Do maternal health problems influence child's worrying status? Evidence from the British Cohort Study

an article by Xianhua Dai (Wuhan Institute of Technology, People’s Republic of China), Wolfgang Karl Härdle (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany and Singapore Management University) and Keming Yu (Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK)

Abstract

Conventional methods apply symmetric prior distributions such as a normal distribution or a Laplace distribution for regression coefficients, which may be suitable for median regression and exhibit no robustness to outliers. This work develops a quantile regression on linear panel data model without heterogeneity from a Bayesian point of view, i.e. upon a location-scale mixture representation of the asymmetric Laplace error distribution, and provides how the posterior distribution is summarized using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.

Applying this approach to the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS) data, it finds that a different maternal health problem has different influence on child’s worrying status at different quantiles. In addition, applying stochastic search variable selection for maternal health problems to the 1970 BCS data, it finds that maternal nervous breakdown, among the 25 maternal health problems, contributes most to influence the child’s worrying status.

JEL Classification: C11, C38, C63

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Gap year takers: uptake, trends and long term outcomes

a DFE Research Report (DFE-RR252) by Claire Crawford and Jonathan Cribb (Institute for Fiscal Studies through the Centre for Analysis of Youth Transitions (CAYT))

This report provides the first quantitative evidence on the characteristics and outcomes of gap year takers in the UK. It does so by using two rich survey datasets: the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE), which follows a cohort of young people as they make decisions about whether or not to enter higher education (HE) and whether or not to take a gap year at the height of the recent recession, and the British Cohort Study (BCS), which follows the population of individuals born in Great Britain in a particular week of April 1970, who were first eligible to enter HE in September 1988.

These two datasets together enable an assessment of the intentions, activities and characteristics of a recent cohort of gap year takers and the long term consequences of the decision to delay entry into HE for a range of outcomes, with a particular focus on wages and earnings.

Includes:

• Introduction
• Data
• Methodology
• Gap year takers in the LSYPE
• Gap year takers in the BCS and the long-run effects of gap years
• Conclusions

Full text (PDF 94pp)

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