We have shown that vocational education does not perform as well as academic education both in la... more We have shown that vocational education does not perform as well as academic education both in labour market outcomes and in the level of basic skills, including literacy and numeracy. This is especially true for higher education. Only at the upper secondary or post-secondary level does vocational education perform slightly better than academic education in the probability of being currently employed as well as in the time spent in paid employment, although the differences we find are small.
We propose a new methodology for identifying the causal effect of Protestantism versus Catholicis... more We propose a new methodology for identifying the causal effect of Protestantism versus Catholicism on the decision to become an entrepreneur. Our quasi-experimental research design exploits religious minorities' strong attachment to religious ethics and the exogenous historical determination of religious minorities' geographical distribution in the regions of the former Holy Roman Empire in the 1500s. We analyse European Social Survey data, collected in four waves between 2002 and 2008, and find that religious background has a significant effect on the individual propensity for entrepreneurship, with Protestantism increasing the probability to be an entrepreneur by around 5 percentage points with respect to Catholicism. Our findings are stable across a number of robustness checks, including accounting for migration patterns and a placebo test. We also provide an extended discussion of the assumptions' validity at the basis of our research design. This paper is one of the first attempts to identify a causal effect, rather than a simple correlation, of religious ethics on economic outcomes.
A Tale of Minorities: Evidence on Religious Ethics and Entrepreneurship from Swiss Census Data * ... more A Tale of Minorities: Evidence on Religious Ethics and Entrepreneurship from Swiss Census Data * Does Protestantism favour the market economy more than Catholicism does? We provide a novel quasi-experimental way to answer this question by comparing Protestant and Catholic minorities using Swiss census data from 1970 to 2000. Exploiting the strong adhesion of religious minorities to their confession's ethical principles and the historical determination of the geographical distribution of confessions across Swiss cantons, we find that Protestantism is associated with a significantly higher propensity for entrepreneurship. The estimated difference ranges between 2.3 and 4.4 percentage points. Our findings are robust to a number of robustness checks, including a placebo test.
It is widely believed that the expanding burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) is in no smal... more It is widely believed that the expanding burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) is in no small part the result of major macro-level determinants. We use a large amount of new data, to explore in particular the role played by urbanizationthe process of the population shifting from rural to urban areas within countriesin affecting four important drivers of NCDs worldwide: diabetes prevalence, as well as average body mass index (BMI), total cholesterol level and systolic blood pressure. Urbanization is seen by many as a double-edged sword: while its beneficial economic effects are widely acknowledged, it is commonly alleged to produce adverse side effects for NCD-related health outcomes. In this paper we submit this hypothesis to extensive empirical scrutiny, covering a global set of countries from 1980-2008, and applying a range of estimation procedures. Our results indicate that urbanization appears to have contributed to an increase in average BMI and cholesterol levels: the implied difference in average total cholesterol between the most and the least urbanized countries is 0.40 mmol/L, while people living in the least urbanized countries are also expected to have an up to 2.3 kg/m 2 lower BMI than in the most urbanized ones. Moreover, the least urbanized countries are expected to have an up to 3.2 p.p. lower prevalence of diabetes among women. This association is also much stronger in the low and middle-income countries, and is likely to be mediated by energy intake-related variables, such as calorie and fat supply per capita.
Health problems in this part of the world reverberate throughout society and bode ill for the fut... more Health problems in this part of the world reverberate throughout society and bode ill for the future.
We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the stand... more We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the standard requires costly effort, secondary education needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools, as in Epple and Romano, 1998. An alternative configuration, with public schools offering a higher educational standard than private schools, is also possible, in spite of the fact that tuition levied by private schools is strictly positive. In our model, private schools can offer a lower educational standard at a positive price because they attract students with a relatively high cost of effort, who would find the high standards of the public school excessively demanding. With the key parameters calibrated on the available micro-econometric evidence from the US, our model predicts that majority voting in the US supports a system with high quality private schools and low quality public schools, as assumed by Epple and Romano, 1998. This system, however, is not the one that would be selected by the social planner, who prefers high quality public schools combined with low quality private schools.
