This paper discusses the importance of incorporating personal assistance into interventions aimed at improving long-term education and labor market success. While existing research demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of low-touch behavioral nudges, this paper argues that the dynamic nature of human capital accumulation requires sustained habits over time. To foster better habits, social connections are critical for encouraging enduring effort and intrinsic motivation. The paper links the role of personal assistance to economic theories of human capital investment and decision-making, and showcases examples from various stages of skill accumulation, including early childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, in which interventions that incorporate personal assistance substantially out-perform less intensive nudges. We underscore the importance of interactive support, guidance, and motivation in facilitating significant progress and explore the challenges associated with implementing cost-effective policies to provide such assistance.

This paper introduces a new matching mechanism that is a hybrid of the two most common mechanisms in school choice, the Boston Mechanism (BM) and the Deferred Acceptance algorithm (DA). BM is the most commonly used mechanism in the field, but it is neither strategyproof nor fair. DA is the mechanism that is typically favored by economists, but it is not Pareto efficient. The new mechanism, the Secure Boston Mechanism (sBM), is an intuitive modification of BM that secures any school a student was initially guaranteed but otherwise prioritizes a student at a school based upon how she ranks it. Relative to BM, theoretical results suggest that sBM is an improvement in terms of strategyproofness and fairness. We present experimental evidence using a novel experimental design that confirms that sBM significantly increases truth-telling and fairness. Relative to DA, theoretical results suggest that sBM can be a Pareto improvement in equilibrium but the efficiency comparison of sBM and DA is theoretically ambiguous. We present simulation evidence that suggests that sBM often does Pareto dominate DA when DA is inefficient, while sBM and DA very often overlap when DA is efficient. Overall, our results strongly support the use of sBM over BM and suggest that sBM should be considered as a viable alternative to DA.

We exploit testing data to gain better understanding on framing effects on decision-making and performance under risk. In a randomized field experiment, we modified the framing of scoring rules for penalized multiple-choice tests. In penalized multiple-choice tests, right answers are typically framed as gains while wrong answers are framed as losses (Mixed-framing). In the Loss-framing proposed, both non-responses and wrong answers are presented in a loss domain. According to our theoretical model, we expect the change in the framing to decrease students’ non-response and to increase students’ performance. Under the Loss-framing, students’ non-response reduces by a 18%-20%. However, it fails to increase students’ scores. Indeed, our results support the possibility of impaired performance in the Loss-framing.

We experimentally investigate in the laboratory prominent mechanisms that are employed in school choice programs to assign students to public schools and study how individual behavior is influenced by preference intensities and risk aversion. Our main results show that (a) the Gale–Shapley mechanism is more robust to changes in cardinal preferences than the Boston mechanism independently of whether individuals can submit a complete or only a restricted ranking of the schools and (b) subjects with a higher degree of risk aversion are more likely to play “safer” strategies under the Gale–Shapley but not under the Boston mechanism. Both results have important implications for enrollment planning and the possible protection risk averse agents seek.

We study the incidence of Social Security taxes on teacher wages and employment. On average, we estimate teachers with Social Security coverage take home 9.6 percent less in wages than observationally similar teachers in similar districts without Social Security coverage. This accounts for about three-fourths of the 12.4-percent total Social Security tax. Moreover, our analysis suggests this is likely a lower-bound estimate of the true incidence of Social Security taxes – under reasonable assumptions, we cannot rule out full (100%) tax incidence on teacher wages. We find no evidence of tax incidence on teacher staffing levels.

India has not only maintained its top position among countries with the largest number of underweight adults but has also jumped to a higher position among countries with largest increase in the proportion of overweight people in the last three decades. More studies focus on double burden of malnutrition among women than on men. This study uses the quantile regression model to analyse the covariates associated with low and high body mass index (BMI) primarily among men aged 20–54 years during 2015–2016 in India. Occupations that involve more manual work help in maintaining a normal BMI along with better education, dietary diversity, and less sedentary lifestyle. A gendered comparison of men and their spouses highlights the differences in the association of covariates with BMI for men and women. The results from this study will provide insights for behavioural change at an individual level and inputs for public health intervention for addressing ill health concerns arising from underweight, overweight, or obesity.

The ‘knowledge economy’ is said to depend increasingly on capacities for innovation, knowledge-generation and complex problem-solving – capacities attributed to university graduates with research degrees. To what extent, however, is the labour market absorbing and fully utilising these capabilities? Drawing on data from a recent cohort of PhD graduates, we examine the correlates and consequences of qualification and skills mismatch. We show that job characteristics such as economic sector and main work activity play a fundamental and direct role in explaining the phenomenon of mismatch, experienced as overeducation and overskilling. Academic attributes operate mostly indirectly in explaining this mismatch, since their effect loses importance once we control for job-related characteristics. We detected a significant earnings penalty for those who are both overeducated and overskilled. Being mismatched reduces satisfaction with the job as a whole and with non-monetary aspects of the job, especially for those whose skills are underutilised. Overall, the problem of mismatch among PhD graduates is closely related to the demand-side constraints of the labour market. Increasing the number of adequate jobs and broadening the job skills that PhD students acquire during training should be explored as possible responses.

