Kelly Bedard

By estimating differences in long-run education and labor market outcomes for cohorts of students exposed to differing state-level primary school retention rates, this article estimates the effects of retention on all students in a cohort, retained and promoted. We find that a 1 standard deviation increase in early grade retention is associated with a 0.7 percent increase in mean male hourly wages. Further, the observed positive wage effect is not limited to the lower tail of the wage distribution but appears to persist throughout the distribution. Though there is an extensive literature attempting to estimate the effect of retention on the retained, this analysis offers what may be the first estimates of average long-run impacts of retention on all students.

During the past half century, there has been a trend towards increasing the minimum age a child must reach before entering school in the United States. States have accomplished this by moving the school entry cutoff date earlier in the school year. The evidence presented in this paper shows that these law changes increased human capital accumulation and hence adult wages. More specifically, shifting the school entry cutoff up by one month (i.e. from January 1 to December 1) increases average white male hourly earnings by approximately one percent. We further show that the increased human capital accumulation that generates this wage increase comes from within grade skill accumulation rather than increased educational attainment. Perhaps most importantly, there is some preliminary evidence that the entire cohort of children benefits from the cutoff change, not just those whose entry is delayed by a year.

This paper begins with three facts. One, math and science skills are scarce resources that are highly rewarded in the labor market. Two, women are underrepresented in most university math/science programs and are less likely to be employed in math/science related fields. Three, isolating the important reasons why women are less likely to enter math/science fields is difficult, if not

Needs based capitation models have been suggested as an alternative to funding methods based on historical utilization patterns. The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) applied in conjunction with an age/gender adjustment is the most widely adopted measure of relative need. This paper addresses a number of important index construction issues using Canadian data. These include the influence exerted by the reference population (national versus provincial), the age structure (excluding people over 64 versus 74), the optimal period over which to average the SMR in order to smooth meaningless fluctuations, and the correspondence between SMRs, standard socio-economic indicators (i.e. unemployment, education, and income), health care 'need', and expenditures.

Recently, 55 high-resolution seismic sections were collected by the Geological Survey of Canada to map the Quaternary sedimentary succession over an area of 7600 km2 in the St. Lawrence Estuary (eastern Canada). To better understand the geometrical relationships between these various units and to document the impact of the bedrock topography on the Quaternary basin infill, a numerical seismic stratigraphic

While the Serrano v Priest decisions and Proposition 13 effectively rendered California school district budgets exogenous, intra-district resource allocation remains largely at the discretion of school district administrations. As a result, Serrano v Priest and Proposition 13 alleviate concerns about the potentially endogenous relationship between student body composition and inter-district resource disparity and allow us to focus on consistently estimating the effect of classroom versus non-classroom spending. We find that teaching expenditures have a positive effect on student performance while nonteaching expenditures have a negative effect. Either the reallocation of $100 from administrative to classroom spending, with no change in overall expenditures, or an $100 increase aimed directly at the classroom moves the average California high school approximately 5 percentage points higher in the state test score rankings. These results are similar across grade levels (elementary, mi...

After forty years of school consolidation, the preponderance of the evidence, including the results presented in this paper, suggest that the race to reap returns to scale and specialization in education may have come at a high price. This paper uses newly available STAR test score data from California to explore the relationship between school size and the distribution of test scores across elementary, middle, and high schools. We find that school size has a statistically significant and economically large impact on school performance. For example, the probability that an average suburban high school is dominated by low scorers rises from 47% to 71% as the school grows from 200 to 800 students per grade.

Much of the debate over the allocation of education resources focuses on the alleged benefits of smallness—of classroom or school—and is based on evidence from small-scale studies. This paper reframes the question in terms of cohort size. Using national data, we find that a 10% increase in kindergarten enrollment yields a 0.5% increase in cohort shrinkage across early grade transitions,

There is longstanding evidence that youths raised by single parents are more likely to perform poorly in school and partake in “deviant” behaviors such as smoking, sex, substance use, and crime. However, there is not widespread agreement as to whether the timing of the marital disruption differentially impacts youth outcomes. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and its Young

Abstract: Previous research has shown that wage-setting institutions help explain international dif- ferences in wage inequality. We expand on this theme to explore the role that educational institutions play in determining di�erences in wage dispersion across countries and within countries over time. We compare the distribution of test scores at age thirteen in 1964 and 1982 and wages later in life across eleven countries. We Þnd that wage dispersion later in life is never greater than test score dispersion. In particular, Lorenz curves for a cohort’s wages always lie above or on top of the cohort’s test score Lorenz curve. Furthermore, wage dispersion, as summarized by Gini coe�cients, is signiÞcantly related to test score dispersion in the country. A general fall in test score dispersion between 1962 and 1982 appears to be reßected in reduced wage dispersion within cohorts. For three countries with available data (the U.S., the U.K., and Japan), we Þnd evidence of skill-biased ch...

We examine the impact of class size on student evaluations of instructor performance using data on all economics classes offered at the University of California, Santa Barbara from Fall 1997 to Spring 2004. A particular strength of this data is the opportunity to control for both instructor and course fixed effects. In contrast to the literature examining class size effects on test-based outcomes—where results can vary considerably across specifications—we find a large, highly significant, and nonlinear negative impact of class size on student evaluations of instructor effectiveness that is highly robust to the inclusion of course and instructor fixed effects.

... Permissions & Reprints. Early gender test score gaps across OECD countries. Kelly Bedard a , Corresponding Author Contact Information , E-mail The Corresponding Author and Insook Cho b. a Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States. ...

It is well documented that immigrants are in better health upon arrival in the United States than their American counterparts but that this health advantage erodes over time. We study the potential determinants of this "healthy immigrant effect, " with a particular focus on the tendency of immigrants to converge to unhealthy American BMI levels. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey, we find that average female and male immigrants enter the United States with BMIs that are approximately two and five percentage points lower than native-born women and men, respectively. Consistent with the declining health status of immigrants the longer they remain in the United States, we also find that female immigrants almost completely converge to American BMIs within 10 years of arrival, and men close a third of the gap within 15 years.

ABSTRACT Needs-based capitation models have been suggested as an alternative to health-care funding methods based on historical utilization patterns. The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) applied in conjunction with an age/gender adjustment is the most widely adopted measure of relative need. This paper addresses a number of important index construction issues using Canadian data and discusses their health policy implications. These include the influence exerted by the age structure (excluding people over 64 versus 74), the optimal period over which to average the SMR in order to smooth meaningless fluctuations, and the correspondence between SMRs, standard socioeconomic indicators (i.e., unemployment, education, and income) health-care "need," and expenditures.