Overweight and obesity in the Middle East and North Africa: trends, socioeconomic inequalities and determinants
While there is widespread agreement at least in the scientific community that obesity has become ... more While there is widespread agreement at least in the scientific community that obesity has become a public health problem also in the developing world, there remains a persistent, and rather fundamental shortage of data to accurately measure the size and recent evolution of the problem, let alone its determinants. In this paper we make use of the Demograhic and Health Survey, a high quality survey whose main focus has been on “traditional” health challenges in developing countries, but which has routinely collected information on height and weight, at least for women. We focus on the Middle Eastern and North Africa region, as this is one region that appears to be facing a particularly severe but yet widely under-appreciated and under-researched public health challenge due to obesity. We use data for Egypt (5 rounds from 1992-2008), Jordan (4 rounds from 1990-2007) and Morocco (4 rounds from 1987-2003/4).We start at the macro level to demonstrate that the prevalence of obesity in those countries is significantly higher than in other countries at comparable per capita income levels. While the exceptionally high level of obesity applies to all socioeconomic groups in the country, it has thus far been the higher educated, the wealthier and the urban residents that display the largest prevalence (especially so in Egypt), unlike most other countries at a similar level of economic development. Recently, however, a trend has emerged towards a reversal in the socioeconomic gradient.The bulk of the increase in obesity appears to have occurred over the 1990ies, flattening during the first years of the new millennium and modestly declining in most recent years, at least in Egypt and Jordan. On the whole, the high levels of obesity in those countries appear to have been driven by the fairly stable, high obesity prevalence in the upper socioeconomic groups, while the observed changes in obesity over time are mostly driven by the changes in obesity within the lower socioeconomic groups.A decomposition analysis of the micro data also reveals that fairly consistently, obesity has been driven by an obesity enhancing age effect, a declining cohort effect, and a highly variable period effect, the combination of which renders the prediction of future trends very difficult.The initial multivariate analysis confirms at first sight the surprising independent, positive association between education, wealth and urban residence (alongside other relevant factors) on one hand and obesity on the other hand. Year-by-year analysis also shows that these effects are declining and that most recently obesity is becoming equally important in people and areas characterised by lower socioeconomic status. Once, however, we control for unobserved heterogeneity at the household level by estimating a within siblings (fixed effect) linear probability model (Griliches, 1979; Ashenfelter and Krugman, 1994), we tend to find that at least in most recent years, compared to people with lower education, college graduates are significantly less likely to be obese. Finally, we study the importance of neighborhood effects in determining obesity by estimating a spatial autoregressive model (Kelejian and Prucha, 1998)
During the postwar period, many countries have de-tracked their secondary schools, based on the v... more During the postwar period, many countries have de-tracked their secondary schools, based on the view that early tracking was unfair. What are the e¢ ciency costs, if any, of de-tracking schools? To answer this question, we develop a two skills-two jobs model with a frictional labour market, where new school graduates need to actively search for their best match. We compute optimal tracking length and the output gain/loss associated to the gap between actual and optimal tracking length. Using a sample of 18 countries, we …nd that: a) actual tracking length is often longer than optimal, which might call for some e¢ cient de-tracking; b) the output loss of having a tracking length longer or shorter than optimal is sizeable, and close to 2 percent of total net output.
This Discussion Paper is issued under the auspices of the Centre's research programme in LABOUR E... more This Discussion Paper is issued under the auspices of the Centre's research programme in LABOUR ECONOMICS. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Research disseminated by CEPR may include views on policy, but the Centre itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Centre for Economic Policy Research was established in 1983 as a private educational charity, to promote independent analysis and public discussion of open economies and the relations among them. It is pluralist and non-partisan, bringing economic research to bear on the analysis of medium-and long-run policy questions. Institutional (core) finance for the Centre has been provided through major grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, under which an ESRC Resource Centre operates within CEPR; the Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust; and the Bank of England. These organizations do not give prior review to the Centre's publications, nor do they necessarily endorse the views expressed therein. These Discussion Papers often represent preliminary or incomplete work, circulated to encourage discussion and comment. Citation and use of such a paper should take account of its provisional character.
