Do crowded classrooms crowd out learning?

The concern that learning performance may be adversely affected by increased class size appears to be unfounded. But unchecked, the negative peer effect could hinder student achievement.Education Bangladesh ,School children Food ,Nutrition programs ,Food aid ,

Do crowded classrooms crowd out learning?

The concern that learning performance may be adversely affected by increased class size appears to be unfounded. But unchecked, the negative peer effect could hinder student achievement.Education Bangladesh ,School children Food ,Nutrition programs ,Food aid ,

Racial, Ethnic, and Urban/Rural Differences in Transitions into Diabetes: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Survey Biomarker and Self-Reported Data

We examine differences in transitions between stages of type 2 diabetes across racial, ethnic, and urban/rural statuses. The individual-level data from the 2006 to 2012 waves of the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) and county-level data from the 1990-2000 U.S. Censuses, the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research are used to analyze the transition from the stage of prediabetic to diabetic, and the transition from having no diabetes to being prediabetic and diabetic. The HRS includes both biomarker data and self- reported doctors’ diagnoses of diabetes, which allow us to identify people who are prediabetic and undiagnosed diabetics. The likelihood of reporting the transition from prediabetes to diabetes increases with the degree of rurality. Adding county-level proxies for structural disadvantage and individual-level correlates to the regressions attenuate race/ethnicity and rurality disparities in the development of diabetes

Empowering Women through Education and Influence: An Evaluation of the Indian Mahila Samakhya Program

This paper shows that participation in a community-level female empowerment program in India significantly increases participants' physical mobility, political participation, and access to employment. The program provides support groups, literacy camps, adult education classes, and vocational training. We use truncation-corrected matching and instrumental variables on primary data to disentangle the program's mechanisms, separately considering its effect on women who work, and those who do not work but whose reservation wage is increased by participation. We also find significant spillover effects on non-participants relative to women in untreated districts.women's empowerment, community-level interventions, impact evaluation, India

The Impact of Child Labor and School Quality on Academic Achievement in Brazil

We analyze the impact of child labor on school achievement using Brazilian school achievement test data from the 2003 Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Básica (SAEB). We control for the endogeneity of child labor using instrumental variable techniques, where the instrumental variable is the average wage for unskilled male labor in the state. Using our preferred OLS estimates, we find that child labor causes a loss in students' school achievement. Children and adolescents who do not work have better school performance than students who work. Up to two hours of work per day do not have a statistically significant effect on school performance, but additional hours decrease student's achievement. Differences in work conditions affect school performance. For high school students in Portuguese, compared to students who have schooling as their only activity, students who work only at home score 4 percent lower on the tests. Those students who only work outside the house are worse off than those who only work within the house, with test scores decreasing by 5 percent. Students who work both inside and outside the house have the lowest test scores of all the working conditions, decreasing by up to 7 percent.child labor, school achievement, Brazil

The effects of schooling incentive programs on household resource allocation in Bangladesh

This paper examines the impact of programs that provide incentives for school attendance in rural Bangladesh-a food-for-education program for poor primary-school children and a secondary-school scholarship scheme for girls. Detailed time-use data were available from a 1991-92 village study conducted prior to the programs’ implementation as well as for two points in time in 1995 and 1996 when the programs were in place. The time children spent in school increased dramatically, especially for adolescent girls. Families were able to take advantage of the school programs because of the short school days required and because of the compatibility of household work with schooling. Data from 1992 and 1995 show that a sudden increase occurred in marriage postponement for adolescent girls, because the secondary-school scholarship program required parents to sign a bond assuring that their daughters would not be married before age 18. The effects of the incentives varied by gender. Adolescent boys were less likely to remain in school and more likely to leave to do wage work. Parents may have decided to send adolescent girls to school and adolescent boys to work in response to the incentives

