Economics of education.

• Position: Bureau News - National Bureau of Economic Research meeting - Brief Article

The NBER's Program on the Economics of Education, directed by Caroline M. Hoxby, NBER and Harvard University, met in Cambridge on November 1. The following papers were discussed.

Raquel Fernandez, NBER and New York University, "Education, Segregation, and Marital Sorting. Theory and an Application to the U.K. Data" (NBER Working Paper No. 8377)

Michael Kremer, NBER and Harvard University, and Edward Miguel, University of California at Berkeley, "Worms: Education and Health Externalities in Kenya" (NBER Working Paper No. 8481)

Thomas J. Nechyba NBER and Duke University, "School Finance, Spatial Segregation, and the NAture of Communities"

Esther Duflo, NBER and MIT, "The Medium-Run Effects of Educational Expansion: Evidence from a Large School Construction Program in Indonesia."

Intestinal helminths--including hookworm, roundworm, schistosomiasis, and whipworm -- infect more than one-quarter of the world's population. A randomized evaluation by Miguel and Kremer of a project in Kenya suggests that school-based mass treatment with deworming drugs reduced school absenteeism in treatment schools by one quarter; the gains were especially large among the youngest children. Deworming is cheaper than alternative ways of boosting school participation. By reducing the transmission of disease deworming creates substantial benefits among untreated children in the treatment schools and among children in neighboring schools. These externalities are large enough to justify fully subsidizing treatment. The authors find no evidence that deworming improves academic test scores, though. Existing experimental studies, in which treatment is randomized among individuals in the same school, find that deworming treatment has small and insignificant effects on education; however, these studies underestimate the true treatment effects if deworming indeed creates positive externalities for the control group and reduces attrition in the treatment group.

Fernandez presents a model of the intergenerational transmission of education and marital sorting. Parents matter both because of their house-hold income and because their human capital determines the distribution of a child's disutility from making an effort to become skilled. The author shows that in the steady state an increase in segregation has potentially ambiguous effects on the fraction of individuals who become skilled, and hence on marital sorting, the personal and household income distribution, and welfare...