We have shown that vocational education does not perform as well as academic education both in la... more We have shown that vocational education does not perform as well as academic education both in labour market outcomes and in the level of basic skills, including literacy and numeracy. This is especially true for higher education. Only at the upper secondary or post-secondary level does vocational education perform slightly better than academic education in the probability of being currently employed as well as in the time spent in paid employment, although the differences we find are small.
We propose a new methodology for identifying the causal effect of Protestantism versus Catholicis... more We propose a new methodology for identifying the causal effect of Protestantism versus Catholicism on the decision to become an entrepreneur. Our quasi-experimental research design exploits religious minorities' strong attachment to religious ethics and the exogenous historical determination of religious minorities' geographical distribution in the regions of the former Holy Roman Empire in the 1500s. We analyse European Social Survey data, collected in four waves between 2002 and 2008, and find that religious background has a significant effect on the individual propensity for entrepreneurship, with Protestantism increasing the probability to be an entrepreneur by around 5 percentage points with respect to Catholicism. Our findings are stable across a number of robustness checks, including accounting for migration patterns and a placebo test. We also provide an extended discussion of the assumptions' validity at the basis of our research design. This paper is one of the first attempts to identify a causal effect, rather than a simple correlation, of religious ethics on economic outcomes.
A Tale of Minorities: Evidence on Religious Ethics and Entrepreneurship from Swiss Census Data * ... more A Tale of Minorities: Evidence on Religious Ethics and Entrepreneurship from Swiss Census Data * Does Protestantism favour the market economy more than Catholicism does? We provide a novel quasi-experimental way to answer this question by comparing Protestant and Catholic minorities using Swiss census data from 1970 to 2000. Exploiting the strong adhesion of religious minorities to their confession's ethical principles and the historical determination of the geographical distribution of confessions across Swiss cantons, we find that Protestantism is associated with a significantly higher propensity for entrepreneurship. The estimated difference ranges between 2.3 and 4.4 percentage points. Our findings are robust to a number of robustness checks, including a placebo test.
It is widely believed that the expanding burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) is in no smal... more It is widely believed that the expanding burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) is in no small part the result of major macro-level determinants. We use a large amount of new data, to explore in particular the role played by urbanizationthe process of the population shifting from rural to urban areas within countriesin affecting four important drivers of NCDs worldwide: diabetes prevalence, as well as average body mass index (BMI), total cholesterol level and systolic blood pressure. Urbanization is seen by many as a double-edged sword: while its beneficial economic effects are widely acknowledged, it is commonly alleged to produce adverse side effects for NCD-related health outcomes. In this paper we submit this hypothesis to extensive empirical scrutiny, covering a global set of countries from 1980-2008, and applying a range of estimation procedures. Our results indicate that urbanization appears to have contributed to an increase in average BMI and cholesterol levels: the implied difference in average total cholesterol between the most and the least urbanized countries is 0.40 mmol/L, while people living in the least urbanized countries are also expected to have an up to 2.3 kg/m 2 lower BMI than in the most urbanized ones. Moreover, the least urbanized countries are expected to have an up to 3.2 p.p. lower prevalence of diabetes among women. This association is also much stronger in the low and middle-income countries, and is likely to be mediated by energy intake-related variables, such as calorie and fat supply per capita.
Health problems in this part of the world reverberate throughout society and bode ill for the fut... more Health problems in this part of the world reverberate throughout society and bode ill for the future.
We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the stand... more We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the standard requires costly effort, secondary education needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools, as in Epple and Romano, 1998. An alternative configuration, with public schools offering a higher educational standard than private schools, is also possible, in spite of the fact that tuition levied by private schools is strictly positive. In our model, private schools can offer a lower educational standard at a positive price because they attract students with a relatively high cost of effort, who would find the high standards of the public school excessively demanding. With the key parameters calibrated on the available micro-econometric evidence from the US, our model predicts that majority voting in the US supports a system with high quality private schools and low quality public schools, as assumed by Epple and Romano, 1998. This system, however, is not the one that would be selected by the social planner, who prefers high quality public schools combined with low quality private schools.
