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January 11, 2016
Brandeis University
Heller Graduate School
Sustainable International Development (SID) Program
Economics of education (HS 221f)
Syllabus (module I) – Spring 2016
Instructor: Ricardo Godoy
Office: Heller 153
Tel. 6-2784; E-mail:
Time and place: Thursdays 9am-11:50am, (except Feb 18 [holiday]). G-55
Broad goals. The course has to two broad goals, one substantive and one practical:
· Substantive:
o Specific goal #1: The benefits of schooling. Abundant international evidence suggests that human capital or schooling is a strong predictor of the economic growth of nations and of indicators of individual well-being, such as monetary income. If so, then at least two questions follow, which we try to address as part of the first specific goal of the course:
§ What forms of human capital are most likely to improve individual well-being? In particular, we want to identify and compare the relative contribution of academic skills (e.g., math, literacy), cognitive skills, and behaviors acquired in school (e.g., cooperation) to individual well-being.
§ What are the financial and the non-pecuniary benefits of these different forms of human capital?
o Specific goal #2: The determinants of school achievement. If various forms of human capital are associated with improved indicators of individual well-being, then several questions follow:
§ What drives the accumulation of different forms of human capital?
§ What is the economic rationale for girl-boy disparities in human capital investments within the household?
§ Under what conditions do girl-boy disparities in human capital accumulation grow or wane?
· Practical: familiarize you with empirical work, particularly with applied statistical analysis using Stata 14 to answer some of the questions just posed.
Structure of class time. The typical class (#2-6) will run as follow:
· 9-9:45 Quiz and review of the quiz [class 2, 4, and 6]
· 9:45-10:45 lecture
· 10:45-11:00 break
· 11:00-11:50 review of intermediate steps for final paper and presentation
Readings. Readings and quizzes from 2015 are in Latte.
Grade. The final grade will be based on the following:
[1] Weekly quizzes. (50%). During weeks 2, 4, and 6 there will be a 20-minutes quiz that will cover the cumulative material in lectures and readings. You should expect to see some the questions and topics from earlier lectures, readings, and quizzes reappear in later quizzes. The quizzes will be closed-book and in-class. I will drop the quiz with the lowest grade when computing your final grade. Each quiz will be graded as follow: the top 20% of the class will receive an A, the next 20% an A-, and so on until we reach the bottom 20% of the class, who will receive a B-.
[2] Final paper and presentation. (Total 50%). On the last day of class (March 3) you will have to turn in a paper containing empirical analysis of the causes or consequence of human capital accumulation. See the next section for details of the final paper. The final paper should contain only 1-2 beautifully constructed tables showing your best regression results, and ≤5 doubled spaced pages (12 font, regular margins) presenting your hypotheses, the measure of the variables you used, caveats and limitations, and your empirical results (with a focus on the interpretation of the coefficients or estimated relations). Before the last class I will hand out guidelines and instructions about the final presentation.
Final paper and presentation.
[a]The topic. For the final paper students alone or in groups of two will need to do an empirical investigation using a data set in which they estimate either the returns to different forms of human capital, or the causes of human capital accumulation. For example, in one recent paper a student estimated the positive externality of education by measuring the impact of community mean schooling on own earnings and health. In another recent paper students estimated the comparative effects on earning of variables related to human capital such as schooling and academic skills versus personality traits. Others have used country-level data to estimate the association between country-level educational achievement and environmental degradation, and still others have gone on to estimate girl-boy intra household disparities in education. Copies of two recent student papers are in Latte.
[b] The data. The data set can be country-level, household-level, or individual-level. If you cannot find a suitable data set, you can always use one of my many data sets from native Amazonians in Bolivia. If you are interested in a particular region of the world, then you should find data from that area, but if you are more interested in an idea or in honing technical skills, then the geographical origin of the data is less important and you will have more choices.
