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We study how the returns to education in the adult labor market affect children's school enrollment. We show that when families are liquidity constrained, the expected relationship between higher returns and children's schooling is ambiguous. When liquidity constraints matter, the relationship can only be assessed empirically. For African-South African liquidity-constrained households, we find a positive relationship that is quite robust.

This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure).

These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.

Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.

Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.

One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.

We estimate a dynamic programming model of schooling decisions in which the degree of risk aversion can be inferred from schooling decisions. In our model, individuals are heterogeneous with respect to school and market abilities but homogeneous with respect to the degree of risk aversion. We allow endogenous schooling attainments to affect the level of risk experienced in labor market earnings through wage dispersion and employment rate dispersion. We find a low degree of relative risk aversion (0.93) and the estimates indicate that both wage and employment rate dispersions decrease significantly with schooling attainments. We find that a counterfactual increase in risk aversion will increase schooling attainments. Finally, the low degree of risk aversion implies that an increase in earnings dispersion would have little effect on schooling attainments.

In Bangladesh, girls’ ability to complete schooling is compromised by poverty and the practice of early marriage. Although most girls enroll in school, rates of dropping out are high around puberty. This paper uses a panel survey (2001 and 2003) of nearly 3,000 adolescent girls in rural Bangladesh to predict schooling outcomes. The analysis explores household and community factors to explain school enrollment, dropping out and marriage. Girls in poor households are more likely to drop out before reaching secondary school. Girls in wealthier households are more likely to drop out later, because of marriage, and having more siblings increases this possibility.

Sustainable economic growth is a major policy target of many governments over the world; Hong Kong also has no exception after its sovereignty handover on 1^st July 1997. Hong Kong has also been inertly receiving more than one hundred Chinese immigrants every day for several decades which mainly serves the purpose of family reunion through One-way Permit scheme. There exists a public voice in relation to Chinese immigrants' intentions of migrating to Hong Kong; some people argued Chinese immigrants are not simply aimed to reunifying their family but purposely grasping public resources of Hong Kong; public resources include public healthcare benefits and subsidized public housing; such hidden motivation and immigrants' economic contribution are not theoretically mutually exclusive. This chapter summarizes literature in relation to various concerns about immigrants' contribution towards economic growth, also consolidates immigrants' survey results which regularly conducted by Hong Kong Home Affairs Department and Immigration Department, and utilized Hong Kong census and by-census datasets to empirically compare the return rates of schooling and work experience between Chinese immigrants and natives over the past forty years, and investigate the causality between Hong Kong economic growth rates and these two return rates.

Korean educational migrant (kirogi) families have received widespread popular attention due to their ironic form of family that sacrifices the togetherness of a family. Recent trends suggest that this practice is spreading to the less affluent classes and that many such families are heading to ‘new’ destinations, including Singapore. This study examines the transnational schooling and life experiences of Korean transnational educational families in Singapore. It addresses the questions, why did these families choose Singapore? Why did transnational schooling, which parents almost unanimously said that they had organised for the betterment of their children's future, lead to some families getting stuck in the destination country?

Fieldwork in Singapore and Korea was conducted between April 2006 and September 2007. In-depth interviews with both mothers and fathers who have at least one child attending public, private or international schools in Singapore, at the primary or secondary level, were conducted with 18 families. The analysis was conducted using a grounded theory approach and NVivo 7/8.

Although the Korean state's emphasis on international competitiveness and parental aspirations for their children's future upward social mobility were common motivators, Koreans in Singapore were also attracted by the relatively low cost, English–Chinese bilingualism and other ‘family-friendly’ features in Singapore. However, kirogi children had highly contrasting schooling experiences and they met with mixed success in gaining what they expected. Furthermore, many children in public schools faced demotion and other difficulties in their new school environments. Some less affluent families found themselves facing dilemmas of cross-border schooling. This study shows that transnational schooling does not necessarily operate equally favourably for participants from diverse class backgrounds. It also demonstrates that the societal contexts of reception in both the countries of origin and of destination, including the buffering institutions and reference groups and peer culture, are important factors shaping the schooling and life experiences of educational migrant children and in reconfiguring their trajectories.

