Now showing 1 - 10 of 27
  • Publication
    Do Dads matter? Or is it just their money that matters? Unpicking the effects of separation on educational outcomes
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2007-06-12) ;
    The widely held view that separation has adverse effects on children has been the basis of important policy interventions. While a small number of analyses have been concerned with selection into divorce, no studies have attempted to separate out the effects of one parent (mostly the father) leaving, from the effects of that parent's money leaving, on the outcomes for the child. This paper is concerned with early school leaving and educational attainment and their relationship to parental separation, and parental incomes. While we find that parental separation has strong effects on these outcomes this result seems not to be robust to adding additional control variables. In particular, we find that when we include income our results then indicate that father’s departure appears to be unimportant for early school leaving and academic achievement, while income is significant. This suggests that income may have been an important unobservable, that is correlated with separation and the outcome variables, in earlier research. Indeed, this finding also seems to be true in our instrumental variables analysis - although the effect of income is slightly weakened.
      494
  • Publication
    Who really wants to be a millionaire? Estimates of risk aversion from gameshow data
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2006-05-10) ; ;
    This paper analyses the behaviour of TV gameshow contestants to estimate risk aversion. We are able to show that the gameshow participants are broadly representative of the population as a whole. The gameshow has a number of features that makes it well suited for our analysis: the format is extremely straightforward, it involves no strategic decisionmaking, we have a large number of observations, and the prizes are cash and paid immediately, and cover a large range – from £100 up to £1 million. Even though the CRRA model is extremely restrictive we find that a coefficient or relative risk aversion which is close to unity fits the data across a wide range of wealth remarkably well
      439
  • Publication
    Dispersion in the economic return to schooling
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2001-08) ; ;
    In this paper we extend the standard human capital earnings function to include dispersion in the rate of return to schooling by treating the return as a random coefficient. One motivation is that if the increase in supply of skilled workers has been brought about by dipping further into the ability distribution. Alternatively if the expansion in post-compulsory education comes about through relaxed credit constraints then we might expect this to increase average ability in the pool of educated workers. Either event might lead to a rise in the variance in returns. Based on a sample of data from the United Kingdom our estimates suggest that neither the mean nor the dispersion in returns to schooling has altered significantly over time. This is consistent with educational expansion not leading to a disproportionate inflow of low ability individuals into the system.
      520
  • Publication
    The labor supply effect of in-kind transfers
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2008-09-12) ;
    We estimate a model of labor supply and participation in multiple programs for UK lone mothers which exploits a reform of in-work transfers. Cash entitlements increased but eligibility to in-kind child nutrition programs was lost. We find that in-work cash and inwork in-kind transfers both have large positive labor supply effects. There is, however, a utility loss from program participation which is estimated to be larger for cash than for child nutrition. This implies that the partial cash out of the in-kind benefits reduced labor supply.
      126
  • Publication
    The impact of parental income and education on child health : further evidence for England
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2007-02-01) ; ;
    This paper investigates the robustness of recent findings on the effect of parental education and income on child health. We are particularly concerned about spurious correlation arising from the potential endogeneity of parental income and education. Using an instrumental variables approach, our results suggest that the parental income and education effects are generally larger than are suggested by the correlations observed in the data. Moreover, we find strong support for the causal effect of income being large for the poor, but small at the average level of income.
      972
  • Publication
    Labour supply, health and caring : evidence from the UK
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 1999-11) ;
    This paper investigates the impact of own-health,and that of others, on individual labour supply. We estimate a model of hours of caring and hours of work using a large micro dataset of UK households. We find that own ill health has a negative effect on wages for men but not women; being a carer has a negative effect on wages for women but not men; and that unobservables associated with caring are positively correlated with wages for men but not for women. We also find that own ill health has a strong negative effect on the labour supply of both men and women and a negative effect on their supply of caring. We also find that hours caring are responsive to wages for women.
      430
  • Publication
    The college wage premium, overeducation, and the expansion of higher education in the UK
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2007-06-12) ;
    This paper provides findings from the UK Labour Force Surveys from 1993 to 2003 on the financial private returns to a degree – the "college premium". The data covers a decade when the university participation rate doubled – yet we find no significant1 evidence that the mean return to a degree dropped in response to this large increase in the flow of graduates. However, we do find quite large falls in returns when we compare the cohorts that went to university before and after the recent rapid expansion of HE. The evidence is consistent with the notion that new graduates are a close substitute for recent graduates but poor substitutes for older graduates. There appears to have been a very recent increase in the number of graduates getting "non-graduate" jobs but, conditional on getting a graduate job the returns seem stable. Our results are consistent across almost all degree subjects – the exception being maths and engineering where we find that, especially for women, there is a large increase in the proportion with maths and engineering degrees getting graduate jobs and that, conditional on this, the return is rising.
      587
  • Publication
    Does education raise productivity, or just reflect it?
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2003-01) ; ; ;
    It is clear that education has an important effect on wages paid in the labour market However it not clear whether this is due to the role that education plays in raising the productivity of workers (the human capital explanation) or whether education simply reflects the ability of the worker (through a signalling role). In this paper we describe and implement, using a variety of UK datasets, a number of tests from the existing literature for discriminating between the two explanations. We find little support for signalling ideas in these tests. However, we have severe reservations about these results because our doubts about the power of these tests and the appropriateness of the data. We propose an alternative test, based on the response of some individuals to a change in education incentives offered to other individuals caused by the changes in the minimum school leaving age in the seventies. Using this idea we find that data in the UK appears to strongly support the human capital explanation.
      2088
  • Publication
    There’s no such thing as a free lunch : altruistic parents and the response of household food expenditures to nutrition program reforms
    (University College Dublin. Geary Institute, 2007-06-12) ;
    Many countries provide extensive in-kind public transfers for specific needs of particular client groups such as the elderly, the disabled, and children. However, this may crowd out private expenditures on the goods in question and, to some extent, undermine the case for not simply giving cash. If the target group belongs to a larger household the mechanism behind this crowding out could be either altruism or agency. This paper is concerned with three nutrition programmes for children in UK households: free lunch at school for children from poor households; free milk to poor households with pre-school children; and free milk at day-care for pre-school children in attendance regardless of parental income. We exploit a reform that removed eligibility to the first two programs from working poor households. We find significant crowding-out of private food expenditures – a free school lunch reduces food expenditure by around 15% of the purchase price of the lunch, and a free pint of milk reduces milk expenditure by about 80% of the market price. We conclude that this is due to altruism rather than agency problems because milk expenditure crowd-out is similar across milk programs that have different delivery mechanisms.
      278