If you are interested in using micro-level data sets try: (1) the web sites of the World Bank’s Living Standard Measurement Survey or (2) BREAD (Bureau of Research and Economic Analysis of Development) – a large repository of household level data sets. If you are more interested in doing cross-country comparisons, the World Bank Development Report or several of the UN reports/data banks are ideal. If you have trouble finding a data source, then use the Bolivia data set Econ_of_Education_2016 in Stata in Latte.
[c] The steps to ensure the paper moves along well. To ensure progress in the final assignment, during the last 50 minutes of each class students might want to turn in intermediate progress report of their work. Although I will not grade the intermediate reports, I will give you comments soon after you turn them in. You might want to bring your laptops with the data for the last 50 minutes of each class since this will be an ideal time to cover the Stata commands you might need for your analysis. I will help students without prior background in statistics move along, but students are responsible for identifying a suitable data set
Each week during weeks 2-6 (inclusive) you might want to turn in a 1-2 page intermediate report of your final project. The details of the intermediate reports are described in the last column of the table entitled, “Summary of schedule”. I have organized the intermediate reports so that they follow a sequential, logical order and help you move along to complete the final empirical piece of work. I will provide more details on the intermediate steps than described in the last column of the table “Summary of schedule”..
Stata 14. If you have a valid Brandeis identification, you can download Stata 14 for free. I will hand out the commands that you might need as the course unfolds and – should you need help -- I can help you with the Stata commands during each weekly session or during office hours. I have put a short Stata tutorial in Latte. STATA.. For those unfamiliar with Stata, useful references for STATA include:
Lawrence C. Hamilton. 2009. Statistics with Stata. Updated for Version 10. Belmont, CA: Cengage.
A.C. Acock. (2012). A Gentle Introduction to Stata (Revised Third Edition). Stata Press.
J.S. Long. (2009). The Workflow of Data Analysis Using Stata. Stata Press.
M.N. Mitchell. (2010). Data Management Using Stata: A Practical Handbook. Stata Press.
STATA resources on the web (besides the use of the “help” icon in STATA): http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/
http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/default.htm
What test to use?
http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/whatstat/whatstat.htm#chifit http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/whatstat/default.htm
Feedback to students. I will return the graded quiz shortly after you take the quiz so you should be able to gauge how well you are doing as the course unfolds. Also, we will go over the quiz in class right after the quiz, so you should be able to assess your performance each week. Since you have the option of turning in each week a progress reports on your paper, you will also receive my feedback on the empirical analysis you will be doing.
Gender perspective. Much of the course focuses of why there are girl-boy disparities within the household, why mothers and fathers disagree when investing in their offspring, and the returns to human capital along gender lines.
Office hours. By appointment, Tuesdays or Fridays 3-6pm.
Students with disabilities. See me soon if you are a student with a documented disability and if you wish to request a reasonable accommodation for this class. Brandeis cannot provide reasonable accommodations retroactively.
Policy about academic honesty. Academic integrity is central to the mission of educational excellence at Brandeis University. Each student is expected to turn in work completed independently, except when assignments specifically authorize collaborative effort. It is not acceptable to use the words or ideas of another person without proper acknowledgement of that source. This means that you must use footnotes and quotation marks to indicate the source of any phrases, sentences, paragraphs or ideas found in published volumes, on the internet, or created by another student. Violations of University policy on academic integrity, described in Section 3 of Rights and Responsibilities, may result in failure in the course or on the assignment, and could end in suspension from the University. If you are in doubt about the instructions for any assignment in this course, you must ask for clarification.
Readings
Class #1:
Hanushek, E.A., Guido Schwerdt, Simon Wierderhold, et al. 2013. Returns to skills around the world: Evidence from PIAAC. OECD, Working Paper 2013-16.
Class #2:
G. Psacharopoulous and H. A. Patrinos. 2004. Returns to investment in education: A further update. Education Economics 12:2:111-134.
Barbara L. Wolfe and Robert H. Haveman. 2003. Social and Nonmarket Benefits from Education in an Advanced Economy,” in Education in the 21st Century: Meeting the Challenges of a Changing World, Yolanda Kodrzycki, ed., Boston: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, pp. 102-119.
