Melissa Binder

The Motherhood Wage Penalty: Which Mothers Pay It and Why?

Studies of the motherhood wage penalty typically focus on the “pure” effect of children, holding all else equal. But as all parents know, the arrival of a child means that nothing stays the same. One change especially salient to labor economists is that many mothers exit the work force. Absences from the labor market are likely to reduce wages because general and firmspecific skills depreciate and workers lose rents associated with good job matches. Low-skilled workers may be less vulnerable to such earnings erosion, since they have less human capital and their wages reflect less rent. If so, these workers may escape a motherhood wage penalty. Conversely, we would expect highly skilled women to experience the largest penalties for exiting the labor force to care for their children.

Inequality and Intergenerational Mobility in Schooling: The Case of Mexico*

The authors consider two hypotheses for crowding at the lower-secondary level and the reversal in intergenerational mobility: 1) the economic crisis of the 1980s and 2) institutional barriers to the continued expansion of schooling. Though the crisis appears to have played a role we find evidence that institutional barriers are also important. The existence of these barriers is problematic for the long-term prospects of educational expansion because it suggests a deep-rooted limit of the system and not just a temporary setback. This article proceeds as follows. Section II discusses the links between schooling inequality intergenerational mobility in schooling and income inequality. Section III describes the data and provides an overview of educational expansion over the past 47 years. Section IV establishes trends in intergenerational schooling mobility. Section V ponders the causes and implications of the recent slowdown in schooling mobility and Section VI concludes. (excerpt modified)

Family background, gender and schooling in Mexico

This article is organised around two enquiries concerning the determinants of schooling attainment in Mexico. The first explores the importance of parental schooling for childrens educational attainment, which is a near‐universal finding in the literature. Even after controlling for usually unobserved family characteristics such as desired schooling, parental schooling continues to exert a strong influence on childrens attainment. The second enquiry examines differences in determinants of schooling for boys and girls. Schooling attainment for boys appears to be more sensitive to their number of siblings, household wealth and parents desired schooling. Girls’ schooling depends relatively more on birth order and family structure.

Community effects and desired schooling of parents and children in Mexico

Abstract This paper investigates community effects in the determination of desired schooling in a sample of more than 300 school children and their parents in three Mexican cities. Community residence is found to be a significant predictor of desired schooling of parents and children, even with comprehensive controls for child and family traits. Measurement error and omitted variable bias are considered, but rejected, as principal causes of this result. A comparison of recent and long-term residents of a community reveals that the predictive power of residence is much stronger for long-term residents. This result is interpreted as evidence of community effects, since the alternative hypothesis of Tiebout behavior predicts a stronger common effect for recent migrants. Potential sources of the community effects are then investigated with neighborhood-level data from the 1990 Mexican Census.

Who Benefits from a Lottery-funded College Subsidy? Evidence from the New Mexico Success Scholarship

This paper investigates the enrollment, retention and academic performance effects of NM Success, a merit-based lottery-funded scholarship established in 1997, using student-level data from the University of New Mexico. While we find a staggering 56 per cent increase in University enrollments, the program pays out four subsidies for every new student attracted to college. Less academically able, higher income students have the greatest enrollment response. The program has not improved retention, and students have responded to its performance requirements by reducing their credit hours. Held to overall enrollment objectives, the program is truly a Success, but it fares less well when held to the standards of economic efficiency and distributional equity.

Why Are Some Low-Income Countries Better at Providing Secondary Education?.

Despite the tremendous expansion in education access worldwide, countries differ dramatically both in primary and secondary enrollment rates and in student achievement. Although per capita income explains a great deal of the difference, schooling outcomes vary sharply even among countries at similar income levels. For example, among low-income countries in 2000 (those with per capita GDP below

Making the Invisible Visible: Advancing Quantitative Methods in Higher Education Using Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality.

746), net enrollment rates (NERs) varied from 30 percent to 100 percent at the primary level and from 5 percent to 78 percent at the secondary level. In a clear illustration of this variation, Vietnam and the Gambia, with respective per capita GDPs of

Does Broad-Based Merit Aid Improve College Completion? Evidence from New Mexico's Lottery Scholarship

417 and

Labor Force Participation and Household Work of Urban Schoolchildren in Mexico: Characteristics and Consequences

418, had secondary enrollments of 62 percent and 35 percent. This study asked whether developing countries with relatively better and worse secondary schooling enrollment and achievement outcomes differ systematically in the structure of their education finance (education expenditure as a share of GDP, secondary education expenditure as a share of total education spending, and per student costs) and service delivery features such as pupils per teacher, percent of students repeating a grade (the repetition rate), and percent of students older than expected for their grade level (the overage rate). It may well be that countries with limited secondary education have dedicated scarce resources to other priorities, such as the expansion of primary education or investments in infrastructure, and I do not wish to imply that these countries should necessarily divert scarce resources to the expansion of secondary education. At the same time, a common finding in the literature is that unit costs appear to be lower in school systems with better outcomes. As such, it may be the case that countries can improve secondary education outcomes without a large infusion of resources. Using available data, I argue that it is worthwhile to examine how countries with better outcomes at similar income levels manage to perform as well as they do. Several studies have explored these questions at the primary level and at least one has addressed the secondary level. In addition to the question

Schooling indicators during Mexico's "Lost decade"

Abstract We appeal to critical race theory and intersectionality to examine achievement gaps at a large public university in the American southwest from 2000 to 2015. Using white, high-income women as our reference group, we report linear combinations of marginal effects for six-year graduation rates and developmental course taking across 20 distinct social locations varying according to race-ethnicity, gender, and class. We find substantial achievement gaps that remain unseen in conventional models treating such characteristics as independent. Nearly every group has a significantly lower likelihood of graduation compared to the reference group, and there is substantial variation in estimated achievement gaps. Low-income, American Indian men are approximately 45 percent less likely to graduate within six years relative to the reference group. For high income, black men this gap is approximately 30 percent. Our paper proposes a method and praxis for exploring the complex, interdependent relationship between race-ethnicity, gender, and class.