What parents want Burgess, Simon M; Greaves, Ellen; Vignoles, Anna ...
The Economic journal (London),
September 2015, Letnik:
125, Številka:
587
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We investigate parents' preferences for school attributes in a unique data set of survey, administrative, census and spatial data. Using a conditional logit, incorporating characteristics of ...households, schools and home–school distance, we show that most families have strong preferences for schools' academic performance. Parents also value schools' socio-economic composition and distance, which may limit the potential of school choice to improve academic standards. Most of the variation in preferences for school quality across socio-economic groups arises from differences in the quality of accessible schools rather than differences in parents' preferences, although more advantaged parents have stronger preferences for academic performance.
Research examining the educational attainment of low-income students has often focused on financial factors such as credit constraints. We use unique longitudinal data to provide direct evidence ...about a prominent alternative explanation—that departures from school arise as students learn about their academic ability or grade performance. Examining college dropout, we find that this explanation plays a very prominent role; our simulations indicate that dropout between the first and second years would be reduced by 40% if no learning occurred about grade performance/academic ability. The article also contributes directly to the understanding of gender differences in educational attainment.
This paper proposes a model of cab drivers' labor supply, building on Henry S. Farber's (2005, 2008) empirical analyses and Botond Köszegi and Matthew Rabin's (2006; henceforth "KR") theory of ...reference-dependent preferences. Following KR, our model has targets for hours as well as income, determined by proxied rational expectations. Our model, estimated with Farber's data, reconciles his finding that stopping probabilities are significantly related to hours but not income with Colin Camerer et al.'s (1997) negative "wage" elasticity of hours; and avoids Farber's criticism that estimates of drivers' income targets are too unstable to yield a useful model of labor supply.
We examine the competition between a group of Internet retailers who operate in an environment where a price search engine plays a dominant role. We show that for some products in this environment, ...the easy price search makes demand tremendously pricesensitive. Retailers, though, engage in obfuscation—practices that frustrate consumer search or make it less damaging to firms— resulting in much less price sensitivity on some other products. We discuss several models of obfuscation and examine its effects on demand and markups empirically.
Abstract
Disparities along racial and ethnic lines persist across domains. Distinguishing among the possible sources of such disparities matters. This article introduces an absolute test for ...identifying prejudice in the presence of statistical discrimination. In the context of police officers deciding whether to conduct vehicle searches, the key intuition of the test is that each officer’s search decisions and search outcomes generate a point on a concave “return possibility frontier,” (RPF) whose slope equals the officer’s search cost, or personal standard of evidence for conducting a search. Variation along a RPF provides information about search costs, and a discrepancy in these costs across drivers of different races constitutes prejudice. The model and test generalize and unify the existing literature, and the test can be partially extended to the setting where officers vary in the quality of their information, or discernment. Higher discernment generates an expansion of the frontier, and a version of the test remains valid for more discerning officers. Empirically, the test finds suggestive evidence of prejudice against Hispanic drivers and of varying discernment among officers of different races and ethnicities. These results are robust to (and not well explained by) officer experience. (JEL C26, K42, J15)
Using a longitudinal household panel dataset in the UK, where a significant proportion of the interviews are conducted in September each year, we are able to show that the attacks of September 11 ...resulted in lower levels of subjective well-being for those interviewed after that date in 2001 compared with those interviewed before it. This quasi-experiment provides one of the first examples of the impact of a terrorist attack in one country on well-being in another country.
This paper empirically examines whether certain corporate governance mechanisms are related to the probability of a company restating its earnings. We examine a sample of 159 U.S. public companies ...that restated earnings and an industry‐size matched sample of control firms. We have assembled a novel, hand‐collected data set that measures the corporate governance characteristics of these 318 firms. We find that several key governance characteristics are unrelated to the probability of a company restating earnings. These include the independence of boards and audit committees and the provision of nonaudit services by outside auditors. We find that the probability of restatement is lower in companies whose boards or audit committees have an independent director with financial expertise; it is higher in companies in which the chief executive officer belongs to the founding family. These relations are statistically significant, large in magnitude, and robust to alternative specifications. Our findings are consistent with the idea that independent directors with financial expertise are valuable in providing oversight of a firm’s financial reporting practices.
How a cost shock is passed through to final consumer prices may relate to nominal price stickiness and rigidities, the existence of nonadjustable cost components, strategic markup adjustments, or ...other contract terms along the supply distribution chain. This paper presents a simple framework to assess the potential role of nonlinear pricing contracts and vertical restraints, such as resale price maintenance or wholesale price discrimination in the supply chain, in explaining the degree of pass-through from upstream cost shocks in the ground coffee category to downstream retail prices. We find that resale price maintenance increases pass-through rate.
Whom do high-growth firms hire? Coad, Alex; Daunfeldt, Sven-Olov; Johansson, Dan ...
Industrial and corporate change,
02/2014, Letnik:
23, Številka:
1
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We study employment and new hires among high-growth firms (HGFs) in the Swedish knowledge-intensive sectors 1999-2002. Using matched employer-employee data, we find that HGFs are more likely to ...employ young people, poorly educated workers, immigrants, and individuals who experienced longer unemployment periods. However, these patterns seem contingent on the stage of the firm's evolution. HGFs that have already realized some rapid growth are more likely to hire individuals from other firms, even though immigrants are still overrepresented among new hires. In the case of both HGF employees and HGF new hires, employment opportunities in HGFs are provided by young and small firms. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
We study the prices that individual banks pay for liquidity (captured by borrowing rates in repos with the central bank and benchmarked by the overnight index swap) as a function of market conditions ...and bank characteristics. These prices depend in particular on the distribution of liquidity across banks, which is calculated over time using individual bank-level data on reserve requirements and actual holdings. Banks pay more for liquidity when positions are more imbalanced across banks, consistent with the existence of short squeezing. We also show that small banks pay more for liquidity and are more vulnerable to squeezes. Healthier banks pay less but, contrary to what one might expect, banks in formal liquidity networks do not. State guarantees reduce the price of liquidity but do not protect against squeezes.
► We study the prices individual banks pay for liquidity. ► Prices are captured by repo rates and benchmarked by the overnight index swap. ► These prices are higher when liquidity is distributed more unevenly across banks. ► Larger and healthier banks pay less, but banks in formal liquidity networks do not. ► State guarantees reduce the price of liquidity but do not protect against squeezes.
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