No abstract

A limited number of studies have investigated the impacts of education on non-cognitive skills, yet they offer mixed results. A few studies suggest no impact, but others report positive impacts of education on non-cognitive skills. In this paper, we apply the elimination of Social Security student benefits that took place in the United States in 1982 to study the impacts of education on non-cognitive skills, as measured by the Rotter Locus of Control Scale and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. We apply eligibility for aid due to the death of father to avoid endogeneity in our analysis. Our results suggest that non-cognitive skills improve during the college education years, but the causality relationship from college education to non-cognitive skills disappears to a high extent when the prior levels of non-cognitive skills are controlled for.

Fluid intelligence, which refers to the ability of a person to solve novel problems independent of previously acquired knowledge, is a highly crucial factor in learning and has a big impact on educational and professional success. However, the impacts of formal education on fluid intelligence has been neglected in the literature. In this paper, we apply an exogenous variation in years of schooling to explore the impacts of education on fluid intelligence. From 1971 to the end of 1973, the global price of crude oil increased over 400%. Such an increase in oil price improved the revenue of the Indonesian government from oil production. Indonesia invested most of the new income on central government’s construction projects famous as “Presidential Instructions” (INPRES), which aimed to improve regional equity in the country. The largest INPRES program, known as Sekolah Dasar INPRES, also remains the largest school construction project in history. The government built over 60 thousand elementary schools all over the country from 1973 to 1978. Duflo (2001) studies the impacts of the program on years of education. We have received INPRES data from Duflo and combined it with the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), which contains individual cognitive ability tests. This dataset represents 83% of the population of 13 out of 26 Indonesian provinces. The results show positive and statistically significant impacts of years of schooling on the fluid intelligence of both females and males.

This paper investigates the impacts of a large and exogenous oil price shock in December 1973 on mortality rates of the major oil producer nations of the Middle East and North Africa. We use longitudinal data from 1960 to 2014 and we apply the difference-in-differences approach to investigate the main question of the research. Our findings show that the oil price shock did not lead to higher GDP per capita, but it did lead to lower mortality. These findings are puzzling. A possible explanation is that the oil price shock allowed for higher spending on publicly funded health care. We find a positive impact of the oil price increase on the number of hospital beds which perhaps suggests that higher oil revenues increased spending on public health and that possibly decreased mortality.