The Measured Black-White Wage Gap Among Women is Too Small

Taken as a whole, the literature on black-white wage inequality suggests that racial gaps in potential wages are much larger among men than women, and further that one can accurately assess black-white gaps in potential wages among women without accounting for black-white differences in patterns of female labor supply. This paper challenges both pieces of this conventional wisdom. I provide several estimates of the black-white gap in potential wages for the year 1990 using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), a panel data set that includes persons born between 1957 and 1964. I exploit data on wages and income sources for years before and after 1990 to develop imputation methods that allow me to adjust measures of the black-white wage gap among women for racial differences in selection patterns. Among young adult employed women in 1990, the Census, Current Population Surveys, and NLSY data yield median log wage gaps of -.11, -16, and -.18 respectively. Based on several different imputation procedures, I estimate that the median black-white gap in log potential wages among women in the NLSY is approximately -.25.

Chicago workshop on black–white inequality: a summary

The Chicago Workshop on Black–White Inequality, funded by the Searle Freedom Trust, meets on a semiannual basis to explore the causes and consequences of economic inequality between blacks and whites in the U.S. On December 15, 2006, the second meeting of the workshop was hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.Education - Economic aspects

What have we learned about the benefits of private schooling?

The author summarizes the literature on the relative performance of public and private schools over the past decade and assesses what we have learned from these studies. Although many questions remain unanswered, the author concludes that private schooling--in particular, Catholic schooling--can raise graduation rates. In addition, the author finds that minority students in large cities have the most to gain from private schooling.Education

Pay for percentile

We propose an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets, and we show that under certain conditions our scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort to all students. Because this scheme employs only ordinal information, our scheme allows education authorities to employ completely new assessments at each testing date without ever having to equate various assessment forms. This approach removes incentives for teachers to teach to a particular assessment form and eliminates opportunities to influence reward pay by corrupting the equating process or the scales used to report assessment results. Our system links compensation to the outcomes of properly seeded contests rather than cardinal measures of achievement growth. Thus, education authorities can employ our incentive scheme for educators while employing a separate system for measuring growth in student achievement that involves no stakes for educators. This approach does not create direct incentives for educators to take actions that contaminate the measurement of student progress.Income ; Wages

Pay for Percentile

We propose an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets, and we show that under certain conditions our scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort to all students. Because this scheme employs only ordinal information, our scheme allows education authorities to employ completely new assessments at each testing date without ever having to equate various assessment forms. Thus, our scheme removes incentives for teachers to teach to a particular assessment form and eliminates any opportunities to influence reward pay by corrupting the equating process or the scales used to report assessment results. Having shown that cardinal measures of achievement growth over time are not a necessary ingredient of incentive systems for educators, we note that education authorities can employ our scheme as a means of providing incentives for educators while employing a separate system for measuring growth in student achievement that involves no stakes for educators. This approach creates no incentives for educators to take actions that contaminate the measurement of student progress.compensation, education, tournaments

Left Behind By Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-Based Accountability

Many test-based accountability systems, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), place great weight on the numbers of students who score at or above specified proficiency levels in various subjects. Accountability systems based on these metrics often provide incentives for teachers and principals to target children near current proficiency levels for extra attention, but these same systems provide weak incentives to devote extra attention to students who are clearly proficient already or who have little chance of becoming proficient in the near term. We show based on fifth grade test scores from the Chicago Public Schools that both the introduction of NCLB in 2002 and the introduction of similar district level reforms in 1996 generated noteworthy increases in reading and math scores among students in the middle of the achievement distribution. Nonetheless, the least academically advantaged students in Chicago did not score higher in math or reading following the introduction of accountability, and we find only mixed evidence of score gains among the most advantaged students. A large existing literature argues that accountability systems built around standardized tests greatly affect the amount of time that teachers devote to different topics. Our results for fifth graders in Chicago, as well as related results for sixth graders after the 1996 reform, suggest that the choice of the proficiency standard in such accountability systems determines the amount of time that teachers devote to students of different ability levels.

The Design of Performance Pay in Education

This chapter analyzes the design of incentive schemes in education while reviewing empirical studies that evaluate performance pay programs for educators. Several themes emerge. First, it is difficult to use one assessment system to create both educator performance metrics and measures of student achievement. To mitigate incentives for coaching, incentive systems should employ assessments that vary in both format and item content. Separate no-stakes assessments provide more reliable information about student achievement because they create no incentives for educators to take hidden actions that contaminate student test scores. Second, relative performance schemes are rare in education even though they are more difficult to manipulate than systems built around psychometric or subjective performance standards. Third, assessment-based incentive schemes are mechanisms that complement rather than substitute for systems that promote parental choice, e.g. vouchers and charter schools.

The Economics of Family Structure

A significant literature in demography and demographic history documents clear relationships between the supply of men with stable earnings and marriage rates among women. Wilson (1987) reasons that because single motherhood is an alternative to traditional marriage, circumstances that impede marriage should also encourage single motherhood. However, few studies provide evidence that the supply of marriageable men affects single parenting rates among women in any significant way. To address this puzzle, this paper presents a model based on a specific version of Wilson's hypothesis. The model demonstrates how previous studies based on various regression methods may have misstated the actual relationship between declining marriage market prospects and the prevalence of never-married mothers. Much of the existing literature frames the expansion of welfare and decreasing supplies of marriageble men as two competing explanations for the rise in single motherhood, especially among less educated black women, but the model developed here shows that the interaction between these two factors may be crucial for understanding the demographic trends we observe. Wilson asserts that, after 1970, economically disadvantaged black women responded to poor marriage markets by choosing to raise children on their own, but this choice may not have been desirable or even feasible without the expansion of welfare programs during the 1960s. The logic of assortative mating implies that, during economic downturns, the women who face the worst marriage prospects are themselves economically disadvantaged and may not possess the resources required to raise children on their own. Studies in demographic history indicate that, in previous eras, women in western societies routinely choose to remain single and childless whenever economic crises or wars eroded their marriage market prospects. Never-married mothers are a relatively recent demographic phenomenon.

