Parental aspirations, schools, and the limits of flexible citizenship: Examining elite return migrants’ schooling decisions

This article investigates how return migrant parents navigate primary and secondary education options in Bangalore, a city in southwest India, by addressing the following question: What factors do return migrant parents consider when making schooling decisions? Through analyzing interviews with return migrant parents from 37 different families, the author argues that parents ultimately want to give their children the skills necessary to pursue their educational and professional interests anywhere in the world. To do so, parents select the ‘best’ school for their child, taking into consideration its demographics, curriculum, and reputation. However, in the process of crafting their children’s transnational futures, parents encounter stumbling blocks as they prepare for the transition from high school to college.

Pollution, Ability, and Gender-Specific Investment Responses to Shocks

This paper explores how labor market conditions drive gender differences in the human capital decisions of men and women. Specifically, I investigate how male and female schooling decisions respond to an exogenous change in cognitive ability. Using data from Mexico, I begin by documenting that in utero exposure to thermal inversions, which exacerbate air pollution, leads to lower cognitive ability in adulthood for both men and women. I then explore how male and female schooling decisions respond differentially to this cognitive shock: for women only, pollution exposure leads to reduced educational attainment and income. I show that this gender difference is explained by the fact that women disproportionately sort into white-collar jobs, where schooling and ability are more complementary than they are in blue-collar jobs.

Schooling Decisions in Indonesia: a Lesson From Indonesian Crisis

This research aims to analyze the role of income shocks, gender, and resource competition between siblings against the school's decision at the level of primary and senior secondary education during the economic crisis in Indonesia. Methods in this research were conducted in two phases, fixed effect and conditional logit. Results reveal that no evidence of households' transitory income affected children's education level, both for primary and senior secondary education. Meanwhile, compared to boys, girls have a higher probability of dropping out of school and have lower school enrollment rates in primary education. This paper indicated the existence of resource competition between the younger child and the older child for education, especially for senior secondary education.JEL Classification: I20, I24, I25, J16How to Cite:Kharisma, B., Hadiyanto, F., & Remi, S. S. (2020). Schooling Decision in Indonesia: a Lesson From Indonesian Crisis. Signifikan: Jurnal Ilmu Ekonomi, Vol. 9(1), 81-92. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.15408/sjie.v9i1.12479.

The role of local labour market conditions and pupil attainment on post-compulsory schooling decisions

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of local labour market conditions and pupil educational attainment as primary determinants of the post-compulsory schooling decision. Design/methodology/approach Through the specification of a nested logit model, the restrictive independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption inherent in the multinomial logit (MNL) model is relaxed across multiple unordered outcomes. Findings The analysis shows that the factors influencing schooling decisions differ for males and females. For females, on average, the key drivers of the schooling decision are expected wage returns based on youth educational attainment, attitudes to school and parental aspirations, rather than local labour market conditions. For males, higher local unemployment rates encourage greater investment in education. Originality/value The contribution of this paper to the existing literature is threefold. First, a nested logit model is proposed as an alternative to a MNL. The former can formally incorporate the structured and sequential decision-making process that youths may engage with in relation to the post-compulsory schooling decision, as well as relaxing the restrictive IIA assumption inherent in the MNL across multiple unordered outcomes, an issue the authors discuss in more detail in the Methodology section below. Second, the analysis is based on extremely rich socio-economic data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, matched to local labour market data and administrative data from the National Pupil Database and Pupil Level Annual School Census, which provide a broad set of unusually high-quality measures of prior attainment. The authors argue that such high-quality data and an appropriate model specification allows identification of the determinants of the post-compulsory decision in a more detailed manner than many previous analyses. Third, the data have the scale necessary to consider whether the determinants of post-compulsory schooling decisions vary by gender, a particularly important issue given the differential education participation rates of males and females (e.g. in this cohort, females are about 10 percentage points more likely to go on to higher education in the UK than males), and the gendered choices of occupation (see, e.g. Bertrand, 2011). The work will, therefore, provide recent empirical evidence from England on gender differences in the determinants of education choices.