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High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

Virtually all parents want their children to succeed academically. How to achieve this goal, though, is far from clear. Specifically, the temporal spacing between adjacent births has been shown to affect educational outcomes. While many of these studies have produced substantial and statistically significant results, these results have been relatively narrow in their application due to data limitations. Using Colorado birth certificates matched to schooling outcomes, we investigate the relationship between birth spacing and educational attainment. We instrument birth spacing with a previous pregnancy that did not result in a live birth. We find no overall effect of spacing on either the first or second children’s grade 3–10 test scores. Stratifying by the sexes of the children, we find that when the first child is a boy and the second a girl, an extra year of spacing increases the first child’s math, reading, and writing test scores by 0.07–0.08 SD, while there is no impact on the second child. This is the first study to do such an analysis using matched large-scale birth and elementary to high school administrative data, and to leverage a very large dataset to stratify our results by the sexes of the children.

We use OECD-PIAAC data to estimate the earnings effects of both years of education and of numerical skills. Our identification strategy exploits differential exposure to educational reforms across birth cohorts and countries. We find that education has the strongest earnings effect. A one standard deviation increase in years of education raises earnings by almost 22 percentage points (corresponding to a return to education above 7 percentage points), which compares with a lower percentage points return to an equivalent increase in numerical skills. Our results suggest that the same set of unobservables drives the accumulation of both formal years of education and numeracy skills. OLS estimates underestimate returns to human capital, consistently with the idea that educational reforms favor the human capital acquisition of abler children from disadvantaged parental backgrounds. When we consider numerical skills alone education reforms cannot identify any significant effect of skills on wages, however, when we jointly consider schooling and skills as endogenous factors in a recursive structure we find a significant role for skills in determining wages.

The payoff to schooling among the foreign born in the United States is only around one-half of the payoff for the native born. This paper examines whether this differential is related to the quality of the schooling immigrants acquired abroad. The paper uses the overeducation/required education/undereducation specification of the earnings equation to explore the transmission mechanism for the origin-country school-quality effects. It also assesses the empirical merits of two alternative measures of the quality of schooling undertaken abroad. The results suggest that a higher quality of schooling acquired abroad is associated with a higher payoff to schooling among immigrants in the US labor market. This higher payoff is associated with a higher payoff to correctly matched schooling in the United States, and a greater (in absolute value) penalty associated with years of undereducation. A set of predictions is presented to assess the relative importance of these channels, and the undereducation channel is shown to be the more influential factor. This channel is linked to greater positive selection in migration among those from countries with better quality schools. In other words, it is the impact of origin-country school quality on the immigrant selection process, rather than the quality of immigrants' schooling per se, that is the major driver of the lower payoff to schooling among immigrants in the United States.

This chapter discusses some of the criticisms of standardized assessments by doing a document analysis of mainly Mexico's and Argentina's ministries of education's web sites and exploring the theoretical work of diverse authors, mainly critical pedagogues and culturalists. This chapter argues that the process of assessment using standardized tests is a highly political and even commercial process, but the challenge to compete globally, still perform locally, collaborate in solidarity, and decide collectively whose knowledge is of most worth is still before us. As exemplified in Mexico's test ENLACE, standardized tests tend to show a negative bias against minorities and tendency to highlight certain values and knowledge. Countries should seek for as many partnership opportunities with teachers and communities to be able to assess learning collectively and even consider not adopting policies passively, as opposed to having an international organization or policy dictating what is worth knowing and testing. This way, assessment will still help countries compete globally, still perform locally, and collaborate in solidarity.

This chapter analyzes the World Bank's Education Strategy 2020 (WBES) to assess its likely impact on inequality. The chapter begins with a review of assessments of the Bank's past education policies. It then compares four different theoretical perspectives on education policy: social class equalization, public goods, human capital, and neoliberalism. Applying quantitative and qualitative content analysis to the WBES, we identify the World Bank's approach as promoting a neo-liberal capitalist development ideology emphasizing private sector schooling and nonformal education along with standardized testing. Our analysis predicts that this strategy will not lead to major increases in educational equality in the developing world, and may even increase inequality.