Now showing 1 - 10 of 39
  • Publication
    A good time to stay out? Strikes and the business cycle
    (Institute for the Study of Labor, 2008-07) ;
    In this paper, we compile a unique historical dataset that records strike activity in the British engineering industry from 1920 to 1970. These data have the advantage of containing a fairly homogenous set of companies and workers, covering a long period with varying labour market conditions, including information that enables the addition of union and company fixed effects, and providing geographical detail that allows a district-level analysis that controls for year and seasonal effects. We study the cyclicality of strike durations, strike incidence, and strike outcomes and distinguish between pay and non-pay strikes. Like the previous literature, we find evidence that strikes over pay have countercyclical durations. However, in the post-war period, the magnitude of this effect is much reduced when union and firm fixed effects are included. These findings suggest that it is important when studying strike durations to take account of differences in the composition of companies and unions that are involved in strikes at different points of the business cycle. We also find that strike outcomes tend to be more favourable to unions when the national unemployment rate is lower.
      505
  • Publication
    Rank Effects in Education: What do we know so far?
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2022-03) ;
    In recent years there has been a plethora of empirical papers by economists concerning the effects of academic rank in school or college on subsequent outcomes of students. We review this recent literature, describing the difficult identification and measurement issues, the assumptions and methodologies used in the literature, and the main findings. Accounting for ability or achievement and across a range of countries, ages, and types of educational institutions, students that are more highly ranked in their class or their grade have been found to have better long-term outcomes. The effect sizes are generally large when compared to magnitudes found for other factors and interventions. Rank effects can provide useful insight into other educational phenomena such as the extent to which students benefit from high ability peers and the presence of a gender gap in STEM. However, the state of knowledge has probably not reached the point where the empirical findings from this literature have practical implications for policy intervention to improve outcomes of students.
      302
  • Publication
    Gender Differences in Teacher Judgement of Comparative Advantage
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2023-11) ;
    Much research shows that students take account of their perceived comparative advantage in mathematics relative to verbal skills when choosing college majors and career tracks. There is also evidence for an important role for comparative advantage in explaining the gender gap in college STEM major choice. For these reasons, it is important to understand why student perceptions of comparative advantage may differ from true comparative advantage as determined by actual abilities. One plausible pathway is through teachers. We study gender differences in teacher evaluations of student comparative advantage relative to comparative advantage as measured by test scores. We show that findings are very sensitive to the methods used; commonly used methods are not equivalent and can give different results as they target different estimands. Using two recent UK cohort surveys, we show that these conceptual issues matter in practice when we evaluate whether teachers are likely to over-estimate female comparative advantage in English relative to mathematics. Our preferred estimates provide no evidence that teachers exaggerate the female advantage in English relative to mathematics and generally suggest the opposite. We conclude that differences in teacher judgement by gender do not provide another reason for the gender gap in STEM.
      13
  • Publication
    More Education, Less Volatility? The Effect of Education on Earnings Volatility over the Life Cycle
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2017-10) ;
    Much evidence suggests that having more education leads to higher earnings in the labor market. However, there is little evidence about whether having more education causes employees to experience lower earnings volatility or shelters them from the adverse effects of recessions. We use a large British administrative panel data set to study the impact of the 1972 increase in compulsory schooling on earnings volatility over the life cycle. Our estimates suggest that men exposed to the law change subsequently had lower earnings variability and less pro-cyclical earnings. However, there is little evidence that education affects earnings volatility of older men.
      423
  • Publication
    Fragility of the Marginal Treatment Effect
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2022-01-25)
    Many interesting and important economic questions relate to the effects of binary treatments such as starting a college degree or participating in a job training program. The causal effects of these treatments are likely to be heterogeneous and recent research has emphasized the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects, with a particular focus on Marginal Treatment Effects (MTEs). In this note, I describe why common methods of estimating MTEs of binary treatments can be very sensitive to omitted higher powers of covariates and demonstrate this using simple Monte Carlo simulations. I conclude by discussing approaches that may be useful for researchers to address this problem in practice.
      145
  • Publication
    Older and wiser? Birth order and IQ of young men
    (Institute for the Study of Labor, 2007-08) ; ;
    While recent research finds strong evidence that birth order affects children’s outcomes such as education and earnings, the evidence on the effects of birth order on IQ is decidedly mixed. This paper uses a large dataset on the population of Norway that allows us to precisely measure birth order effects on IQ using both cross-sectional and within-family methods. Importantly, irrespective of method, we find a strong and significant effect of birth order on IQ, and our results suggest that earlier born children have higher IQs. Our preferred estimates suggest differences between first-borns and second-borns of about one fifth of a standard deviation or approximately 3 IQ points. Despite these large average effects, birth order only explains about 3% of the within-family variance of IQ. When we control for birth endowments, the estimated birth order effects increase. Thus, our analysis suggests that birth order effects are not biologically determined. Also, there is no evidence that birth order effects occur because later-born children are more affected by family breakdown.
      758
  • Publication
    Recent developments in intergenerational mobility
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2010-04) ;
      701
  • Publication
    Earnings Returns to the British Education Expansion
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2011-06) ;
    We study the effects of the large expansion in British educational attainment that took place for cohorts born between 1970 and 1975. Using the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, we find that the expansion caused men to increase education by about a year on average and gain about 8% higher wages; women obtained a slightly greater increase in education and a similar increase in wages. Clearly, there was a sizeable gain from being born late enough to take advantage of the greater educational opportunities offered by the expansion. Treating the expansion as an exogenous increase in educational attainment, we obtain instrumental variables estimates of returns to schooling of about 6% for both men and women.
      437
  • Publication
    Real wage cyclicality of job stayers, within-company job movers, and between-company job movers
    (Institute for the Study of Labor, 2005-07) ;
    Using the British New Earnings Survey Panel Data (NESPD) for the period 1975 to 2001 we estimate the wage cyclicality of job stayers (those remaining within single jobs in a given company), within company job movers, and between company job movers. We also examine how the proportion of internal and external job moves varies over the business cycle. We find that the wages of internal movers are slightly more procyclical and wages of external movers considerably more procyclical than those of stayers. Notwithstanding, a decomposition shows that in Britain, wage cyclicality arises almost entirely from the procyclicality of wages for job stayers, with across- and within-firm mobility playing a lesser role. Thus, there is little evidence for rigid wage models that imply that employers use changes in job titles as a means of adjusting wages to the business cycle. We also show that the distinctions between private and public sectors and between workers covered and uncovered by collective agreements have important impacts on the wage estimates of both stayers and movers.
      418
  • Publication
    Optimally combining censored and uncensored datasets
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2008-09) ;
    We develop a simple semiparametric framework for combining censored and uncensored samples so that the resulting estimators are consistent, asymptotically normal, and use all information optimally. No nonparametric smoothing is required to implement our estimators. To illustrate our results in an empirical setting, we show how to estimate the effect of changes in compulsory schooling laws on age at first marriage, a variable that is censored for younger individuals. Results from a small simulation experiment suggest that the estimator proposed in this paper can work very well in finite samples.
      479