Early marijuana use and educational outcomes

Marijuana use is getting more and more accepted by the public and lawmakers. Indeed, many studies have shown that its effects are no worse that allowed addictive goods such as tobacco and alcohol, that it may in some cases even have a positive impact (foremost example: tolerating consequences of various deceases), and it is not even clear that it is addictive. However, there has been little study about the consequences of using marijuana early, that is, by children or teenagers who are still growing up. It is known for a variety of goods that consuming too early can have sometimes dramatic results.

Deborah Cobb-Clark, Sonja Kassenboehmer, Trinh Le, Duncan McVicar and Rong Zhang look at early adopters of marijuana and their educational outcomes. Studying this is not straightforward, as those who smoke early are clearly not a random draw from the population. They likely share characteristics that have an impact of educational outcomes. The study focuses on those 14 years or younger in Australia and how they complete high school and obtain university entrance scores. Marijuana use is obtained by survey, which may introduce additional difficulties, and is linked to an administrative data set on welfare use by their parents. The authors find strong penalties in high school completion from early marijuana uses, and stronger ones for intensive use and for those coming from a disadvantaged background. The impact on university entrance scores is milder, and this applies of course only to those who managed to complete high school. The penalty for welfare-recipient families is, however, dramatically higher in that case. In other words, even if marijuana gets legalized, it needs to be treated like alcohol and tobacco and early use needs to be strongly discouraged with campaigns that can be efficiently targeted toward welfare-recipients.

Update: An email correspondent tells me I am over-eager to reach policy conclusions given the large endogeneity issue which the authors also acknowledge. I think I was indeed too eager. But I would still pursue this policy. The potential risk appears too large for me.

About faculty participation in university administration

A major difference between American and other universities is the professionalization of their administration. Typically, they are managed by former faculty who have specialized in higher education administration, and what is become more and more frequent, by administrators who have never been academics. While the result are universities that put in my opinion excessive emphasis on non-academic endeavors like athletics, students living and other student entertainment, there is little doubt that the academics are also in better shape than elsewhere. When faculty are in charge, I suppose there is too much rent seeking. It would be good, though, to have this formalized in some way for better analysis.

Kathleen Carroll, Lisa Dickson and Jane Ruseski build a model of university administration where the extend of faculty involvement may vary exogenously. The model is rather trivial and does not deliver unexpected results, the more faculty participate, the more academic affairs get priority, and this is social optimal if there are externalities from academics to non-academics. What would have really made the paper interesting is to put the model to the data and actually provide some quantification of effects. How much does faculty participation matter? What is the size of cross-effects between academics and non-academics? How big should the administration be? Too bad this paper was only about trivial theory.

Fresh air is better for learning

How do you get children to learn better at school? You can change the curriculum, the teachers, class size, or the administrators. You can provide incentives to the teachers, children or their parents (unfortunately, you cannot change the parents). You can bus children to other schools. You can add more equipment to the classroom. All this may be effective to some extend, and in some cases not. That is a major part of what the Economics of Education field is about, and there is obviously still a lot to do, given how the latest PISA results show dramatic differences across countries.

Tess Stafford adds another piece to the puzzle. As a Texas school district went through a renovation project for all its schools that involved improving indoor air quality for most of the schools, and those projects were staggered over several years, it became possible to see how students test scores have changed before and after the renovation. They improved, and significantly. Stafford even claims that it has a stronger impact than reducing class size. So if you have poorly ventilated and moldy schools, you know what to do.

Child labor and fertility

Child labor has often been described as a vicious circle. Parents have too little income to feed their family and require their children to work. Children do not get educated and end up earning too little to sustain their own family. One may then question why they decide to have children in the first place.

Simone D’Alessandro and Tamara Fioroni build a model of human capital and fertility with child labor. At least in theory, they highlight that destitute parents find it relatively advantageous to have children: they are less costly as they can work. If their net contribution is positive, they want to have many children. And this mechanism can be self-reinforcing if the gap between skilled and unskilled wages is large. This is an amplified quantity/quality trade-off that increases child labor and leads to more wage inequality. The only way out is to make it more attractive for unskilled parents to have fewer children and not have them work. Legislating child labor away will not help, as already demonstrated many times. One example was discussed here, and some was to get one of the vicious circle as well: 1, 2, 3.

