B E Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 

About: B E Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is an academic journal published by De Gruyter. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Competition (economics) & Wage. It has an ISSN identifier of 1935-1682. Over the lifetime, 1084 publications have been published receiving 23016 citations. The journal is also known as: B.E. journal of economic analysis and policy.

The Inheritance of Educational Inequality: International Comparisons and Fifty-Year Trends

Abstract: This paper estimates 50-year trends in the intergenerational persistence of educational attainment for a sample of 42 nations around the globe. Large regional differences in educational persistence are documented, with Latin America displaying the highest intergenerational correlations, and the Nordic countries the lowest. We also demonstrate that the global average correlation between parent and child's schooling has held steady at about 0.4 for the past fifty years.

Mental Health and Academic Success in College

Abstract: Mental health problems represent a potentially important but relatively unexplored factor in explaining human capital accumulation during college. We conduct the first study, to our knowledge, of how mental health predicts academic success during college in a random longitudinal sample of students. We find that depression is a significant predictor of lower GPA and higher probability of dropping out, particularly among students who also have a positive screen for an anxiety disorder. In within-person estimates using our longitudinal sample, we find again that co-occurring depression and anxiety are associated with lower GPA, and we find that symptoms of eating disorders are also associated with lower GPA. This descriptive study suggests potentially large economic returns from programs to prevent and treat mental health problems among college students, and highlights the policy relevance of evaluating the impact of such programs on academic outcomes using randomized trials.

Racial and Economic Factors in Attitudes to Immigration

Abstract: In this paper we distinguish between three channels that determine attitudes to further immigration: labour market concerns, welfare concerns, and racial or cultural concerns. Our analysis is based on the British Social Attitudes Survey. A unique feature of the survey is that it includes questions on attitudes towards immigration from different origin countries, with populations differing in ethnic similarity to the resident population. It also contains sets of questions relating directly to the labour market, benefit expenditure and welfare concerns, and racial and cultural prejudice. Based on this unique data source, we specify and estimate a multiple factor model that allows comparison of the relative magnitude of association of attitudes to further immigration with the three channels, as well as comparison in responses across potential immigrant groups of different origin. Our results suggest that, overall, welfare concerns play a more important role in determination of attitudes to further immigration than labour market concerns, with their relative magnitude differing across potential emigration regions and characteristics of the respondent. In addition, we find strong evidence that racial or cultural prejudice is an important component to attitudes towards immigration; however, this is restricted to immigration from countries with ethnically different populations.

Entrepreneurship and Household Saving

Abstract: Using data from the 1983 and 1989 Federal Reserve Board Surveys of Consumer Finances, we quantify three findings about entrepreneurial saving decisions and their role in household wealth accumulation. First, entrepreneurial households own a substantial share of household wealth and income, and this share increases throughout the wealth distribution and the income distribution. Second, the portfolios of entrepreneurial households, even wealthy ones, are very undiversified, with the bulk of assets held within active businesses. Third, wealth-income ratios and saving rates are higher for entrepreneurial households even after controlling for age and other demographic variables. Taken together, these findings suggest that studies of household saving decisions in general and of the savings decisions of wealthy or high-income households in particular have paid insufficient attention to the role of entrepreneurial decisions and their role in wealth accumulation.

The Role of Wealth Transformations: An Application to Estimating the Effect of Tax Incentives on Saving

Abstract: Researchers may want to estimate the percentage change of a variable, such as household wealth or corporate profits, that takes on economically significant nonpositive values. Using the logarithmic transformation, however, requires discarding observations with nonpositive values. This paper describes a possible solution to this problem-the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation-and shows how to implement this transformation optimally in the case of median regression. As an illustration of the usefulness of this transformation, I revisit a specification sometimes used to estimate the effect of tax incentives on household saving.