This study examines a sharp decline of school attendance among white children in the Southern US after the Civil War. According to Census data, the school-attendance rate among whites in the Confederate states declined by almost half from 1860 to 1870, whereas the rate in Northern states was approximately stable. This shock left the South approximately three decades behind its antebellum trend. We account for little of this drop with household variables plausibly affected by the War. However, a select few county-level variables (notably the drop in wealth) explains around half of the decline, which suggests a systemic explanation. We adopt a model-based approach to decomposing the decline in schooling into demand versus supply factors. On the supply side, the region saw a decline in wealth and public resources, but we observe a stable relationship between time in school and literacy or adult occupation, which is not consistent with a contracting constraint on school quantity or quality. Nevertheless, further research is required to determine how much the contraction in school access affected attendance. On the demand-side, we present suggestive evidence of a decline in the return to school (measured by the relative wage of engineers to laborers). Relatedly, we see a “brain drain”: in longitudinally linked census samples, educated Southerners were more likely to migrate out of the South after the War.

Inequality in the distribution of family income in the U.S., which had remained virtually unchanged since the end of World War II until 1968, has increased sharply since then. In contrast, schooling and skill inequality has declined rather steadily over the postwar period. Another notable change over the past 30 years or so has been the widespread diffusion of computers. Using aggregate time-series data for the 1947–2000 period, I find that the largest effects on inequality come from office, computing and accounting equipment (OCA) investment, which accounted for about half of the rise in inequality between 1968 and 2000. The unionization rate is second in importance, and its decline over this period explains about 40 percent of the increase in inequality. The decline in the dispersion of schooling, on the other hand, plays almost no role in explaining the rise in inequality. On the basis of pooled time series, industry regressions for the 1970–2000 period, I also find that investment in OCA is positively related to changes in skill inequality, while changes in the unionization rate are negatively related.

This paper argues that the assumption of a homogeneous workforce, which is implicitly invoked in the decomposition analysis of changes in welfare indicators, hides the role that schooling and its returns may have on the understanding of these changes. Using Peruvian cross-sectional data for a period of 10 years (2004–2013) and counterfactual simulations, this paper finds that the main factor contributing to poverty reduction has been individuals’ changes in labor earnings, and the role of these changes has been less important in reducing income inequality. The main driving force of reduced income inequality has been the fall in returns to education, which at the same time has been one of the important factors to constraining the period’s remarkable progress in poverty reduction and expansion of the middle class.

This chapter reviews the status of Education For All (EFA) in China and identifies four gaps: between rural and urban residents, between residents of geographic regions, between ethnicity groups, and between the genders. It turns to examine the educational situation and interests of girls weighed down by the crushing burden of multiple disadvantages in “left-behind” Western China. Based on analysis of macro-level socio-economic and educational conditions, along with rich micro-level data on girls’ vigorous pursuit of education, the authors argue that the changing conditions of rural girls’ lives and their education can best be understood from a critical empowerment perspective. Summarizing the global discourse and cross national evidence on the benefits of girls’ education, the chapter and looks beyond a utilitarian perspective and argues for the cogency of a critical empowerment framework. Filled with telling stories and case studies of Han Chinese, Tibetan, and Muslim girls, this chapter proposes that prioritizing girls’ education in Western China is crucial and required for achieving the MDG of gender parity. Even though girls are often stranded by family financial conditions, their actions and ideas seeing education as their future reflect a changing gender identity and role in the family and society. The fieldwork suggests that educating girls promotes localized development, reduces dangerous levels of economic gaps and social instability, but also advances hard to measure effects: personal and civil empowerment, and sustainable, harmonious cultural change – as well as MDG.