Procrastination is a strong predictor of academic performance

I believe that perseverance and timeliness are the secret to success, and foremost so in school. And I believe these are the qualities that brought me to where I am now, and I hope these qualities have also transpired on this blog. But ,y belief may not be general wisdom or even scientifically established. Thus, I am happy to report on a study that confirms at least part of my credo.

Marco Novarese and Viviana Di Giovinazzo use data on how promptly astudents have enrolled for university to forecast their future academic performance, and the forecast is quite good. Of course, promptness likely correlates with plenty of other positive student characteristics the authors cannot measure. And of course, the result is not too surprising. But I feel comforted in my belief and my bias in selecting studies that confirm my prejudices is thus reinforced.

Give girls a bicycle

It is well known that girls from developing countries face hurdles in their schooling experience. This goes from subtle issues during their periods, curricula geared towards boys, and household work to plain denial of access to schools. While some of this has to do with cultural issues that are difficult to overcome with (economic) policy, some help could be surprisingly easy. It happened before in public health, my favorite example being telling kids to wear shoes eradicated hookworm from many parts of the world.

Karthik Muralidharan and Nishith Prakash have a recommendation, and that is to give girls a bicycle. They base this on an experiment they ran in India, where girls were offered a bicycle if they continued into secondary education. This helped overcome traditions that would not let girls out of the village and increased enrollments by 30% and closed the boy-girl gap by 40%. The authors also claim this is more cost-effective that the traditional cash transfers because bicycles have positive externalities, such as the safety of girls during commutes and more generally empowering them. As with any such experiment, one can question whether the result can be generalized, but it is interesting nonetheless.

PS: As several readers noted by email (but could have commented), this is not a randomized experiment. Rather, the authors used an initiative conducted by the government of Bihar. I apologize for the confusion.

Do child laborers learn less?

Child labor is frowned upon because going to school is deemed essential to the development of every child, especially in terms of giving her the essential tools to do well as an adult. It is generally recognized that parents do not want to keep their child away from school (excluding those who insist on home schooling), but that sometimes economic hardship forces them to have children help with current expenses to the detriment of their future earnings. But child labor is not a black and white outcome. It may happen that children work and go to school. To what extend does this have an impact of academic outcomes?

Patrick Emerson, Vladimir Ponczek and André Portela Souza got their hands on excellent data from the municipal schools in São Paulo, where they can track students across several years, know whether they work outside the home, what their study habits are as well as a few socio-economic characteristics of the family. They find that transitioning into child labor leads to a decline in test scores for mathematics and Portuguese in the order of 6% to 10% of a standard deviation. That may not look like much, but this adds up to a quarter to a full year of education by the time they are done with school. However, one may argue that they also learn some useful skills for the labor market while working, so one can wonder how it look like in terms of adult outcomes.

Is early childhood really that important for adult life?

How important are the preschool years for adult outcomes? Empirical evidence from rich countries mostly shows that treatments during preschool years persist to adult years. James Heckman, for example, has pushed very hard this result. How robust is it once you look at more extreme cases?

Todd Schoellman does this by looking at refugees from Indochina who arrived in the US. He finds no difference in adult wages, education and anything else he can throw at the data between refugees who arrived in the United States at different preschool ages (before 5). One would have expected a huge effect, as they were exposed to very dire environments in their home countries or the refugee camps. It runs also counter to other empirical evidence and standard models. So what is going on here? Schoellman argues that what really matters in early childhood were the parents, much less the environment. That result changes somewhat once the arrival date falls into school age.

Entrepreneurship cannot be taught

A lot of classes in business schools teach rather fluffy material, especially MBA classes. It is all about entertaining the students who pay dearly for their education and expect a diploma. The signaling value from the diploma happened with entry into the school and not through the selection process during classes. And quite a few classes are all about making the students believe they are learning important skills that will make them CEOs. Nowhere is that more true than with "entrepreneurship" classes, whose teachers are often adored by students who think they will turn into the next Bill Gates.

Michael Stuetzer, Martin Obschonka, Per Davidsson, and Eva Schmitt-Rodermund Do not empirical research into what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and I presume their sample includes only successful ones. It turns out education has no bearing at all. It is all about having a varied work experience. Thus, working a long time on the same job will not make you a successful entrepreneur once you quit. And taking entrepreneurship classes or getting an MBA will not help you either.

