Kuntal K. Das

HOME COMPUTERS AND EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES: EVIDENCE FROM THE NLSY97 and CPS*

Although computers are universal in the classroom, nearly twenty million children in the United States do not have computers in their homes. Surprisingly, only a few previous studies explore the role of home computers in the educational process. Home computers might be very useful for completing school assignments, but they might also represent a distraction for teenagers. We use several identification strategies and panel data from the two main U.S. datasets that include recent information on computer ownership among children--the 2000-2003 CPS Computer and Internet Use Supplements (CIUS) matched to the CPS Basic Monthly Files and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997--to explore the causal relationship between computer ownership and high school graduation and other educational outcomes. Teenagers who have access to home computers are 6 to 8 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than teenagers who do not have home computers after controlling for individual, parental, and family characteristics. We generally find evidence of positive relationships between home computers and educational outcomes using several identification strategies, including controlling for typically unobservable home environment and extracurricular activities in the NLSY97, fixed effects models, instrumental variables, and including future computer ownership and falsification tests. Home computers may increase high school graduation by reducing non-productive activities, such as truancy and crime, among children in addition to making it easier to complete school assignments.

Which Institutions Promote Growth? Revisiting the Evidence

Recent research examining the growth impacts of institutions have found that institutions are important in fostering economic growth. By building a framework around the institutional taxonomy proposed by Rodrik (2005), our paper contributes to the literature in the following way. First, we confirm the result that “institutions matter” and show that dfferent types of institutions matter differently for growth. By applying a dynamic panel model, we find that market-creating and market-stabilizing institutions are important in fostering economic growth. We then extend this analysis and investigate whether countries at different levels of development could respond heterogeneously to changes in their institutional structure. We find that poor countries benefit the most from market creating institutions and institutions that support market stability. We also find some evidence that market legitimizing institutions such as “democracy” are not necessarily optimal for growth in poor countries. These results have important implications for countries that decide on the optimal strategy to improve their institutional framework.

Are Competitive Banking Systems Really Stable

This study replicates Schaeck et al. (2009), henceforth SCW. SCW conclude that (i) concentration and competition (as measured by Panzar and Rosse’s H-statistic) represent two separate dimensions of the banking sector, with (ii) greater competition being associated with greater financial stability. Using their data, we are able to exactly reproduce their original results. However, when we use current vintage data for the variables in their dataset, from both the same and alternative data sources, we find that H-statistic fails to attain significance at the 5% level. We obtain this result even though we use the same variables, estimation, and sample as SCW—just with more recent data instead of the earlier (later revised) numbers provided by the data vendors. Additional tests, such as expanding the timeframe from 1980–2005 to 1980–2011, employing more recent data for H-statistic and concentration, or using the z-score as an alternative measure of financial distress, further confirm this result. Further, not only are the estimates statistically insignificant, but they are economically insignificant, with small effect magnitudes. Our paper suggests that competition may not positively contribute to financial stability after all.