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The aim of this chapter is to present a brief review of the main trends in the reforms of school structures in Europe that have happened over the past 25 years. The review comprises school systems in 38 European countries: the European Union member states, the European Free Trade Association countries, and some countries in South-Eastern Europe. The chapter starts with an introduction to the reasons for focusing on the school structures, and then outlines the following six main reform trends: (1) decreasing the school entrance age; (2) expanding compulsory preschool education; (3) increasing the duration of compulsory school education; (4) increasing the duration of primary education; (5) eliminating primary education as a separate level by providing single basic education; and (6) continuing the diversity of school structures. The chapter concludes with short prognoses on the six trends.

Tax risk refers to the uncertainty of future corporate taxation. Tax reform is a key issue in major current tax system adjustments that seriously affect a firm's tax risk. In response to changes in the economic environment, many countries are actively executing tax reform. Long-term reforms implemented for a smooth transition may instead increase corporate risk. This study examines the relationship among tax risk, tax reform and investment timing.

Selecting the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange A-share listed companies' panel data from 2008 to 2017, the paper used survival analysis and the propensity score matching-difference in difference models.

The results show that a higher corporate tax risk results in more deferred investments, which are further examined using the latest Chinese value-added tax reform as a natural experiment.

The conclusion serves as an important reference for governments to balance reform time and to support enterprises in effectively identifying and managing tax risk under tax reform.

The purpose of this paper is to use the two-way fixed effect (TWFE) methodology to estimate the impact of the reform, exploiting its staggered implementation across regions. The analysis is restricted to graduates from the short vocational track before and after the reform.

This paper studies the impact on the length of school-to-work transition of a reform that extended from two to three years the short vocational track in Italy in the early 2000s.

The study finds that the reform had a positive impact and reduced school-to-work transition by around five months (a 24% reduction). Moreover, the new short vocational track proved to be extremely effective for migrants and females, whose school-to-work transition was reduced by 1.4 years and 0.9 years, respectively. In implementing the new short vocational track, some regions adopted a quasi-market organization in which private training institutions competed with public schools. This model proved to be more effective in shortening school-to-work transitions, in particular for migrants.

This study makes an important contribution to the literature on the labor-market effect of vocational education by showing that lengthening the short vocational track, and changing the overall content of curricula, can speed up school-to-work transition.

Purpose – Since the mid-1980s, unemployment policy reforms in Europe and throughout the rich democracies have stressed publicly supported activation of the unemployed through both reductions in perceived disincentives to work as well as commitments for improved training, employment services, and related policies. In this chapter, I systematically explore the domestic and international political economic sources of these policy changes.

Methodology/approach – I test a set of hypotheses – original and derivative – about the domestic and international determinants of labor market policy change through pooled time-series cross-section analysis of 1980-to-2002 annual data from 18 capitalist democracies. The dependent variables consist of national spending on active labor market policy, measures of passive unemployment compensation benefits, and the ratio of active to passive unemployment program spending. Causal models account for spatial diffusion of policy reforms as well as core political and economic determinants of policy change.

Findings – I find that Left party governments and coordinated market institutions buoy resources for active labor market programs, maintain relatively generous passive unemployment supports and entitlements, and, at the same time, foster a shift to more active social policy. International trade openness promotes generous active labor market policies while more left-leaning voters and veto points within the polity significantly constrain reductions in unemployment benefits and entitlement rights. De-industrialization reinforces policy reforms toward activation while high unemployment rates engender cuts in passive unemployment benefits and eligibility conditions.

Originality/value – Overall, the chapter demonstrates that the economic effects on policy change notwithstanding, politics fundamentally matters: domestic political dynamics and variations in institutions explain the preponderance of the change (or lack thereof) in unemployment policy.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the empirical literature on the association between non-compete agreement (NCA) enforceability and entrepreneurship by investigating how NCA policies affect different types of entrepreneurship with incorporated and unincorporated businesses.

The authors estimate difference-in-differences regressions based on individual-level data. This allows to control for heterogeneity at the individual level. Additionally, the authors provide graphical evidence using the synthetic control method (SCM).