The impact of bullying

If you do not manage to be part of the clique of "popular" people in school, or even worse are bullied, the conventional wisdom reassures you telling you that it is going to be all downhill from here on for the popular people, and that the bullied ones are going to be significantly more successful after school. I think the reason is that after high school, people split into the circles they really belong to, do not have to suffer other people they have nothing in common with and can really deploy their talents. The bulliers and popular people have lost their only edge, particular social interactions, once they get into the labor force and cannot progress.

Nick Drydakis tries to bring some empirical analysis to all this by using the Greek Behavioral Study dataset, which includes information about recollection about bullying, including frequency and intensity. It shows that at least part of the conventional wisdom (or at least how I perceived it) is wrong. Being bullied is associated with lower labor market outcomes, and it is hypothesized this is due to lower self-esteem which has also translated in lower academic achievement while in school (before age 18) and is perpetuated once in the labor force. Thus those whose mental health has been affected by bullying suffer significantly, and they seem to be more common than those who manage to brush it off and go on with life. However, the bullied ones achieve more human capital as measured by computer or English skills and higher degrees, but it looks like they do not managed to turn this into more employment or higher wages. The Greek labor market may be in part responsible for this. For example, the impact of bullying is particularly strong for homosexuals, and all those may not have a fair shot in the Greek labor market either. One should not read too much into a causality from bullying to outcomes here, as the author is careful to highlight. The study has nothing to say, however, about the bulliers and the popular people.

Textbooks do not matter

I have complained before, and I am far from being the only one, that textbooks are too expensive. But we still use them because we think they are useful, or because we are too lazy to come up with class material ourselves. Beyond the benefit for the lazy teacher, do textbooks actually bring something to the classroom?

Maria Kuecken and Marie-Anne Valfort looks at a case where textbooks are sometimes simply not available, classrooms in 11 Sub-Saharian countries. And it turns out the availability of textbooks does not matter, whether owned by each pupil or shared. It is only in one case, the richer kids, where there is a noticeable improvement in school achievement for shared textbooks. So it looks like teachers manage to adapt well to the absence of textbooks. And I think there is virtue in working without them: students have to listen to the teacher, learn to take notes or absorb material on the spot, and they are more active in the classroom. I wish I could go without textbooks, but unfortunately rules are rules. And publishers also need to make a living, right?

Human capital and corruption

It is commonplace to assume that corruption is bad, although the evidence is far from clear about this. Empirical investigations are typically at the macro level and have very little to say about the micro channels of corruption. In fact there is very little structural modelling or estimation in this area.

Spyridon Boikos concentrates on the impact of corruption on the accumulation of human capital using an endogenous growth model. Two channels are investigated: the first is about public resources being misdirected being education and production sectors, and the second is complementarity between human and physical capitals. Putting this to the data, it is found that corruption does not have that much impact in the education sector, and it is conjectured that corruption does not have the same bite in the education sector as in the rest of the economy. I cannot help thinking that the model misses the big elephant in the room in terms of human capital and corruption: a very common form of corruption in this regard is bribing for entry into schools, passing exams and even getting diplomas. This means that the signalling effect of diplomas is getting lost, and hence the incentive to get an education vanishes, in particular for the talented ones. And for those who attend a school, there is little incentive to learn.

Which academic field contributes most to economic growth?

If you have sat on any inter-disciplinary academic committee, you must have witnessed frustrating discussions about how one field is more useful in some respect than another, especially when resources are involved. And irremediably people compare apples and oranges, as academic fields can be very different and their metrics impossible to compare.

Cristiano Antonelli and Claudio Fassio decided to open this Pandora box and concentrate on one impact: economic growth. They perform a cross-country study and take the number of graduates in each field as an indicator of academic output, and see where that leads us in terms of economic achievement. They make the distinction between engineering, hard, social, medical sciences, and humanities in a 11-year panel of 16 OECD countries. The horse race ends with two clear winners, engineering and social sciences, and two big losers, medical sciences and humanities, the latter having a significant negative contribution to growth.

That said, should we believe those results? Beyond the obvious issue with panel cross-country regressions, the problem is that we are still comparing apples to oranges. In some countries, medical studies are at the graduate level only, while it is undergraduate elsewhere. There are also stark difference for Economics as well. In the US, many students graduate in that field and have actually only two years of classes in this major, having to take general education classes first for two years. In Europe, Economics students spend their whole four years on the topic. And the same applies to other fields. Thus counting students, and especially if you want to make the claim they are specialized in a particular field, is rather heroic. I would not yet claim social sciences have won this battle.

