Chile is unusual in having long-term experience with nationwide school vouchers. A key criticism of school voucher systems is that they make it easier for private schools to attract better teachers to the detriment of public schools. This paper uses longitudinal data from Chile to estimate a discrete choice dynamic programming (DCDP) model of teacher and nonteacher labor supply decisions and to explore how wage policies affect the composition of the teacher labor force in public and private schools. In the model, individuals first decide whether to get a teaching degree and then choose annually from among five work/home sector alternatives. Empirical results show that private voucher schools attract better teachers than public schools. However, the existence of the private voucher sector also draws higher-productivity individuals into the teaching profession.

Many studies find that parental resources importantly determine children's human capital, schooling returns, and earnings. The collective household approach suggests that, in addition, parental resources of marital partners may importantly affect resource distributions within marriage. This paper presents empirical results consistent with this framework. They suggest that parental wealth continues to play roles in augmenting welfare of children into adulthood beyond provision of human capital in early life-cycle stages or direct financial aid during adulthood, and that actual transfers from parents to adult children do not fully measure influences of parental wealth on behaviors and welfare of adult children.

We use data on monozygotic twins to obtain improved estimates of the effect of intrauterine nutrient intake on adult health and earnings and thus to evaluate the efficacy of programs aimed at increasing birthweight. We use the results to evaluate the bias in cross-sectional estimates and to assess the proposition that health conditions play a major role in determining the world distribution of income. We show that there is considerable variation in the incidence of low birthweight across countries, and our estimates suggest that there are real payoffs to increasing body weight at birth. Increasing birthweight increases adult schooling attainment and adult height for babies at most levels of birthweight, but has no effect on adult body mass. The effect of increasing birthweight on schooling, moreover, is underestimated by 50x% if there is no control for genetic and family background endowments as in cross-sectional estimates. We also find evidence that augmenting birthweight among lower-birthweight babies, but not among higher-birthweight babies, has significant labor market payoffs. However, shifting the distribution of birthweights in developing countries to that in the United States would reduce world earnings inequality by less than 1%, far less than indicated by the cross-country correlation between per-worker GDP and birthweight.

New survey-based data on siblings are used to assess potential roles of bequests in redistributing income among siblings as implied by prominent models. The data are not focused on the upper tail of the wealth distribution and include both own and sib reports on own and sib's bequests, enabling use of a measurement model. Results indicate that bequests are received by almost two-thirds of children, average bequests are significant fractions of annual earnings, and there are significant differences between sibs' schooling and earnings. However, there are not significant sib differences in bequests once measurement error is incorporated into the analysis.

A latent-variable representation of health is used in a system that determines health and various indicators of health and health-care utilization for Nicaraguan women. Estimates differ somewhat from standard estimates. They imply that women's schooling increases health-care utilization, literate women report less disease incidence, women's childhood backgrounds affect their adult health and health-care utilization, and general resources favor childbirth-related care, but women's full income favors general care. The most significant result is that several important characteristics usually associated with development-women's schooling, household resources, and women's labor force participation-have inverse or no associations with women's health. Health status is hypothesized to be important in developing countries, both as a direct indicator of welfare and because of its possible impact on productivity. Health-care utilization also is of interest, both because of its relation to health status and because it is a particular manifestation of demand and supply for a 1 modem service. Work on the determinants of health status and health-care utilization in developing economies, however, is flawed because true health status is not directly observable. The indicators of health status that have been used in empirical studies-anthropometric measures, days ill, self-reported or clinical disease records, inputs such as nutrients, and health-care utilization indicesare imperfect indicators of underlying health status and generally do not give a congruent representation of that status. Thereby they may not measure adequately health status and their use may lead to biases in estimates and incorrect interpretations. We use a latent variable methodology for the first time to explore health status and health-care utilization in a developing country.' This approach employs systematic relations between various indicators of health status and health status itself and between health status and various related outcomes so that it is possible to estimate the determinants of health status and control for health status in other relations, even though health status is not directly observed. By using this methodology we obtain more satisfactory estimates of the determinants of health status and of health-care utilization in a developing country context than previous estimates using direct but imperfect proxies. This should improve the empirical bases for evaluating health and related policies in the developing world. I. Latent Variable Model of Health Status and Health-Care Utilization In the human capital tradition of analysis of health, individual health status is viewed as determined by individual demand factors given supply prices, environment, age and resources (including genes). Health-care utilization is a derived demand for a service which is used to produce better health. To incorporate the latent variable representation of the unobserved health status, we assume that the demand-supply health status and health-care utilization interactions, as well as the relation of other health indicators to health status, can be represented by the following linear system of relations:

tional attainments suggests the usefulness of special training programs for unskilled immigrants. Further, the persistence of racial differentials underscores the importance of the enforcement of anti-bias employment regulations to protect non-white immigrants. Recent changes in immigration law under the Refugee Act of 1980 will increase uncertainty regarding the composition of future immigration waves. It is likely, however, that the proportion of immigrants for whom specialized training and anti-bias regulation enforcement can hasten the traditional catch-up process which has historically characterized the immigrant economic experience will continually increase. Additional research using more recent data will allow both the efficacy of the recommendations advanced and the persistence of the observed patterns to be tested.

We reassess the empirical robustness of the empirical findings in Jere R. Berhman and Mark R. Rosenzweig (2002) using new information on schooling which was collected and coded independently of codings carried out by both Kate Antonovics and Arthur Goldberger, and Berhmamn and Rosenzweig. We conclude that the independently coded data and the codings by Antonovics and Goldberger provide additional support for Behrman and Rosenzweig's original results showing that the positive cross-sectional relationship between a mother's schooling and her child's schooling is not robust to controls for unmeasured, intergenerationally correlated endowments, while the positive effect of paternal schooling is robust.

Does Increasing Women's Schooling Raise the Schooling of the Next Generation? by Jere R. Behrman and Mark R. Rosenzweig. Published in volume 92, issue 1, pages 323-334 of American Economic Review, March 2002

A local governmental welfare function is specified to explore two of its central characteristics: the equity-productivity trade-off and differential weights across neighborhoods. The constrained maximization model is estimated using service outcomes (safety) in the welfare function, as opposed to publicly provided inputs (police), over neighborhoods. The equity-productivity trade-off is found to be considerable, and not all neighborhoods are weighted equally. The results show that inequality aversion and unequal concern by local government over service outcomes must be addressed explicitly to understand the observed distribution of publicly provided inputs, with important implications for standard analysis of local governmental behavior.