We assess the effects of the Crianza Positiva text and audio e-messaging program on caregiver–child language interaction patterns. The program is a six-month-long intervention for families with children aged 0–2 aimed at strengthening parental competences. Its design exploits behavioral tools such as reminders, suggestions of action, and messages of encouragement to reinforce and sustain positive parenting practices. Families in 24 early childhood centers in Uruguay that completed an eight-week workshop were randomized into receiving or not receiving mobile messages. After the program, we videotaped 10-minute sessions of free play between the caregiver and the child, and decoded language patterns using automated techniques. The intervention was successful at improving the quality of parental vocalizations, as measured by the parent's pitch range. We also found suggestive evidence of increases in the duration of adult vocalizations. The results are consistent with more frequent parental self-reported involvement in reading, telling stories, and describing things to the child. Regarding the child, we find a nonrobust decrease in the duration of vocalizations, which we attribute to a crowding-out effect by the caregiver in the context of a fixed 10-minute suggested activity and a more proactive parental role.

This paper contributes to the migration literature studying the time devoted to educational activities. It uses US time-diary surveys to study the allocation of time to informal as well as formal learning and educational activities by immigrants and natives. We develop a simple theoretical framework, which highlights the different constraints/opportunity costs faced by immigrants as compared with natives. Consistently with our theoretical model, the estimates show that immigrants are more likely to engage in informal and formal education and conditional on participation, they allocate more time to these activities. We find that the main drivers are economic incentives, mostly in the early phase of working life, and that the differences between natives and immigrants persist across generations. We also find that differences between immigrants and natives are generally larger in informal education than in formal education. The investment in informal and formal learning and educational activities is likely to boost immigrants' human and social capital and contribute to their socio-economic integration.

This study explores how the distinctive Korean age reckoning, the Confucian age culture, and the school-entry-cutoff date affect the decisions of parents on both birth and school-entry timing for their children in Korea. There is a traditional method of age calculation in Korea that all people get one year older on January 1. Korea also has a distinctive age culture influenced by Confucianism. I find a substantial amount of birth and school-entry timing selections around the Korean age-cutoff date, January 1. The estimation results show that children born in January and February delayed school entry by 18.2–21.2 percentage points more than those born in November and December and 24% of births moved from one week before January 1 to one week after when the school-entry cutoff was March 1. After the school-entry cutoff has changed to January 1, children barely delay school enrollment, while more births are moved from December to January: 42% of births are shifted within the 7-day window. These behaviors are made by two motives: (1) parents want their children to have the same Korean age with their classmates because of the Confucian age culture; (2) they also want their children to be relatively older to have academic advantages.

Policy discourse surrounding Britain’s unusually well-resourced private schools surrounds their charitable status and their relationship with low social mobility, but informative evidence is scarce. We present estimates of the extent to which private and external benefits at age 25 are associated with attendance at private school in England in the 21st century. We find a weekly wage premium of 17 percent, and a 12 percentage point lower chance of downward social mobility. By contrast, private schooling is not significantly associated with participation in local voluntary groups, unpaid voluntary work, or charitable giving and fundraising; this finding casts doubt on claims that private schools deliver ‘public benefit’ in this way.

Economists theorize that the inverse relationship between income and family size reflects a trade-off between child quality and quantity. Testing this hypothesis requires addressing the simultaneity of the quality and quantity decisions. The unanticipated birth of twins and sex composition of the first two children have been used as the exogenous variation in family size with mixed results. We exploit the One-Child Policy (OCP) in China, which exogenously reduced fertility, and examine how the OCP affected the education of Chinese migrants to the USA. Using the American Community Survey and a difference-in-differences strategy, we find higher levels of education for Chinese migrants born after the OCP compared with their counterparts from other East Asian countries. This finding provides additional support for the existence of a quality-quantity trade-off.

Based on a sample of university students, we provide evidence that a small-scale training intervention has both a statistically and economically significant effect on subjective and objective assessments of financial knowledge. We also show that the intervention increases self-assessed more than actual financial knowledge. The intervention consists of measuring financial literacy before and after a small on-line course and is administered through an on-line platform.