On the benefits of an international education

Universities encourage study abroad programs because it is a good experience for students to learn about others cultures (and in the case of expensive colleges, a cheap way to make money while students continue to pay tuition). With the Erasmus program in Europe where local tax payers typically foot most of the bill for higher education, the question arises whether it is worth paying for the education of foreigners. Of course, there is a chance that they would stay and thus only one year of all their education has been paid. And this does not necessarily have to be a zero-sum game, as the international education should be enhancing. Oh, and the Erasmus program also seeks to establish more pan-European ties, so there is a political motive at least.

Jan Bergerhoff, Lex Borghans, Philipp Seegers and Tom van Veen try to look into the impact of international higher education using the Lucas growth model. Students study abroad if they find it in their interest, which in this model means that they can benefit from higher human capital in the other country, implying a faster human human capital accumulation the more foreign students there are. The probability the students are staying is then exogenously calibrated. The authors find that the impact on growth rate should be positive, while still modest at current internationalization rates. on a personal level, i can only recommend study abroad, it has certainly helped me, even though my host country probably did not get much out of it.

Misallocation of human capital in developing countries

It is now well established and documented that capital and labor are very poorly distributed across and within sectors in developing economies. The impact of this misallocation is large enough to explain a non-negligible part of the gap between rich and poor countries. This analysis has, however, only pertained to worker counts and physical capital. What about human capital?

Dietrich Vollrath looks at the sectoral allocation of human capital in 14 developing economies, analyzing the marginal return by using wage data. He comes to the conclusion that the misallocation has an impact on GDP of at most 5%, more than in the US but clearly negligible to explain cross-country differences. I find this hard to believe from my casual observation. For example, in many developing economies, the brightest minds go into government administration because this is where they can extract the most rents (some call this corruption). They expand a bureaucratic machine at the expense of the productive sector. That cannot be good for GDP. Using wage data here can be misleading, as the marginal product of corrupt bureaucrats, at least in social terms, is certainly not reflected in their wage. Add to this important informal sectors where wages may be substantially mismeasured, even in household surveys, and I am not quite as confident in the data as Vollrath seems to be.

Fathers are drinking away their time with their children

It is no secret that growing up with an alcoholic parent is no fun. It is even worse for single parents. How bad this is is difficult to evaluate, as one would need data on alcohol consumption by parents and a measure of outcomes for children. Maybe some proxies can help here.

Gianna Claudia Giannelli, Lucia Mangiavacchi and Luca Piccoli take time spent with the children as a proxy for child wellbeing. They use a Russian survey and look at how much time each parent spends with the children, along with their alcohol consumption. They find that fathers care less about their children when they drink more, but there is no effect for mothers. In some ways, this reminds me of the paper by Siwan Anderson and Jean-Marie Baland that shows that mothers in Kenya use ROSCAs to keep money away from their (drinking) husbands, despite the fact that ROSCAs are a very inefficient savings technology.

But let us get back on topic. Is time spent with your children the best measure of child wellbeing? Certainly not, but it is supposed to be a proxy. But on theoretical grounds, I need a lot of convincing here. Indeed, if my parents had been alcoholic, I would have preferred, all else being equal, that they spent the least possible time with me. This would reverse the conclusion of the paper ("negative impact of fathers' alcohol consumption on child welfare," implying no impact of the mothers' alcohol consumption).

Reduce inequality by increasing the number of school days

Some children have the bad luck to be born in a poor environment or a dysfunctional family. For them, school is the great equalizer that gives them a chance to still make in reasonably well in life. That works only if they can be in school and out of bad influence long enough (the "incarceration" hypothesis). Unfortunately, in areas where there are few school days and where especially the Summer break is long, all the good work is easily undone. In particular where there is inequality, we see the richer kids go to Summer camps to reinforce what they learned or learn some more, while the poor ones linger at home and forget a year's worth of school.

It is thus not surprising to see that Daiji Kawaguchi finds that fewer school days leads to more inequality. He looks at the 2002 school reform in Japan that abolished school on Saturdays. Comparing time diaries and test scores of students before and after the reform, he finds a dramatic change in the distribution. Students after the reform studied one third less at home, and the decline was even steeper in poor households. The impact on test scores is that the slope against socio-economic factors becomes 20-30% steeper. This is just from removing two half days of school a month. I wonder how this would translate in an international comparison where the school year ranges from 180 days in the US and France to 220 days in South Korea.

