How Education Empowers Women in Developing Countries

This paper evaluates the impacts of education on women’s relational empowerment, within a context of 70 developing countries across the world. Exploiting the variation in educational attainment between biological sisters, we find that education is positively associated with women’s intra-household decision making authority in both financial and non-financial domains. Moreover, education reduces relational friction, especially women’s exposure to psychological abuse. Our mechanism analyses provide suggestive evidence that these improvements could be attributed to increased access to information, assortative matching, and better labor market outcome.

Labor Market Trajectories for Community College Graduates: How Returns to Certificates and Associate's degrees Evolve Over Time

We estimate labor market returns to terminal associate's degrees and certificates, with a particular focus on how returns for different credential types evolve over a longer period of time (11 years post entry) than most of the prior literature. We also explore how returns vary depending on labor market conditions and on which labor market outcome metric is used. Using administrative data from Ohio and an individual fixed-effects approach, we find that the value of an associate's degree grows substantially after graduation, and this finding is robust to choice of specification and outcome. The returns to a long-term certificate are flat over time in our main specification, but more sensitive to assumptions about individual-specific earnings trends. Returns to associate's degrees are notably higher in recession years versus pre-recession years. Finally, we find that associate's degrees lead to improved outcomes relative to non-completion across a range of metrics, including higher paying jobs, more stability in employment over time, and a greater likelihood of earning a living wage, while certificates generally pay off via the employment margin and a reduced likelihood of claiming unemployment insurance.

Education and Socio-economic Outcomes

Within the OECD INES Project, the development of indicators on "Education and socio-economic outcomes" is the focus of Network B's activities. The aims of education have always been viewed more broadly than imparting basic elements of knowledge and skills to youth. This article presents the framework that brings together the various areas in which the development work takes place: school-work transitions, continuing education and training, and human and social capital. The issue of equity, a central one in education, is also explicitly dealt with, mainly as a dimension integrated in each area of indicator development. After its initial work focussing on educational attainment of the population and the labor force - key measures of the "stock" of human capital - and education and earnings, Network B turned its attention to the resolution of comparability issues in labor market outcome indicators and the improvement of indicators related to lifelong learning. Stating the policy issues it is aiming to address always precedes indicator development work, so these issues are also presented in this article.