Mehmet A. Soytas

Intergenerational Mobility and the Effects of Parental Education, Time Investment, and Income on Children’s Educational Attainment

This article analyzes the mechanisms through which parents? and children?s education are linked. It estimates the causal effect of parental education, parental time with children, and parental income during early childhood on the educational outcomes of children. Estimating the causal effects of time with children, income, and parental education is challenging because parental time with children is usually unavailable in many datasets and because of the problem of endogeneity of parental income, time with children, and education. The authors, therefore, use an instrumental variables approach to estimate the causal effects. They find that once they account for the parental time input with children, parental income during the first five years is no longer statistically significant. The parental time investments of both parents in early childhood are each statistically and quantitatively significant determinants of the educational outcomes of children.

Exploring the Nexus between Inflation and Globalization under Inflation Targeting through the Lens of New Zealand’s Experience

We investigate empirically the inflation dynamics in New Zealand, a small open economy and a pioneer in inflation targeting, under various open-economy Phillips curve specifications. Our forecasting exercise suggests that open-economy Phillips curves under standard measures of global slack do not help forecast domestic inflation, possibly indicating measurement problems with global slack itself. In turn, under a stable inflation target we still find that (i) global inflation and (ii) global inflation and oil prices have information content for headline CPI and core CPI inflation over the 1997:Q3-2015:Q1 period and appear to be reliable proxies for global slack in forecasting inflation.