This is an attempt to view the relationships involving education and income as forming a system, and one that can generate a poverty trap.  The setting is rural China, and the data are from a national household survey for 2002, designed with research hypotheses in mind.  Enrolment is high in...

Econometric analyses of European datasets suggest that income aspirations increase with current income.  This finding is consistent with the adaptation hypothesis - the notion that individual aspirations adjust to reflect personal circumstances and living conditions.  We add to these existing...

Using a specially designed lab-type experiment conducted in the field, we compare the willingness of head teachers, centrally appointed public servants, and community representatives to hold Ugandan primary school teachers to account.  We find no difference in the willingness of centrally...

We report the short-term results from a randomized evaluation of a mobile phone literacy and numeracy program (Project ABC) in Niger, in which adult literacy students learned how to use mobile phones as part of a literacy and numeracy class.  Students in ABC villages showed substantial gains in...

This paper looks at some recent work on estimating quadratic variation using realised variance (RV) - that is sums of M squared returns. This econometrics has been motivated by the advent of the common availability of high frequency financial return data. When the underlying process is a...

In this paper we study the reliability of the mixed normal asymptotic distribution of realised variance error, which we have previously derived using the theory of realised power variation. Our experiments suggest that the asymptotics is reliable when we work with the logarithmic transform of...

This paper provides limit distribution results for power variation, that is sums of powers of absolute increments, for certain types of time-changed Brownian motion and $alpha $-stable processes. Special cases of these processes are stochastic volatility models used extensively in financial...

The existence of intergenerational spillovers to public investments in schooling is often assumed in policy discussions regarding economic development. However, few studies to date have forwarded convincing evidence that externalities exist for developing countries. In this paper, we address...

This paper shows that realised power variation and its extension we introduce here called realised bipower variation is somewhat robust to rare jumps. We show realised bipower variation estimates integrated variance in SV models --- thus providing a model free and consistent alternative to...

In order to assess the effect of jumps on realised variance calculations, we study some of the econometric properties of time-changed Levy processes. We show that in general we can derive the second order properties of realised variances and use these to estimate the parameters of such models....