The quantity-quality transition in Asia

Societies in which fertility is falling and human capital investment per child increasing are experiencing a “quantity-quality transition.” Such transitions imply, over the long term, both slower rates of labor force growth and higher levels of human capital per worker. They are fundamental to economic development. Yet, these transitions are neither automatic or self-propelling. Their momentum depends on competing forces acting at both the family and the macroeconomic levels; the balance can easily tip against further transition. Family decisions about schooling are largely motivated by its private economic returns. These returns are determined in labor markets, and here the logic of supply and demand applies. When families decide to invest more deeply in their children, they collectively produce right-ward shifts in the supply of educated young labor. If other things are held fixed, the rate of return to schooling should then fall, and this, in turn, should dampen parental enthusiasm for further educational investments. Reductions in the rate of return should also weaken the case for continued reductions in fertility. Unless they are counterbalanced by other forces, such negative feedbacks would tend to bring a quantity-quality transition to a halt. The aim of this paper is to explore both the negative and positive feedbacks that have affected the quantity-quality transition in Asia. We assemble the leading hypotheses and evidence on the macroeconomic forces, both domestic and international, that could influence returns to schooling. We also examine family factors, giving particular attention to the intergenerational links that seem to have maintained the momentum of the Asian transition. Our conclusion is that negative feedbacks associated with increases in the relative supplies of educated labor have been largely offset by beneficial macroeconomic change (resulting from increases in the stock of physical capital, substantial technological change, and trade) and by powerful family-level effects that, over the generations, have continued to propel the transition

Changing opportunities and constraints: Women in Bangladesh and Brazil in the 1980's.

The dissertation consists of essays entitled Changes in Female Labor Force Participation in Brazil 1976-1990: Pushed by Need or Pulled by Opportunity?; How Do Family Planning Worker Visits Affect Women's Behavior in Bangladesh? and Is Doorstep Delivery of Contraceptives Equitable and Efficient? Evidence from Bangladesh's Extension Project. The first essay examines how Brazilian women increased their labor force participation rates during the 1980s in response to the country's weak macroeconomic situation and in response to their increased educational attainment. Using a series of large household surveys, the Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra do Domicilios, I develop a fixed effect methodology to distinguish long-term cohort-educational effects from short-term responses to changes in income and wages. I find significant effects of wage and income changes on participation rates. Changes in income can explain up to fifty percent of the increase in female labor force participation between 1976 and 1990 for all women and twenty percent of the increase for married women. Over the long term, educational levels explain between 49 and 70 percent of the variance among cohort life time participation rates. In the second essay, I develop and test a theory of how family planning worker visits in Bangladesh affect women's behavior. Visits lower the costs of contraception and may increase demand for contraception. If visits increase demand or if workers are targeting their visits, past family planning worker visits should have a positive and significant effect on later probabilities of adopting contraceptives. Using longitudinal data collected from 1982 to 1989 by the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, I find that past visits are not significant in hazard models for contraceptive method adoption, while visits in the current round are significant. Therefore, family planning worker visits affect women's contraceptive behavior by decreasing the costs of contraception. Results for contraceptive discontinuation hazard models provide further support for this hypothesis. The results are robust to numerous tests for bias. Visits to women with no education and to women who live in less developed areas have the largest impact on contraceptive adoption and continuation. In the third essay, I find that during the period of the study, the proportion of women who were visited by family planning workers increased, but women with high education were more likely to be visited than women with low education. The effect was primarily due to behavior by individual family planning workers rather than the allocation of workers across areas. Changing workers' incentives so that they target visits to uneducated women may be a cost effective way to improve the equity and efficiency of the program.Ph.D.DemographyEconomicsIndividual and family studiesLabor economicsSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130195/2/9721941.pd

Do foreign-educated nurses displace native-educated nurses?

We examine whether there is any movement in the employment of native-educated nurses due to the influx of foreign-educated nurses. To avoid conflating the short- and long-term reactions to the entry of newly arrived foreign-educated nurses, we implement a multiple instrumentation procedure. We find that there is no significant effect of foreign-educated nurses on the employment of native nurses in both the short- and the long-runs. Our results suggest that relying on foreign-educated nurses to fill gaps in the US healthcare workforce does not harm the employment of native nurses