Should we see more university mergers?

When should universities merge? The recent examples I have witnessed were due to economic hardship, where one college could simply not meet ends and was taken over by another one. There is also a new trend in France to merge universities that had previously been split apart, as part of the eternal higher education reform in this country. Many universities grew so large that they were split along sciences lines (natural, engineering, social sciences, humanities), only to realize that French universities were then really hurting in international rankings. But none of this follows any reasoning about what is best from a social point of view.

Marisa Hidalgo-Hidalgo and Guadalupe Valera try to get to this by using a bit of theory, comparing a university monopoly to a duopoly. A monopoly can bargain better for lower wages and better faculty, and it can create synergies. But a duopoly encourages better competition for excellence. The overall results is that the more heterogeneous universities are, the easier a merger will turn a societal benefit. The current merger craze in France is thus appropriate, but for a different reason.

Yet the model does not allow to take into account some very important aspects of education. Think for example about the diversity of classes than can be offered in a larger institution. And that includes the French mergers, as now there is a potential for students to take classes outside of their field and thus emulate something like a liberal arts education. After all a big drawback of European and especially French education is the excessively specialized education, leading to a workforce lacking flexibility.

American colleges could also benefit from mergers. Think about all these tiny colleges that can barely offer a halfway complete curriculum for the most popular majors. These micro-colleges are expensive for students and pay actually very little to faculty who have to teach extremely varied classes and struggle to do tat well. There is definitely scope for taking advantage of some economies of scale here. But merging large, complete universities, like what the authors have in mind, is definitely less advantageous. Imagine if Columbia University and New York University were to merge. There would be little to gain in a programmatic sense, and I do not think there would much pressure on faculty wages. After all, the market for good faculty is national, if not international.

The lack of sleep of American school children

Children need sufficient sleep to grow and learn well. But every parent knows how difficult it is to get the children to get that sleep, especially sending them to bed while mom and dad are still up. And once children are in their teens, this becomes even more difficult, even though they still need that sleep time. In the United States it is even worse, as school starts earlier for older children and they sometimes have long school bus trips before that. So it is not uncommon for children to wake up at 6. With 10 hours of required sleep, calculate when they should have gone to bed...

Jay Stewart uses the American Time Use Survey to determine the factors of sleep time for children. First, when school is in session, and when it is a school day, they go to bed 38 minutes later and wake up 72 minutes earlier. This lost half hour accumulates quickly through the week and leads to sleepy heads by Friday. Second, while child development often depends on the mother, in this case sleep patterns during school are not influenced by maternal labor supply.

Then, who is to blame? It is certainly not school homework, of which American school children get little. Is it TV? For sure, it is difficult to drag the children away from the monkey box when the parents are glued to it. Is it over-emphasis on school sports? For many children and parents, sports have priority over academics (even in college). Maybe cutting down on those many hours of daily football training would do the children some good (and besides, there are still more academic scholarships for college that sports ones).

Most US students do not care about the academic quality of their college

The attitude of students towards college choice is starkly contrasted across continents. While I certainly tend to over-generalize in the following lines, let me highlight a few differences. In Asia, students are very aware of the ranking of universities and strive hard to pass entrance exams to the highest ranked institutions. After that, students do not work much towards learning. All that matters is the signal that you got in. In Europe, students typically go to the local university and are left to fend for themselves. Attrition rates are high, the surviving students are quite good, and there is limited variance in student quality across institutions. In the United States, students are willing to travel far to study, and the selection of the institution depends on reputation, cost and amenities. Having a nice campus, quality dormitories, extra-curricular activities and especially college sports is deemed very important, aspects that do not matter at all in Asia and Europe. Why?

Brian Jacob, Brian McCall and Kevin M. Stange try to offer an hint of an answer by looking at the demand side for colleges. They use detailed data from high school classes in 1992 and 2004, match this with college characteristics and estimate a discrete choice model. The results are more damning than my ramblings above. Except for the top students, high school graduates do not care about academics at all. All they want is excellent "college consumption amenities." And this likely explains why they learn so little while in college. Their focus is on the university as a consumption good, not an investment good. And colleges have responded by devoting to amenities half the resources they devote to academics, producing a generation of well-entertained know-nothings.