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The Life Journeys of Young Women Project is the first population-based study to examine the role of economic uncertainty throughout early adulthood on age at first childbirth. A retrospective cross-sectional component was added to an existing cohort study that is based on a birth cohort of women born during 1973–1975 in Adelaide, South Australia (n ˜ 1,000). An event history calendar instrument was used to obtain data regarding a range of life domains including partnering, educational attainment, home ownership, higher education debt, employment, and pregnancies over a 20-year period (sometimes as detailed as at monthly intervals). Interviews were conducted between 2007 and 2009. An analysis framework applying time-varying and time-constant survival analysis techniques within a life-course framework was developed that will guide analyses to examine the role of duration and life-course timing of economic uncertainty on age at first childbirth. This paper discusses study objectives and design, fieldwork procedures, planned statistical analyses, and recruitment outcomes, focusing on novel features that would facilitate analogous epidemiologic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the flux of education reform in the U.S. and the pressing issue for greater school choice as of 2017. Topics discussed include the origins and view of school choice as the solution to the public education bureaucracy, research which shows that charter school students are mostly from poor minority groups, and the profit-driven demand for privatizing publics schools. The author states that school system power relationships must be understood and used for capacity building.

The time that children spend in school varies across countries. Do these differences explain international gaps in pupils' academic achievements? In this article I estimate the effects of instructional time on students' achievement using PISA 2006 data, which include data samples from over 50 countries. I find that instructional time has a positive and significant effect on test scores, and that the effect is much lower in developing countries. Evidence also suggests that the productivity of instructional time is higher in countries which implemented school accountability measures or that gave schools autonomy in budgetary decisions and in hiring/firing teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about the economic mechanisms leading to the high level of clustering in behaviour commonly observed in the data. We present a model where agents can interact according to three distinct mechanisms and we derive testable implications which allow us to distinguish between the proposed mechanisms. In our application we study students' performance and we find that a mutual insurance mechanism is consistent with the data. Such a result bears important policy implications for all those situations in which social interactions are important, from teamwork to class formation in education and co-authorship in academic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A burgeoning literature in psychology and economics examines how personality characteristics predict indicators of attained status. We build on this research by suggesting that connections between personality and attained status are also socially contingent: Valued personality characteristics are stronger predictors of attainments at lower levels of parent education (the resource substitution hypothesis), but such characteristics are less likely among the children of less educated parents (the structural amplification hypothesis). We examine these possibilities by drawing on the Mini-IPIP (a standardized instrument assessing personality), the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and a statistical framework to test for moderated mediation. Results reveal that (1) personality characteristics have notable associations with educational attainment, hourly wages, and self-direction at work; (2) personality often has stronger associations with status attainments at lower levels of parent education; and (3) personality is a weak mediator of associations between parent education and attained status. That is, the children of less educated parents may benefit more from valued personality characteristics, but they are slightly less likely to possess such characteristics. These results are discussed in terms of new avenues for research into diverse forms of capital and status attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents results of innovative surveys that tracked academic high achievers from five countries to wherever they moved in the world to directly measure at the micro level the channels through which high-skilled emigration affects sending countries. There are high levels of emigration and of return and the income gains to the best and brightest from migrating are an order of magnitude greater than any other effect. Most high-skilled migrants from poorer countries remit but involvement in trade and foreign direct investment is rare. Fiscal costs vary widely but are much less than the benefits to the migrants themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]