Roland Cheo

Mothers, Maids and Tutors: An Empirical Evaluation of their Effect on Children's Academic Grades in Singapore

Abstract As female labour force participation in the workforce increases in Singapore, the basic economic unit—the home—has become wealthier, although arguably at the expense of both personal and family leisure. Yet with additional income, breadwinners are better able to undertake investment for their own well‐being or their childrens well‐being that can offset the net loss of utility associated with less leisure. Concomitantly, it is common to find a domestic helper living with a Singapore family and other specialist helpers such as paid home tutors, who come to the home. This paper examines how this new investment vis‐à‐vis new home variables affects a childs overall academic performance. Primarily, the effects of a mothers choice to work, the presence of either tutors or domestic helpers and the effects of different investment strategies to raise a childs qualitative attributes. The paper asserts that how a child performs academically is less dependent on his/her choice of time use; rather, it is the number of qualitative benefits the child receives in the home environment. The conventional wisdom of ‘the more the better’ is questioned by the results of this study, arguing instead that diminishing returns set in far quicker when over‐investment in the child takes place.

Do Australian Qualifications Help? The Effect of Host Country Qualification on Migrant Participation and Unemployment*

The current Australian migration program rewards applicants for possessing Australian tertiary qualifications. This study examines whether such qualifications help mitigate the labour market disadvantages faced by immigrants in Australia. The effect of host country qualification on labour market assimilation is estimated by comparing the labour force participation and unemployment of natives with two groups of migrants: those holding foreign qualifications and those holding Australian qualifications. Controlling for factors such as level of education and experience, there is no evidence that Australian qualifications result in better labour market outcomes for migrants.

Teaching Contingent Valuation and Promoting Civic Mindedness in the Process

Economics majors are often assumed to lack civic mindedness. The purpose of this paper then is to demonstrate how by engaging students in the proper understanding of contingent valuation (CV) methodology and by evaluating a social service, we can improve student outcomes in two areas: increasing their competence in research design as well as in the process teaching them to consider the more unfortunate. Since students are really learning by doing in this prescribed process, the attractiveness of the teaching methodology is that the instructor substitutes direct learning and instruction on research design for one where students learn much of the subject matter through experimentation. This paper articulates the experiences of conducting a CV exercise with 49 second- and third-year economics students from the National University of Singapore (in the Environmental Economics course) during the month of October 2001.

SMALL REWARDS OR SOME ENCOURAGEMENT? USING AN EXPERIMENT IN CHINA TO TEST EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

Extrinsic motivation can play a healthy role in influencing student performance, however, in the developing world without outside intervention, the provider of such extrinsic motivation is usually one with limited means, such as the village school teacher, or a parent struggling to make ends meet. Hence, this paper asks the question: Can limited extrinsic motivation affect academic performance? In particular, we look at two types of extrinsic motivation: small rewards and some encouragement and examine which does a better job to motivate students. We find in this study that the promise of a reward leads to improvement in scores during the treatment period, however, encouragement improves student performance in the post-treatment period (during the national primary school leaving examination).

Gamblers hate inequality: evidence from China

Two gambles are presented in this article along with two treatments which allow us to test for inequality aversion without having to consider risk aversion. This work complements existing studies by extending it to the gambling environment. In gambling decisions made from a ‘losses from an initial endowment’ approach, we find that regardless of whether out-of-pocket losses are an issue, both Chinese male and female students bet less when they know that losses will be distributed to the winners of gambles with excessive winnings.