Suchergebnisse

Diese Arbeit untersucht theoretisch und empirisch, wie Institutionen in Medien- und Bildungsmärkten Verhaltensanreize für Wirtschaftssubjekte gestalten, und wie sich diese Anreize auf politische Entscheidungen auswirken. Es wird gezeigt, dass an niederländischen Schulen ein hoher Anteil von Schülern aus sozial benachteiligten Schichten mit niedrigeren Notenstandards einhergeht und dass Schulwettbewerb auf lokalen Bildungsmärkten positive Effekte auf die schulischen Leistungen zeitigt. Die Analyse von Medienmärkten liefert zunächst mit Hilfe von Daten zur räumlichen Verbreitung US-amerikanischer Fernsehsender Belege dafür, dass Politiker Anreizen unterliegen, öffentliche Gelder vermehrt an informierte Wähler zu vergeben. Danach wird dargelegt, dass auf ähnliche Weise in Norwegen einem steigenden Zeitungsleseranteil in der Wählerschaft ein Effizienz steigernder Effekt auf die kommunale Mittelverwendung innewohnt und damit zu bürgernäheren politischen Prozessen führt. ; At the core of this book are theoretical and empirical analyses of how local policies are shaped by the incentives that various institutions in education and media markets create for economic agents. Evidence is provided that Dutch schools harboring large shares of disadvantaged students apply lower grading standards and that there is a positive link between intensity of competition among schools in local education markets and academic achievement. When it comes to media markets, data on the location of television stations in the United States is employed in showing that there are incentives for politicians to gear public spending towards informed voters. In a similar vein, increasing levels of newspaper readership are shown to exhibit an efficiency enhancing effect on Norwegian local governments and thus elicit better politics.

Education yields substantial non-monetary benefits, but the size of these gains is still debated. Previous studies, for example, report contradictory effects of education and compulsory schooling on mortality - ranging from zero to large mortality reductions. Using data from 19 compulsory schooling reforms implemented in Europe during the twentieth century, we quantify the mean mortality effect and explore its dispersion across gender, time and countries. We find that men benefit from compulsory education both in the shorter and longer run. In contrast, compulsory schooling reforms have little or no effect on mortality for women.

Existing growth research provides little explanation for the very large differences in long-run growth performance across OECD countries. We show that cognitive skills can account for growth differences within the OECD, whereas a range of economic institutions and quantitative measures of tertiary education cannot. Under the growth model estimates and plausible projection parameters, school improvements falling within currently observed performance levels yield very large gains. The present value of OECD aggregate gains through 2090 could be as much as $275 trillion, or 13.8 percent of the discounted value of future GDP. Extensive sensitivity analyses indicate that, while differences between model frameworks and alternative parameter choices make a difference, the economic impact of improved educational outcomes remains enormous. Interestingly, the quantitative difference between an endogenous and neoclassical model framework - with improved skills affecting the long-run growth rate versus just the steady-state income level - matters less than academic discussions suggest. We close by discussing evidence on which education policy reforms may be able to bring about the simulated improvements in educational outcomes.

Several studies have shown that body height is positively associated with educational attainment. In this paper, we investigate the mechanisms behind this relationship using data on German pre-teen students. We show that (i) taller children are more likely to enroll in 'Gymnasium', the most academic secondary school track, and that (ii) primary school teachers give better recommendations to taller students. This holds even when controlling for academic achievement and parental background. In addition, we present some evidence that height and social skills are positively associated already at age 2-3. Our results imply that controlling for social skills would significantly reduce estimates of the height-school premium. With respect to education policy, our findings suggest that early school tracking might increase disadvantages for students with low social skills.

We review the empirical literature that estimates the causal effect of parent's schooling on child's schooling, and conclude that estimates differ across studies. We then consider three explanations for why this is: (a) idiosyncratic differences in data sets; (b) differences in remaining biases between different identification strategies; and (c) differences across identification strategies in their ability to make out-of-sample predictions. We conclude that discrepancies in past studies can be explained by violations of identifying assumptions. Our reading of past evidence, together with an application to Swedish register data, suggests that intergenerational schooling associations are largely driven by selection. Parental schooling constitutes a large part of the parental nurture effect, but as a whole does not play a large role.

Assuming a two-period model with endogenous choices of labour, education, and saving, efficient education policy is characterized for a Ramsey-like scenario in which the government is constrained to use linear instruments. It is shown that education should be effectively subsidized if, and only if, the elasticity of the earnings function is increasing in education. The strength of second-best subsidization increases in the elasticity of the elasticity of the earnings function. This second-order elasticity rule extends the well-known Ramsey-Boiteux Inverse Elasticity Rule.

Das vorliegende Buch versammelt 13 Beiträge von 23 Autoren aus verschiedenen Ländern und zu verschiedenen Themen der Bildungsökonomie. Die Arbeitspapiere wurden in erster Linie auf der "International Conference on Economics of Education" an der Universität Tartu (Estland) im August 2005 vorgestellt und diskutiert. Die Themenschwerpunkte der Konferenz waren (1) Bildung und Arbeitsmarkt, (2) Bildungsmarkt und öffentliche Politik, (3) Finanzmanagement im Bildungssystem, (4) Leistungsfähigkeit und Vergütung in Bildungsinstitutionen. - Neben den Problemen und Fragestellungen, die die Schwellenländer betreffen, dokumentiert das Buch auch Erfahrungen, die in den entwickelten europäischen Ländern gesammelt worden sind, und zieht Vergleiche zwischen Westeuropa und den mittel-und osteuropäischen Ländern. Die Beiträge, die in der Einleitung kurz vorgestellt werden, decken ein breites Spektrum von Themen ab, wie z. B. Human- und Sozialkapital, Kompetenzen und Fähigkeiten, Bildungs- und Forschungseinrichtungen, Bildungsangebote und Management sowie Rechnungswesen und Vergütungssysteme in Schulen und Universitäten. (ICI).