Overweight and obesity in the Middle East and North Africa: trends, socioeconomic inequalities and determinants
While there is widespread agreement at least in the scientific community that obesity has become ... more While there is widespread agreement at least in the scientific community that obesity has become a public health problem also in the developing world, there remains a persistent, and rather fundamental shortage of data to accurately measure the size and recent evolution of the problem, let alone its determinants. In this paper we make use of the Demograhic and Health Survey, a high quality survey whose main focus has been on “traditional” health challenges in developing countries, but which has routinely collected information on height and weight, at least for women. We focus on the Middle Eastern and North Africa region, as this is one region that appears to be facing a particularly severe but yet widely under-appreciated and under-researched public health challenge due to obesity. We use data for Egypt (5 rounds from 1992-2008), Jordan (4 rounds from 1990-2007) and Morocco (4 rounds from 1987-2003/4).We start at the macro level to demonstrate that the prevalence of obesity in those countries is significantly higher than in other countries at comparable per capita income levels. While the exceptionally high level of obesity applies to all socioeconomic groups in the country, it has thus far been the higher educated, the wealthier and the urban residents that display the largest prevalence (especially so in Egypt), unlike most other countries at a similar level of economic development. Recently, however, a trend has emerged towards a reversal in the socioeconomic gradient.The bulk of the increase in obesity appears to have occurred over the 1990ies, flattening during the first years of the new millennium and modestly declining in most recent years, at least in Egypt and Jordan. On the whole, the high levels of obesity in those countries appear to have been driven by the fairly stable, high obesity prevalence in the upper socioeconomic groups, while the observed changes in obesity over time are mostly driven by the changes in obesity within the lower socioeconomic groups.A decomposition analysis of the micro data also reveals that fairly consistently, obesity has been driven by an obesity enhancing age effect, a declining cohort effect, and a highly variable period effect, the combination of which renders the prediction of future trends very difficult.The initial multivariate analysis confirms at first sight the surprising independent, positive association between education, wealth and urban residence (alongside other relevant factors) on one hand and obesity on the other hand. Year-by-year analysis also shows that these effects are declining and that most recently obesity is becoming equally important in people and areas characterised by lower socioeconomic status. Once, however, we control for unobserved heterogeneity at the household level by estimating a within siblings (fixed effect) linear probability model (Griliches, 1979; Ashenfelter and Krugman, 1994), we tend to find that at least in most recent years, compared to people with lower education, college graduates are significantly less likely to be obese. Finally, we study the importance of neighborhood effects in determining obesity by estimating a spatial autoregressive model (Kelejian and Prucha, 1998)
During the postwar period, many countries have de-tracked their secondary schools, based on the v... more During the postwar period, many countries have de-tracked their secondary schools, based on the view that early tracking was unfair. What are the e¢ ciency costs, if any, of de-tracking schools? To answer this question, we develop a two skills-two jobs model with a frictional labour market, where new school graduates need to actively search for their best match. We compute optimal tracking length and the output gain/loss associated to the gap between actual and optimal tracking length. Using a sample of 18 countries, we …nd that: a) actual tracking length is often longer than optimal, which might call for some e¢ cient de-tracking; b) the output loss of having a tracking length longer or shorter than optimal is sizeable, and close to 2 percent of total net output.
This Discussion Paper is issued under the auspices of the Centre's research programme in LABOUR E... more This Discussion Paper is issued under the auspices of the Centre's research programme in LABOUR ECONOMICS. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Research disseminated by CEPR may include views on policy, but the Centre itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Centre for Economic Policy Research was established in 1983 as a private educational charity, to promote independent analysis and public discussion of open economies and the relations among them. It is pluralist and non-partisan, bringing economic research to bear on the analysis of medium-and long-run policy questions. Institutional (core) finance for the Centre has been provided through major grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, under which an ESRC Resource Centre operates within CEPR; the Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust; and the Bank of England. These organizations do not give prior review to the Centre's publications, nor do they necessarily endorse the views expressed therein. These Discussion Papers often represent preliminary or incomplete work, circulated to encourage discussion and comment. Citation and use of such a paper should take account of its provisional character.
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