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Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions, but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small, or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups, and this suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects., University Education Choice: Causes and Consquences

Retrofit buildings are becoming popular in the United Kingdom as well as many parts of the advanced economies. Existing whole-life costing models have however, not proven to be robust enough to deal with building retrofit scenarios. Recent research has made a case for the existence of revocability and disruption in building retrofit investments. This paper evaluates the whole-life cost implication of revocability and disruption in office retrofit building projects. The potential implication of revocability and disruption are evaluated based on probability and fuzzy logic principles respectively. Two case study projects are selected to appraise the economic potentials of revocability and disruption. It was found that the average cost of revocability relative to the initial capital cost can be up to 119% over a 60-year life. It was also found that the average cost of disruption relative to the initial capital cost can be up to 12%. Future studies will utilise sensitivity analysis in assessing the relative preference of building retrofit configurations in office building projects. The external validity of this work is moderate, as the intention is to establish analytical generalisation rather than statistical generalisation for office retrofit building projects.

This paper investigates the causal relationship between birth weight and school achievement among children in grades 1 through 8. We find that birth weight significantly affects performance on both math and language test scores in school. Children with higher birth weight do better - a 10% increase in birth weight improves performance in math by nearly 0.05 standard deviations in 1st grade. Children who are born at a weight less than 1500 grams (very low birth weight) have scores in math that are 0.15 standard deviations less in 1st grade. We exploit repeated observations on children to show that birth weight has a persistent effect that does not deteriorate as children advance through grades (upto 8th grade). Children with greater birth weight are also less likely to have ever repeated a grade. The causal link is identified by using a twins estimator - we collected birth weight and basic demographic data on all twins born in Chile between 1992-2000 and match these twin pairs to administrative school records between 2002-2008. There are no differences in school attendance by birth weight, suggesting that missing school perhaps due to health problems is likely not a channel via which test score differentials arise.

El presente artículo presenta evidencia de que el traspaso de los movimientos del precio del petróleo al nivel general de precios ha disminuido en forma importante en las últimas décadas. Se encuentra que tal disminución es generalizada para un amplio conjunto de países. Luego de documentar correlaciones entre el índice de precios al consumidor y el precio del petróleo, se utilizan dos estrategias de estimación en un intento por identificar adecuadamente el efecto inflacionario de los shocks del petróleo. Primero, se estima la curva de Phillips tradicional para 34 países, aumentada de modo de incluir el petróleo y testear si existe quiebre estructural. Esta metodología muestra una caída en el traspaso medio estimado para los países industrializados y, en menor medida, para las economías emergentes. Segundo, se estiman vectores autorregresivos en ventanas moviles para una submuestra de países para los que existen datos suficientes. Se derivan funciones de impulso respuesta de la inflación a los shocks petroleros, y se interpretan las integrales como estimaciones del traspaso. Se encuentra que el efecto de los shocks petroleros sobre la inflación se ha reducido en la mayoría de los doce países de la muestra. Entre los factores que podrían explicar esta caída, en nuestra opinión los más importantes son que la intensidad económica del petróleo se ha reducido en el mundo, que también ha disminuido el traspaso del tipo de cambio, que el ambiente inflacionario es más favorable, y que el actual shock del precio del petróleo es el resultado de una sólida demanda mundial. Estos factores ayudan a entender no solo por qué el actual shock ha tenido efectos inflacionarios limitados, sino asimismo por qué sus consecuencias en el producto también han sido limitadas.

La literatura reciente sobre las interrupciones súbitas de los flujos de capital está basada en el hecho de que muchas economías emergentes han experimentado bruscas y variadas reversiones en su cuenta financiera. El presente artículo argumenta que es más informativo estudiar el comportamiento de los flujos brutos del capital, que solo mirar el resultado neto de éstos. Se enfatiza el hecho de que mientras una economía puede sufrir una interrupción súbita de influjos de capital producto de ser excluida de los mercados financieros internacionales, otra economía puede estar llevando a cabo un ajuste de portafolio, que genera una salida súbita de capital y conduce al mismo efecto neto en la cuenta financiera. Al analizar los flujos brutos, mostramos que entre países industriales y emergentes existe una variedad de experiencias que son heterogéneas entre sí. En particular, vemos que los frenazos de la entrada de capital son igual de comunes tanto en países industriales como en los países emergentes. La diferencia clave es que en el primer caso éstos están negativamente correlacionados con salidas de capital, lo que aminora el efecto neto final. Finalmente se presenta un modelo de diversificación financiera que permite interpretar la evidencia reportada.

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we present evidence from the United States, Chile, Sweden and Croatia that older siblings’ college and major choices can significantly influence their younger siblings’ college and major choices. On the extensive margin, an older sibling’s enrollment in a better college increases a younger sibling’s probability of enrolling in college at all, especially for families with low predicted probabilities of enrollment. On the intensive margin, an older sibling’s choice of college or major increases the probability that a younger sibling applies to and enrolls in that same college or major. Spillovers in major choice are stronger when older siblings enroll and succeed in more selective and higher-earning majors. The observed spillovers are not well-explained by price, income, proximity or legacy effects, but are most consistent with older siblings transmitting otherwise unavailable information about the college experience and its potential returns. The importance of such personally salient information may partly explain persistent differences in college-going rates by geography, income, and other determinants of social networks.

Social procurement policies require companies to develop and implement initiatives to create social value, yet many programmes created in response to these emerging policies lack a reliable empirical and theoretical foundation. Addressing this problem and brining a new theoretically informed evidence-based approach to social procurement research in construction, this paper presents a theoretically informed and methodologically robust social return on investment (SROI) analysis of a construction training programme developed to reduce the risk of youth homelessness. Mobilising Sen and Nussbaum's Capability Empowerment Approach, the paper provides robust, testable and transparent evidence of the social impact of the programme on the lives of the homeless people who went through it. Robust theoretically informed social procurement initiatives are critically important in ensuring that social procurement policies have their intended social outcomes.