessment, downloads and User Guide.

This WP 25 provides the database download, assessment or representativeness, and explanation of database finalisation for record-linkage of census data 1851-91 in England and Wales. The linkage is for two sets of individuals: entrepreneurs, and a stratified quota random sample on non-entrepreneurs in 21 occupational sectors

Essays in economic geography: school vouchers, student riots and maternal surrogacy

In this thesis, I investigate spatial aspects of education and family economics. In the first chapter, I explore the effect of voucher school competition on pupil achievement in Chile. Specifically, I create spatial indices to measure spatially determined competition: a choice index which counts the number of schools that are accessible from a given municipality; and a competition index which summarizes the choice index for a given community of students. The chapter tests the hypothesis that schools which spatially compete more are also more efficient. The results show no effect of spatially determined competition on value added. I discuss how the absence or slow response of parents to “poorly performing” schools and a “too low” voucher can be proposed as two of the causes of the poor functioning of the voucher system. In the second chapter, I exploit a police report on occupied schools in the socalled Chilean Winter—a huge social outburst of pupil protests, walk-outs, riots and school occupations, which started in early June of 2011—and test the hypothesis that a decrease in attendance has a causal effect on reducing students’ performance in standardized tests. My evidence indicates that the performance of pupils affected by missed days from school dropped to nearly 0.18σ, which is sizeable in terms of human capital accumulation. In the last chapter, I produce the first quantitative evaluation of maternal surrogacy. I exploit variation in surrogacy legislation in every US state over time and study surrogacy’s causal effect on vital statistics such as marriage, divorce, births and out-of-wedlock births. Using arguably exogenous changes in legislation to identify the causal impact of surrogacy, I show that one additional standard deviation in the surrogacy rate causes an increase of 0.05σ in the number of marriages and of 0.04σ in the number of divorces. It also causes a decrease of -0.02σ in births and of -0.03σ in out-of-wedlock births. The three chapters introduce novel results that advance current knowledge and should be carefully considered by policy makers in these areas. JEL Codes: H70;I20;J12;J13;J16;J52;K12;K36;K42

Covid-19 school shutdowns: what will they do to our children's education?

Evidence from unexpected temporary school closures and reduced instruction time suggests school closures will reduce educational achievement, both in the short and long term. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are likely to be affected more than others by school closures, with fewer family resources and less access to online learning resources to offset lost instruction time. In England, the total cost of the resources lost in each week of state school closure is more than £1 billion. Educational deficits from time lost to school shutdowns can be made up with additional hours of teaching when schools reopen, though schools might need to put back more hours than were lost and it may not be feasible to do this within the traditional school year. Compensating lost instruction time through additional resources, without additional hours, is likely to be even more expensive

Judge Dread: court severity, repossession risk and demand in mortgage and housing markets

We study the impact of borrower protection on mortgage and housing demand. We focus on variation in the likelihood that a house is repossessed – conditional on the mortgage being in arrears and taken to court – coming from heterogeneity in preferences of judges that adjudicate on repossession cases in England and Wales. We develop a simple theoretical framework that shows that too much borrower protection restricts credit supply, while not enough restricts credit demand. Market outcomes depend on which side dominates. To test the predictions of our model, we exploit exogenous spatial variation in repossession risk created by the boundaries of courts’ catchment areas. In our setting, housing market characteristics, borrower attributes and mortgage rates do not change discontinuously across these boundaries – allowing us to isolate the causal effects of borrower protection. We find that less borrower protection decreases both mortgage sizes and house prices. This pattern suggests that judges in our sample are too strict and that demand determines market outcomes. Furthermore, we find that our measure of borrower protection does not react to market conditions – causing frictions in credit and housing markets

The Chilean way to abortion

This record contains the original Spanish article on abortion in the Unidad Popular by Piero Montebruno and Alejandra Delagado as it was published in The Clinic magazine in Santiago de Chile in 2003 and an English translation by Piero Montebruno of the original article. Cite this article as: Montebruno, Piero, Delgado, Alejandra, “La vía chilena hacia el aborto”, The Clinic, 2003. Montebruno, Piero, Delgado, Alejandra, “La vía chilena hacia el aborto”, The Clinic online, 13 de marzo, 2012. http://www.theclinic.cl/2012/03/13/la-via-chilena/ Montebruno, Piero, Delgado, Alejandra, “The Chilean way to abortion” (Montebruno, Piero, Trans.), The Clinic online, 13 March 2012. http://www.theclinic.cl/2012/03/13/la-via-chilena/ In Chile, until recently, abortion was illegal. Admiral Merino banned it entirely on the last day of the military dictatorship. Since then it has been a contentious issue. Overall, only three countries, Chile, the Vatican City, and Andorra prohibit it altogether. This article authored by Piero Montebruno and Alejandra Delgado was a runner-up in the Official Selection of New Journalism Award of the Foundation for a New Iberoamerican Journalism (FNPI) created by García Márquez himself. This article was first published in the print version of The Clinic in 2003. It was then republished in the online version of the magazine on 13 March 2012

Supplement to BBCE User Guide: Website definitions, downloads, Atlas of Entrepreneurship, and linkage to I-CeM

This paper has two objectives: to guide users on the precise definitions used for the BBCE website https://www.bbce.uk/ and Atlas of Entrepreneurship; and to offer additional guidance to that in the BBCE User Guide https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.47126 on linkage with I-CeM