CONSUMER UNDERSTANDING AND USE OF HEALTH INFORMATION ON PRODUCT LABELS: MARKETING IMPLICATIONS FOR FUNCTIONAL FOOD

In recent years, the numbers of functional foods being developed and subjected to scientific evaluation have increased substantially. The main characteristic of functional foods that distinguishes them from conventional foods is the potential health benefit, which can be considered to be a credence attribute of product quality. Because this characteristic cannot be easily assessed even after consumption, an asymmetric information environment for health benefits has emerged where producers have more information than consumers. Thus the government intervenes by regulating the provision of health information on product labels in order to avoid potential market failures. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently amended the way health claims on labels of conventional food and dietary supplements are managed. The new policy on qualified health claims allows claims to be made based on different levels of supporting scientific evidence. The policy goal is to encourage firms to make accurate, science-based claims about the health benefits of their products while helping consumers prevent disease and improve their health through sound dietary decisions using nutrition information. This marks a break from the previous environment where a lengthy approval process was argued to provide a road block for food firms wanting to market functional foods based on emerging evidence of diet to health links. This study has two objectives. First, to determine how consumers use health and nutrition information on food labels to form judgments about product quality, using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) as a theoretical framework. Second, to examine whether consumers can differentiate various levels of health claims, specifically the new qualified language, approved by FDA in 2003. It is interesting to determine whether consumers understand the different levels of scientific evidence supporting such claims and whether they can distinguish between the disclaimer languages used. Understanding how consumers use health and nutrition information on product labels has implications for both public policy and food manufacturers who use health claims as tools to market their products e.g., functional foods. This study used a still hypothetical functional food product a wheat cracker containing soy protein. It has been shown that soluble fiber and isoflavones, which can be found in wheat and soy products, respectively, independently help prevent the risk of several maladies including cancer and heart disease. A 5 (claim information on the front label a control condition and the four levels of qualified health claim) x 2 (information on Nutrition Facts) between-subjects factorial design was applied. Five versions of claim information were manipulated, including a control condition and four levels of qualified health claim. Each claim contained explicit relationships between nutrients and diseases i.e., isoflavones - heart disease and soluble fiber - cancers, but had different disclaimers explaining the level of scientific evidence supporting the claim. A report card was also included to inform consumers about the various claim levels, ranging from level A to D. Information on the Nutrition Facts panel was manipulated representing a "healthy" and an "unhealthy" version. Three hundred and seventy-two undergraduate students participated in the study, receiving extra credit for a Marketing class. Several multi-item scales are used as dependent variables, including attitude toward the product, buying intention, strength of evaluation about scientific studies to support claim, confidence about claim statement, perception of product's health benefit, and information search. A univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) is conducted to test main and interaction effects among independent variables on a dependent variable. The results of this study suggest that consumers pay attention to information from all sources including the front label and Nutrition Facts panel. Even though it is shown that consumers react more positively to versions with health claims, there is no evidence to support the first hypothesis that consumers are more careful in evaluating product quality when health and nutrition information is present on the front package. Nevertheless, consumers are able to differentiate healthy products from unhealthy products, regardless of the presence of health and nutrition information on the front label. This study examines whether consumers understand and can distinguish various levels of qualified health claims. Although evidence suggests that consumers react differently to various claim levels, it is not clear whether people understand differences in the scientific support of these claims, as described in the disclaimer. Despite an increasing trend in attitude and purchase intention from the weakest claim (level D) to the strongest claim (level A), there is no statistically significant difference among claim levels when using measures of evaluation of strength of scientific studies, confidence about claim information, and perception of product's health benefit. From the public policy perspective, the results of this study can help determine how consumers evaluate health and nutrition information. It is shown that consumers do not overlook information from other parts of the label specifically the Nutrition Facts panel and that the presence of health and nutrition information on the front label is not likely to mislead consumers. The key issue here that needs further investigation is how to effectively provide information on the front label to consumers. FDA's goal is to permit the use of more, better, easily understood, and up-to-date scientific information about how dietary choices can affect consumers' health on food labels. It is important to identify optimal levels of qualified health claims, perhaps only two levels instead of four levels, so that consumers can distinguish and understand differences in terms of the scientific support for the claims and product benefits. As for the food industry, the results of this study can help food manufacturers decide what level of health and nutrition information they should provide to consumers. In addition to understanding the petitioning procedures for different claims, food firms must determine which, how, and when consumers understand and use health information in order to find the most efficient marketing communication channels.Health Economics and Policy,

Grace, Play, and the Body in the Writings of Albert Camus

This essay explores the connections among the body, physical grace, and the absurd in two of Camus’ earliest essays, “Noces à Tipasa” [Nuptials at Tipasa] (1938) and Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) (1942). This then leads into a discussion on “play,” which ties all three subjects together. Finally, these topics are explored in Camus’ novel La Peste [The Plague] (1947) to show how one might apply the findings of this essay to Camus’ fiction. To begin, the essay focuses on the foregrounding of the body in Camus’ two essays. It then shows how Camus’ emphasis on the body leads him to explore either the state of grace or the absurd. After this, it is shown that while grace and the absurd appear to be opposites, there is still the possibility for them to coexist. This is done in the realm of play. Here, the essay refers to the sociological understanding of play, which is developed and related to the absurd. Play is the primary way that one can become graceful, and following the absurd to its conclusion is equivalent to turning life into a game that one must play. In this way, being conscious of and loyal to the absurd turns life into a playing field where one may be in a state of grace