Patrinos, Harry. 2008. Returns to education: The gender perspective. In Mercy Temnon and Lucia Fort, editors, Girl’s education in the 21st century. Gender equality, empowerment, and economic growth. Washingont, D.C.: World Bank , pp. 53-66.
Class #3:
Chou, Shin-Yi, et al. 2007. Parental Education and Child Health: Evidence from a natural experiment in Taiwan. NBER Working Paper 13466.
Class #4:
Meng Zhao and Paul Glewwe. 2010. What determines basic school attainment in developing countries? Evidence from rural China. Economics of Education Review 29: 451-460.
Class #5:
Wu Zeng et al. 2012. Sibling composition and child educational attainment. Economics of Education Review. 31:1017-1027.
Class #6:
Fiszbein, A. & Schady, N. Conditional Cash Transfers: Reducing Present and Future Poverty. (World Bank Policy Research Report, Washington, DC, 2009), pp. 1-27 and chapter 5 (127-164).
Yoong, J. L. Rabinovich, and S. Diepeveen. 2012. The impact of economic resource transfers to women versus men. A systematic review. Technical report. London: EPPI-Center, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London.
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Summary of schedule
Class # / Date / Topic covered in class / In class quiz / Intermediate steps for final assignment and hard copy of the weekly assignment due (intermediate assignments are optional):1 / 1/14 / Human capital: definition, varieties, and macro/micro importance. Introduction to data set / None / None
2 / 1/21 / Consequences of human capital: market (financial) returns / #1 / #1: 1 page identifying the data, hypotheses, and model. You should download the data set by this class. Identify the web site so I can check to make sure the data set is easily usable.
3 / 1/28 / Consequences of human capital: non-market (non-pecuniary) returns / #2: 1 table of summary statistics of the main outcomes and explanatory variables. The table should contain the name of the variable (in English, not in Stata), # of observations, mean, median, and standard deviation1.
4 / 2/4 / Determinants of human capital accumulation: parental attributes / #2 / #3: 1 page of text and as many graphs as you want with an emphasis only on the main outcome and explanatory variables.2
5 / 2/11 / Determinants of human capital accumulation: resource constraints and intra-household girl/boy disparities / #4: 1-2 pages of bivariate and graphical analysis of the main outcomes against the main explanatory variables. I will give more details on this as the assignment is due
2/18 / VACATION. NO CLASS
6 / 2/25 / The role of conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs / #3 / #5: 1-2 pages with preliminary multivariate analysis3. I will give more details on this as the assignment is due
7 / 3/3 / Student presentations. / None / Final paper due by 5pm in my mailbox
/1/ Table 1. Summary statistics of analysis of the impact of education on adult (>20 age) female employment and income in Bombay, India, 2013
Name & definition of variable / N / Mean / SDA. Outcome variables
Income/a/ / Yearly income in US dollars / 3250 / 240 / 45
Employment / 1=employed; 0=unemployed / 3245 / 23%
B. Explanatory variables
Education/b/ / Maximum years of school grades completed / 3100 / 4 / 2
Weight/c/ / Body weight in kg / 2500 / 50 / 12
Notes: /a/ Government pensions excluded. /b/ Maximum years of schooling does not take into account grade repetition. /c/ Weight = without shoes or hat, but with light clothing.
/2/ Graphs showing that the main outcome and explanatory variables you intend to use have variability. For this part, histograms would be more than enough. Ideally, for each graph you should provide a short description of what you see. E.g., “In graph 1 we can see that female education in Bombay, India, during 2013 was highly skewed. 40% of the women had no education.
/3/ Avoid cutting and pasting output from STATA. Create an informative, well-labeled table. For tips on how to present statistics in tables see pages 241-243 and 291-292 in James Stock and Mark Watson (Introduction to Econometrics, NY, Addison-Wesley, 2006); these pages should be in Latte.