A major part of the 2010–15 UK government's education reforms in England was a focus on the curriculum that pupils study from ages 14–16. Most high profile was the introduction of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) performance measure for schools, incentivising study of “subjects the Russell Group identifies as key for university study” (Gibb, 2011). However, there does not appear to be good quantitative evidence about the importance of studying such a set of subjects, per se. This paper sets out to analyse this question, considering whether otherwise similar young people who study specific sets of subjects (full set for EBacc-eligibility, two or more sciences, foreign languages, applied subjects) to age 16 have different probabilities of entering university, and specifically a high-status university. It compares results from regression modelling and propensity score matching, taking advantage of rich survey data from a recent cohort of young people in England. We find that conditional differences in university entry attributable to subject choice are, at most, small.

We evaluate how financial education provided to college students influenced their financial knowledge and planning in a quasi-experimental setting where we control for student motivation to enroll in the course. Using a difference-in-difference strategy, we show that financial education led to an increase in financial knowledge and planning. Specifically, we find that financial education improved students’ financial knowledge score by 11%, and financial planning score by 16%. No statistically significant effects are detected for student levels of financial prudence, discipline, or outcomes related to credit card usage.

Most students do not follow the ‘academic track’ (i.e. A-levels) after leaving school and only about a third of students go to university before the age of 20. Yet progression routes for the majority that do not take this path but opt for vocational post-compulsory education are not as well-known, which partly has to do with the complexity of the vocational education system and the difficulty of deciphering available data. If we are to tackle long-standing problems of low social mobility and a long tail of underachievers, it is essential that post-16 vocational options come under proper scrutiny. This paper is a step in that direction.

We use linked administrative data to track decisions made by all students in England who left compulsory education after having undertaken the national examination – the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) – at age 16 in the year 2009/10. We track them up to the age of 21, as they progress through the education system and (for some) into the labour market. We categorise the many different types of post-16 qualifications into several broad categories and we look at the probability of achieving various educational and early labour market outcomes, conditional on the path chosen at age 17. We also take into account the influence of demographics, prior attainment and the secondary school attended. Our findings illustrate the strong inequality apparently generated by routes chosen at age 17, even whilst controlling for prior attainment and schooling up to that point

This paper provides a closed-form solution for the health capital model of health demand. The results are exploited in order to prove analytically the comparative dynamics of the model. Results are derived for the so-called pure investment model, the pure consumption model and a combination of both types of models. Given the plausible assumptions that (i) health declines with age and that (ii) the health capital stock at death is lower than the health capital stock needed for eternal life, it is shown that the optimal solution implies eternal life.

Noncognitive factors such as discipline (and its mirror, punishment in the form of discipline referrals) can affect school and labor market outcomes, human capital development, and thus the economic well–being of communities. It is well–known throughout the United States, but particularly in rural areas of the south that black males drop out of school more frequently than white males, face higher levels of unemployment, and are incarcerated at a disproportionate rate compared with their white cohorts. Also students in low–income homes were three times more likely to drop out than those from average–income homes and nine times more likely than students from high–income homes. This paper tests the hypothesis that the odds of a student being referred for disciplinary action in the middle school setting (8th grade) increases if the student is male, black, in special education classes, or is poor. We conclude that is indeed the case, with the exception of students assigned to special education classes. In particular, we find that low income students are up to eight times more likely to be sent for disciplinary referrals than others. We next tested the hypothesis that the gender and race of the teachers who refer students for disciplinary action have a significant impact on the first hypothesis. Here the evidence that there is a “color to discipline“ in this school district is weak.

Cet article s'intéresse aux effets liés à l'introduction d'un système de modulation des cotisations patronales à l'assurance chômage (ou experience rating) sur le niveau et la structure du chômage par qualification. Nous construisons pour cela un modèle d'appariement dans lequel l'évolution de la demande de travail, les décisions de création et destruction d'emplois, ainsi que l'évolution des taxes destinées à financer l'assurance chômage sont endogènes. Dans ce cadre, la protection de l'emploi a des effets qui peuvent être différenciés selon le niveau de qualification considéré. L'introduction d'un système de modulation des cotisations employeur à l'assurance chômage pourrait améliorer le fonctionnement du marché du travail; l'importance des éventuels effets indésirables liés à ce système dépend de la capacité à substituer la taxe d'expérience rating aux dispositifs de protection de l'emploi déjà en place. La hausse des incitations à se qualifier réduit en partie l'importance de ce problème.

This paper examines the influences of parental social status, childhood cognitive ability, school motivation and education on social status attainment in early adulthood. Using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), a pathway model of transgenerational status attainment is conceptualised, taking into account the context as well as the timing of individual status transitions. The subjects were 3104 men and 3229 women who participated in the 1958 National Child Development Study and 3049 men and 2692 women from the 1970 British Cohort Study, following their lives from childhood to their mid-thirties. The findings suggest that in both cohorts the number of years spent in full-time education is by far the most important determinant of status attainment among men and women and that there are persistent social inequalities in status attainment. The findings furthermore confirm the hypothesis that social background and cognitive ability are partially mediated through school motivation and education, opening up leverage for possible interventions.