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This paper is a preliminary look at the benefits to states in the US of subsidizing college education. The benefits studies are the external benefits of college education on the earnings of both college graduates and those who have not graduated from college. In completing a college education individuals earn more. In addition, if there are positive external benefits others will also earn more because the average level of college graduates in the state has risen. This study confirms the existence of these positive externalities for the US in 2000 in estimates using the Current Population Survey. Furthermore, these external benefits are large enough that if confirmed in more complete studies would suggest that states invest too little in college education.

AbstractMigration is often viewed as an investment decision. Temporary migrants can be expected to invest less in accumulating human capital specific to the host country. Instead, they work more hours in order to accumulate savings and invest in financial capital that can be transferred back to their country of origin upon return. In this paper, using German panel data, we explore how temporary migrants differ from permanent migrants in their labor supply decisions and behavior. After correcting for endogeneity bias, male temporary migrants are found to work more hours than permanent ones. The effect for females is statistically insignificant.Jel codesJ22, J61, F22

This article adopts the nonradial Russell measure in the context of data envelopment analysis to measure the relative efficiency of public education in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a geographically remote but homogenous region. The empirical analysis focuses on the effect of community characteristics on the schools efficiency by using school district–level data. Several different forms of model specifications in the stage of data envelopment analysis are executed to check the robustness of the findings by adopting extreme‐bound analysis and thick modeling approach. Interestingly, despite the homogeneity of the Upper Peninsula, wide differences in the efficiency of education are found. These differences are robust as to model specification, suggesting that efficiency studies might be a useful guide for policy makers. Community factors such as income and educational levels, obtained from the census data by school district, are introduced in the second stage because they will influence the efficiency of the schools and the technology by which schools help students learn. Median family income is the most important explanatory variable, whereas the median value of housing is insignificant. In addition, private school enrollments are unrelated to the efficiency of public education, contrary to what many advocates of private schools have contended. These findings help understand education efficiency, having policy implications for education‐oriented states such as Michigan. (JEL I2, N3, H52)

In this paper, two approaches (labor efficiency and separate factors approach) and two production functions ( a ray-homothetic function and the Cobb-Douglas function), are used to estimate the productivity of female versus male farm laborers in the traditional agricultural economy of Nepal. The hypothesis that female laborers would be less productive than males due to the disparities in physical and human capital, originating from economic and socio-cultural discrimination, is tested. The study results confirm this expectation. However, the study suggests that once differences in irrigation and type of seeds used by male and female farmers are included in the model, the magnitude of the difference is reduced and the estimated coefficient becomes insignificant. The ray-homothetic function does best in yielding realistic results suggesting that congestion is an important feature of Nepalese agriculture supporting the notion that there may be disguised unemployment in the sense that too much labor is used in agriculture and that empirical analysis should accommodate this possibility when considering functional form.