The authors' findings show that the decrease in the enforceability of NCAs in Massachusetts resulted in a higher rate of unincorporated entrepreneurship among low-wage workers. At the same time, there was no sizable effect on the rate of incorporated entrepreneurship. For Utah, the authors' results indicate that the reform increased both types of entrepreneurship. The findings imply that states can promote entrepreneurial activity by reducing the enforceability of NCAs. The way of changing the enforceability of NCAs matters, as different provisions encourage different types of entrepreneurship in a given state.

The authors contribute to the literature on NCA enforceability effects on entrepreneurship in three ways. First, the authors utilize two quasi-experiments, the NCA policy changes in Utah in 2016 and Massachusetts in 2018, limiting NCAs to one year for all workers. Second, to the authors' knowledge, this is the first individual-level analysis that separates self-employment with incorporated and unincorporated businesses as two different types of entrepreneurship to analyze potentially heterogeneous effects of NCAs. Third, this is the first study to utilize American Community Survey (ACS) data in this literature.

At the heart of educational work is the teacher; and, everybody in the society from parents to the federal government, school administrators, industry, policy-makers, teacher educators, and not-for-profit organizations carry certain notions about the practice of teaching and work of teachers. Each constituency desires to have able, committed, and qualified teachers to care for the young ones of their society. Developing quality teachers is intricately linked to the quality of teacher education. Teacher educator professionalism is central to the improvement of teacher education and therefore school learning, and needs greater emphasis in the context of India. This chapter begins by outlining the work of teacher educators in higher education-based initial teacher preparation programs. It then gives a brief overview of the changes in initial teacher education in the early twenty-first century. This chapter further analyses the various dimensions of teacher educators’ quality of practice as framed by educational documents to gather insights about their practice among the diverse contexts in India. This chapter makes a plea to teacher educators in India to come together as a collective and take responsibility for strengthening quality teaching in India. This chapter concludes with a proposal for a framework of professional practice of teacher educators.

Educational policies are widely recognized as the means par excellence to equalize opportunities among children with different social and family backgrounds and to promote intergenerational mobility. In this chapter, we focus on the French case and we apply the opportunity equalization criterion proposed by Andreoli, Havnes, and Lefranc (2019) for evaluating the effect of rising compulsory schooling requirements in secondary education. Our results show that such education expansion has a limited redistributive effect on students’ earnings distribution. Nonetheless, we provide evidence of opportunity equalization among groups of students defined by family background circumstances.

China is known for its culture of uniformity and conformity. Such a cultural tradition was reinforced in the socialist system that was established in 1949. This was significant in education, which then became an important and instrumental part of the planned economy. During the high time of the planned economy, the entire nation was but one gigantic production unit under one central plan. People's lives are therefore also highly coordinated according to a general national plan. Products from all over the country were collected by the central government, and resources over the entire country were allocated by the central government. Therefore by design, there was not disparity, but then there was also no diversity.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the utility-level productivity changes in Indian electricity sector during a period that witnessed structural reforms through several landmark regulatory changes.

A transformed fixed-effect stochastic frontier panel approach accounting for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity is employed to evaluate the productivity changes, and the inefficiency level in 98 utilities spanning over the years 2001–2010. A flexible translog production model is modeled and estimated, and decomposition of productivity into components of changes in efficiency, scale technology and price effect is computed.

The empirical findings obtained from the present study suggest that the utility-level productivity in Indian electricity sector has generally declined during the observed period of 2001–2010 specifically after the implementation of Electricity Act 2003. Also, it is estimated that the state-level un-bundling of the electricity sector is not significantly associated with utility-level efficiency change. Furthermore, efficiency improvements attributable to increased competition are observed only in the case of smaller gas-based generating utilities.

Earlier studies on the productivity evaluation of Indian electricity industry have applied the non-parametric data envelopment analysis approach, which has several limitations. The novelty of the paper lies in the fact that this paper is one of the first attempts that implement transformed fixed-effect stochastic frontier panel approach and thus disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from inefficiency. Furthermore, it is the only paper that analyzes 98 utilities (51 generating utilities, 38 transmission and distribution licensees and 9 vertically integrated utilities) in a single framework during the period 2001–2010.