As female labour force participation in the workforce increases in Singapore, the basic economic unit—the home—has become wealthier, although arguably at the expense of both personal and family leisure. Yet with additional income, breadwinners are better able to undertake investment for their own well-being or their children's well-being that can offset the net loss of utility associated with less leisure. Concomitantly, it is common to find a domestic helper living with a Singapore family and other specialist helpers such as paid home tutors, who come to the home. This paper examines how this new investment vis-a-vis new home variables affects a child's overall academic performance. Primarily, the effects of a mother's choice to work, the presence of either tutors or domestic helpers and the effects of different investment strategies to raise a child's qualitative attributes. The paper asserts that how a child performs academically is less dependent on his/her choice of time use; rather, it is the number of qualitative benefits the child receives in the home environment. The conventional wisdom of 'the more the better' is questioned by the results of this study, arguing instead that diminishing returns set in far quicker when over-investment in the child takes place.Academic performance, domestic helper, Singapore, tutors, simultaneous equation probit model,

The current Australian migration program rewards applicants for possessing Australian tertiary qualifications. This study examines whether such qualifications help mitigate the labour market disadvantages faced by immigrants in Australia. The effect of host country qualification on labour market assimilation is estimated by comparing the labour force participation and unemployment of natives with two groups of migrants: those holding foreign qualifications and those holding Australian qualifications. Controlling for factors such as level of education and experience, there is no evidence that Australian qualifications result in better labour market outcomes for migrants.

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From 1979, the Singapore government started to transform the nature of secondary education in Singapore. In 1979, nine schools were chosen as Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools. After the call towards reforming the school system in the 1980s, the development of Independent schools evolved. In 1994, a new category — the autonomous school — was established. Besides reforming the school structure, in 1992, the "ST Schools 100" (first published by The Straits Times on 19 August 1992) started to rank the top 50 schools in the Special/Express stream and the top 40 schools in the Normal stream, along with separate tables listing the top value-added schools in both streams. Until quite recently, this ranking scheme had been endorsed by the Ministry of Education since 1992 and published on their website annually since 1995. This paper looks at how these new initiatives have affected secondary school outcomes. Comprising a panel data set of 30 of the top 50 schools in Singapore over the 1991–2001 period, the study looks at the technical efficiency of schools as a response to the introduction of new initiatives using two methodologies. The first baseline approach is that of a Corrected Ordinary Least Squares (COLS) multiple-output distance function. The second methodology used is the technical efficiency frontier effects model as described by Battese and Coelli (1995) and Coelli and Perelman (1996) which is a maximum likelihood estimation technique.

A survey was conducted among 768 migrant workers working in urban cities in China finding out about their experiences over ten types of workplace bullying measures. This paper examines how the ex-ante choices of migrant workers in their choice of which region to work in, choice of how long to stay in their company, choice of level of education to receive, choice to transfer their hukou to the city of their workplace, and also their choice to be educated in the labor law, impact the intensity of workplace bullying experienced. Except for knowledge of the labor law, all other choices lessen workplace bullying in some of these dimensions but increases workplace bullying in others. For those with Junior High qualifications and above, the consistent result is that migrants who are more familiar with the labor law, are able to experience less workplace bullying across most of the ten domains.

An international journal that promotes research into effective learning and teaching practice in economics higher educationThe International Review of Economics Education is dedicated to enhancing learning and teaching in the higher education economics community. It provides a forum for high quality research in the areas of curriculum design, pedagogy, assessment, innovation and evaluation. The journal seeks to promote critical dialogue on educational theory and practice in economics and to demonstrate the relevance of research to good professional practice. Editors Moving to a new publisherWe are pleased to announce that from 2013 the International Review of Economics Education will be published by Elsevier. We will also be increasing our issues to three per calendar year. These changes reflect the growing success of the journal. We are very grateful to the referees who have provided immensely valuable comments on the increasing volume of submissions we have been receiving. We are also very pleased with the rising number of high quality submissions we have been receiving.Although we are moving publishers we will be maintaining our close connection with the Economics Network. The birth and growth of the journal would not have been possible without the Network which has been our home for ten years. It is through the generous funding from the Network that it has been possible to maintain the journal as open access with no author fees. Changing higher education policy in England has seen the withdrawal of government funding for the Network. The excellent work of the Network will, however, continue with the support of the Royal Economic Society, the Scottish Economic Society and many economics departments across the UK. Readers of the journal will be able to follow links to IREE through the Network web site and followers of the Network will be able to follow a link from the new Elsevier page for past IREE editions.We owe a special debt to John Sloman who, as Director of the Economics Network, has been enormously supportive of the journal. He has also helped a great deal in the negotiations for our move to a new publisher. We wish him well in his 'retirement'. Improving grades and upgrading the curriculumWhich factors are more important for students' grades? This issue includes papers which consider three plausible causes that have each attracted substantial interest from economics lecturers: prior achievement, students' critical reasoning and study time. These studies prompt reflection on the extent to which the effects of these three factors reflect the methods of teaching and assessment which dominate current practice in the profession.Chang Da Wan and Roland Cheo contribute to the literature on the effect of pre-university academic achievement on university economics achievement, following the paper on this topic in IREE by Fallan and Opstad (2010, Vol. 9). Wan and Cheo find that although overall pre-university achievement is important, there is no separate effect of performance on particular pre-university sub...

This study empirically investigates the impact (overall, regional, and seasonal) of weather and climate extremes on basic human needs by employing a new poverty index, i.e., the Human Needs Index (HNI), in the United States of America. Detecting the contemporaneous correlations between errors, we apply second-generation unit root tests on monthly statewide panel data ranging from January 2004 to December 2018. The results obtained through cross-sectional time-series feasible generalized least square (i.e., FGLS) regression suggest that human necessities statistically and significantly correlate with a positive response to the weather extremes (cold, low precipitation) and with extreme events (drought, flood). However, the response is the opposite of that in the case of high precipitation. The seasonal variations in necessities indicate that there is a significant escalation of the needs between July and December (January is taken as the reference month), but, in February, they substantially shrink. Furthermore, the regional implications imply that, with the West of the US taken as the reference region, needs are significantly augmented in the Midwest; conversely, in the east and the south, they are significantly decreased. We also observe that some interaction effects, such as high precipitation and personal income as an interaction term, significantly, but negatively, correlate with HNI, indicating a 0.025% shared effect. Contrary to these findings, high precipitation, coupled with supplements to wages and salaries, shows a positive joint association of 0.274% with HNI. Besides, low precipitation, coupled with the unemployment rate, personal income, and flooding, shows an additional positive and significant mutual effect, while low precipitation has a negative effect on basic human needs when coupled with supplements to wages and salaries. The corresponding estimated interacting coefficients are 3.77, scoring 0.053%, 0.592%, and −0.67%, respectively.

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