Teachers' Pay and Pupil Performance

If you pay peanuts, do you get monkeys? If teachers were better paid and higher up the national income distribution, would there be an improvement in pupil performance? Peter Dolton and Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez examine the enormous variation in teachers' pay across OECD countries and its significance for educational outcomes.incentive systems, merit pay, education, teacher salaries, pupil outcome

Matching the supply of and demand for young people graduating from the vocational track in Spain

Existe gran interés, tanto desde la perspectiva social como política, por conocer en qué medida la inversión en capital humano puede afectar a la facilidad de los jóvenes para encontrar un trabajo de ‘calidad. En esta aportación se analizan los factores que condicionan la probabilidad, y retardo en el tiempo, de encontrar trabajo y el salario diferencial que obtienen los jóvenes procedentes de diferentes ramas de la formación profesional.Vocational education, vocational track, job search, interval earnings regression

2013 global teacher status index

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If you pay peanuts, do you get monkeys? Paying teachers 10 per cent more results in 5-10 per cent higher pupil performance

It is no secret that higher teacher quality translates into higher educational outcomes, but how can the UK attract the best and brightest to the profession? Peter Dolton and Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez examine the enormous variation in teachers’ pay across OECD countries and find evidence that if teachers are better paid and higher up the national income distribution, there is likely to be an improvement in pupil performance

The Value of Basic Skills in the British Labour Market

In this paper we evaluate the labour market value of basic skills in the UK, focusing on the wage and employment returns to having better literacy and numeracy skills. We draw on literacy and numeracy assessments undertaken by all cohort members of the UK 1970 British Cohort Study. The data used are very rich and allow us to account for potential ability bias, including as they do early childhood assessments of ability. We find that the literacy and numeracy effects on earnings are over and above any general effect on earnings from a person being more cognitively able. We also assess whether the value of basic skills, in terms of wage returns, has increased over time, using a cross cohort analysis based on the 1958 National Child Development Study cohort and the 1970 British Cohort Study. Our results show that literacy and numeracy skills retained their high value in the labour market over the period 1995-2004, despite numerous policy attempts to increase the supply of basic skills during this period.Skills, Labour Market, Literacy, Numeracy

On the use of preference-based evolutionary multi-objective optimization for solving a credibilistic portfolio selection model

The portfolio selection problem tries to identify the assets to allocate the capital, and the proportion to be devoted to each asset, for maximizing the returns at the minimum risk. By nature, this is a multi-objective optimization problem. In this work, we propose a three-objective model for portfolio selection, in which the uncertainty of the portfolio returns is modelled by means of LR-power fuzzy variables. We consider as criteria the credibilistic expected return (to be maxi- mized), the below-mean absolute semi-deviation as a risk measure (to be minimized), and a loss function which evaluates the credibility of achieving a non-positive return (to be minimized). The uncorrelation among the risk and loss measures concludes that they provide different information. Budget, cardinality, and diversification constraints are considered. To generate non-dominated portfolios fitting the investor' expectations, preference-based evolutionary algorithms are applied. The preferences are given by aspiration values to be attained by the objectives and profiles representing aggressive, cautious, and conservative investors are analysed. The results for data of the IBEX35 show that portfolios improving the preferences are found in the cautious and aggressive cases, while portfolios with objective values as close as possible to the expectations are obtained in the conservative case. In the generation process, the credibilistic loss has played an important role to and diversified portfolios.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

The influence of weekly instruction and homework time on students' academic performance

Objective Students’ use of time and its effective use are of high relevance for their learning and, because of that, this is an issue which has been placed at the core of the education debate. In the present study we intend to check whether both instruction and homework time are contributing to improve students’ competences or not. Data and methodology In order to approach this issue, we have employed Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2019 data, focusing on 4th grade students in 58 countries. Our intention is to go beyond correlation and approach causality as much as possible so, for this purpose, we employ student fixed-effects within-students between-subjects. Results Our main findings show that weekly instruction and homework time present a null influence on students’ competences in most of the countries under analysis, while they also present a low positive one in some of them. Conclusions The most likely explanation for these results may be that TIMSS measures students’ competences, which are related to the abilities that students use in their daily life, and not to content-based knowledge, which is more related to memorisation or to mechanical tasks. Therefore, this instruction and homework time may not be helping students to improve their competences.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech