Category: Education
Women, education, and earnings
From the job market paper of Miriam Gensowski, from University of Chicago:
Yet for education levels beyond the bachelor’s, higher education is associated with slightly lower earnings through marriage. The more highly educated women are less likely to be married, and thus lose the opportunity to bolster their own earnings with their husband’s. In the case of women with a Masters degree, the negative effect is clearly related to lower probability of being married – as Fig. 8 shows. A woman’s propensity to be married is much lower for women with a master’s as opposed to a bachelor’s degree or high school diploma. Most interestingly, the exceptional women who obtained a Doctorate degree did not suffer significantly in the marriage market, as one might have anticipated. Even though they were significantly less likely to be married, when they were married their husbands had higher-than-average earnings, so overall the impact of their high education on the returns to marriage are not statistically different from zero.
Of course there is a tricky causal issue. If you truly feel like getting a Masters degree, that may be enough to indicate your marriage prospects are lower and refraining from the Masters may not much help. We don’t know.
The paper is interesting throughout. For instance it finds a high return to education even after adjusting for IQ and personality traits. It ascertains which male personality types benefit the most from education. It also finds that the personality trait of neuroticism increases male earnings if correlated with a Masters or Ph.d but not otherwise.
The Chronicle of Higher Education covers MRU
Mr. Cowen hopes the site will become a library of explanatory videos about economics, not all of which will be organized into courses. He pictures a day when professors routinely make videos to explain their latest research findings to supplement their scholarly papers. “In less than five years most papers of every note will have a five-minute video,” Mr. Cowen predicts. “People can view it, rewind, rewatch, relisten. You can show it to classes.”
Here is more (listed as gated, but it wasn’t for me).
And here is good additional Washington Post coverage.
Project Blue Sky, from Pearson
Project Blue Sky allows instructors to search, select, and seamlessly integrate Open Educational Resources with Pearson learning materials. Using text, video, simulations, Power Point and more, instructors can create the digital course materials that are just right for their courses and their students. Pearson’s Project Blue Sky is powered by Gooru Learning, a search engine for learning materials.
A simple observation about education reform
The Prince George’s County school board has fewer college graduates serving current terms than any other school system in the Washington region, with only two of its eight members holding a bachelor’s degree.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank M.
MOOC cheating (model this)
From an email from Coursera:
Several students have contacted me about cases of cheating on the Final Exam. Frankly, why anyone who do this in a course that focuses on learning and offers no credentials, beats me. Students who cheat are really cheating themselves. If you are sure an answer is plagiarized from somewhere else (often easy to determine with a quick web search), you could simply award 1’s everywhere, which amounts to a score of 0. Whether you do that for one question or the whole exam is up to you. If there is any doubt that the student has broken the honor code, you have to give the student the benefit of that doubt. 0 on the whole exam is more significant than on one question. Though again, the stakes here are essentially zero; it’s mostly about self esteem, surely. For truly egregious cases, send me the details (your login id and the Student number (1, 2, or 3) and I can take it from there. Violation of the honor code is cause for expulsion from the class. Expulsion has occurred, in this class and others, I’m sad to say.
Meanwhile, if you want to know how evaluation training and peer grading looked from our side (the instruction team and the folks at Coursera who were making sure the ship stayed afloat), check out my latest post at MOOCtalk.org to see what was going on behind the scenes. Enjoy! 🙂
I thank AA for the pointer.
Measuring Baumol and Bowen Effects in Public Research Universities
That is a new paper by Robert E. Martin and R. Carter Hill:
We estimate three models of cost per student using data from Carnegie I and II public research universities. There are 841 usable observations covering the period from 1987 to 2008. We find that staffing ratios are individually and collectively significant in each model. Further, we find evidence that shared governance lowers cost and that the optimal staffing ratio is approximately three tenure track faculty members for every one full time administrator. Costs are higher if the ratio is higher or lower than three to one. As of 2008 the number of full time administrators is almost double the number of tenure track faculty. Using the differential method and the coefficients estimated in the three models, we deconstruct the real cost changes per student between 1987 and 2008 into Baumol and Bowen effects. This analysis reveals that for every $1 in Baumol cost effects there are over $2 in Bowen cost effects. Taken together, these results suggest two thirds of the real cost changes between 1987 and 2008 are due to weak shared governance and serious agency problems among administrators and boards.
For the pointer I thank Michael Tamada (who does not necessarily endorse the argument).
Markets in everything the culture that is Chicago
At Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s request, Walgreen Co. has agreed to provide $25 gift cards to parents who pick up their students’ report cards and participate in parent-teacher conferences during report card pickup days.
Here is more, courtesy of Peter Metrinko.
Good headlines
Does (constant #days) year-round schooling matter?
Some new research says no. Steven C. McMullen and Kathryn E. Rouse, from their piece “The Impact of Year-Round Schooling on Academic Achievement: Evidence from Mandatory School Calendar Conversions,” in The American Economic Journal, report:
In 2007, 22 Wake County, North Carolina traditional calendar schools were switched to year-round calendars, spreading the 180 instructional days evenly across the year. This paper presents a human capital model to illustrate the conditions under which these calendars might affect achievement. We then exploit the natural experiment to evaluate the impact of year-round schooling on student achievement using a multi-level fixed effects model. Results suggest that year-round schooling has essentially no impact on academic achievement of the average student. Moreover, when the data are broken out by race, we find no evidence that any racial subgroup benefits from year-round schooling.
There is an ungated version here.
Visualization data for world development
From Damian Clarke:
I am a PhD student in economics at the University of Oxford, and a fan of your blog. Much of my work focuses on the microeconomics of development (principally fertility and education), however I am also working on the use of open data in economic development – quite an exciting area. I write you with regards to this open data work. Recently I have written a module for Stata which allows anyone to automatically import any of the over 5000 indicators maintained by the World Bank, and produces both a geographic and time series representation of the data (I provide a png attachment of this graph here if you are interested in seeing it)…
Whilst this program may be useful for researchers, I think its prinicipal benefit is in pedagogy – perhaps even users of MRUniversity would be interested in visualising for example fertility, GDP, current account balances, etc in a simple command. The syntax really is very easy: “worldstat Africa, stat(GDP)”.
I provide at the end of this email a brief description, and more details are available on my site: https://sites.google.com/site/damiancclarke/computation#TOC-worldstat
…worldstat is a module which allows for the current state of world development to be visualised in a computationally simple way. worldstat presents both the geographic and temporal variation in a wide range of statistics which represent the state of national development. While worldstat includes a number of “in-built” statistics such as GDP, maternal mortality and years of schooling, it is extremely flexible, and can (thanks to the World Bank’s module wbopendata) easily incorporate over 5,000 other indicators housed in World Bank Open Databases.
…it is automatically available from Stata’s command line by typing: “ssc install worldstat”
The Solow Model
The Solow Model is a workhorse model of economic growth. Many subsequent papers in growth theory and in business cycle theory build on this model. A model of growth helps us to structure our thinking. Why is it, for example, that China is growing faster than the United States despite having much poorer institutions such as the rule of law? Surprisingly, even a simple version of the Solow model offers some useful predictions and ways to interpret aspects of the the growth data. At MRUniversity this week we have four videos on the Solow model. These videos are a bit more technical than many of our previous videos and we think they will be useful in many other classes such as macroeconomics, especially if you are using a truly excellent textbook. The videos will also be useful for anyone who wants to read more of the literature on growth theory or the empirics of growth (such as can be found, for example, in Barro and Sala-i-Martin’s Economic Growth or David Weil’s textbook Economic Growth). Even if you don’t want to study the theory in more depth, we think these videos will be useful for understanding development and how economists use theory and data to understand the sources of growth (and its absence).
Tuition by Major
A task force convened by Florida Governor Rick Scott has recommended changes in tuition subsidies according to job market demand:
Tuition would be lower for students pursuing degrees most needed for Florida’s job market, including ones in science, technology, engineering and math, collectively known as the STEM fields.
The committee is recommending no tuition increases for them in the next three years.
But to pay for that, students in fields such as psychology, political science, anthropology, and performing arts could pay more because they have fewer job prospects in the state.
“The purpose would not be to exterminate programs or keep students from pursuing them. There will always be a need for them,” said Dale Brill, who chairs the task force. “But you better really want to do it, because you may have to pay more.”
The task force has the right idea but the right way to target subsidies is not to the job market per se (let alone Florida’s job market), wages already reflect job market needs. Subsidies instead should be targeted to fields where education has the greatest positive spillovers, benefits that spill over wages and flow to the public at large. Overall, this likely means subsidizing the STEM fields more than anthropology which is why the taskforce has the right idea. If the task force wants to explain the idea, however, they should make it clear that the goal is to focus subsidies on those fields where education most benefits the taxpayer.
Publishing pays in economics
Here is a new paper by Suzanne O’Keefe and Ta-Chen Wang:
We study salaries of economics faculty at the University of California to determine how publications affect salary. We find that each publication in a top 10 journal has a positive and significant effect on annual base salary of 1.5%, or $2,053. Unlike previous research, our analysis specifies the impact of publications in specific journals. Publications in American Economic Review, Econometrica, and Review of Economics and Statistics have an independent positive effect on salary. Compensation is also affected by faculty rank, seniority, university of employment, and teaching awards. Base salary does not significantly differ by gender, however, gross salary is about 9% lower for women. After controlling for migration and faculty rank, seniority has a negative impact on salary.
Here is a sentence of interest:
Full-time tenure-track economics faculty members in the UC system have gross salaries ranging from about $70,000 to $378,000.
Against my expectations, UCLA economics professors are paid more than 13k more, on average, than UC Berkeley economics professors. The pay gap for women is larger in economics than in these universities as a whole.
The possibly gated article is here, and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
New Videos at MRU
Lots of new material at MRU this week. In earlier videos we look at the relatively direct effect of geography on development, e.g. factors such as malaria and access to the coast. In videos released today we look at how geography can influence growth indirectly through the choice of institutions. We also provide background material on measuring GDP and PPP, using the Rule of 70, and we prepare the way for next week’s more technical videos on the Solow model with a brief, non-technical review of the Solow model.
A Macro Homework Question: Answer in the Style of…
I just returned from a trip to South Korea. Today, to prepare for the next trip, I took my jacket to the dry cleaners. Turning the pockets out, I discovered a substantial number of South Korean won. The transaction costs of exchanging the won for dollars are now very high. I will keep the won as souvenirs.
Question: What are the consequences of my decision for the South Korean economy? Answer in the style of a well-known economist. What would Scott Sumner say? (almost too easy!) What about Keynes? Krugman? Cowen? Prescott?
