E se os professores ganhassem mais?

It's common to hear that teachers should be paid better — more like doctors and lawyers. In 2009, the Equity Project, a charter school in New York decided to try it: they would pay all their teachers $125,000 per year with the possibility of an additional bonus.

The typical teacher in New York with five years' experience makes between $64,000 and $76,000. The charter school, known as TEP, would pay much more. But in exchange, teachers, who are not unionized, would accept additional responsibilities, and the school would keep a close eye on their work.


Four years later, students at TEP score better on state tests than similar students elsewhere. The differences were particularly pronounced in math, according to a new study from Mathematica Policy Research. (The study was funded by the Gates Foundation.) After four years at the school, students had learned as much math as they would have in 5.6 years elsewhere:

(Mathematica Policy Research)

The gains erased 78 percent of the achievement gap between Hispanic students and whites in the eighth grade.

The results are important in part because TEP also appears to have sidestepped some common concerns about charter schools. They didn't expel or suspend students out of school in the first four years. There is no evidence that the school encouraged problem students to leave or transfer on their own. And the students who attended were roughly as likely to be low-income, and to have had similar levels of academic achievement before they arrived. They could still differ in other ways — they could have more involved parents, who get them into the charter school lottery, for example — but TEP doesn't present some of the obvious factors that help explain other charter schools' success.

How TEP hired and trained teachers

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The $125,000 number was eye-catching, but it was just the start of the school's approach to teaching. Teachers were also eligible for a bonus of between 7 to 12 percent of their salary. The teachers, who are not unionized, went through a rigorous selection process that included a daylong "audition" based on their teaching skills. The typical teacher already had six years of classroom experience before they were hired.

Teachers at TEP also get more time to collaborate and played a bigger role in school decision-making than teachers in other jobs. Teachers were paired up to observe each others' lessons and provide feedback, collaboration that experts agree is important but happens too infrequently. During a six-week summer training, teachers also helped set school policy.

The workload at TEP, where teachers also take on administrative duties and had an average of 31 students per class, is fairly heavy even with the extra pay. But the school also had more teacher turnover than usual. Nearly half of first-year teachers didn't return for their second year, either because they resigned or because they were not rehired. Teacher turnover has been found to have a slight effect on student achievement.

Overall, though, the results are promising. The researchers caution that this is just one study of a small school. It's not meant to prove that TEP's methods can work in every school nationally. But it appears to suggest that, at least, the approach worked at one school.

Fonte: aqui

Criação e Economia

Em 2011 Amy Chua começou um debate interessante: como o tipo de criação poderia interferir no futuro da criança? A discussão consagrou o termo “helicopter pareting” indicando um novo tipo de paternidade, onde os pais pairam sobre suas crias, guiando e protegendo-os.

Dois autores associaram o estilo de criação predominante em cada país com a economia. De um lado, pais que usam a coerção, impondo escolhas a seus filhos, num estilo autoritário; de outro lado, pais que usam a persuasão, tentando induzir as escolhas. Os autores acreditam que o estilo possa influenciar o coeficiente de Gini, que é uma conhecida medida de desigualdade social. Usando os países mais ricos do mundo, eles encontraram algumas relações interessantes. Entre elas destaco o seguinte gráfico:

Este gráfico mostra a importância que os pais indicam para o trabalho duro. Esta maneira de pensar é importante para os estadunidenses, que possuem elevada desigualdade, mas não é relevante para os escandinavos (Suécia, Noruega e Finlândia), onde o Gini é menor.

Credibilidade

O Banco Central Europeu (BCE) reprovou 25 bancos da Zona do Euro em testes de resistência que envolveram um total de 130 instituições da região. O grupo afetado necessita de mais € 25 bilhões (US$ 31 bilhões) de capital, de acordo com um relatório divulgado neste domingo pela entidade.
Entre os bancos afetados, a instituição monetária com sede em Frankfurt cita nove italianos, três cipriotas e três gregos, assim como o alemão Münchener Hypothekenbank e o francês Caisse de Refinancement de l'Habitat. (...)

Esta operação, chamada "Comprehensive Assessment", mobilizou mais de 6.000 pessoas. Ela procura determinar com precisão a posição financeira dos bancos antes de o BCE assumir em 4 de novembro o papel de supervisor bancário (SSM), no âmbito da união bancária em curso de formação.
A análise foi realizada em duas fases. Desde novembro de 2013, o BCE realizou a sua "revisão de qualidade de ativos" (AQR), um raio-X dos ativos e créditos de 130 bancos da zona do euro (mais a Lituânia).

Ao mesmo tempo, a Autoridade Bancária Europeia (EBA), com sede em Londres, realizou novos "testes de estresse", um exercício de simulação para testar a solidez dos bancos, submetendo-os a cenários de risco. O mais sombrio prevê um retorno à recessão, em um contexto de crise nos mercados financeiros e a queda dos preços da habitação.

Fonte: Brasil Econômico

É interessante o texto do Estado de S Paulo sobre o mesmo assunto:

Estrategistas de dívida do ING acreditam que vários bancos precisam ser reprovados para dar credibilidade ao teste de estresse europeu. Segundo eles, os problemas tendem a se concentrar em bancos menores e de médio porte, principalmente na periferia da zona do euro.

Listas: Subornos para subir na vida

A figura contraria tudo que vemos na vida prática. Perguntou-se em 44 países se era importante dar subornos para subir na vida. Zero era não é relevante e 10 muito importante. O resultado coloca China, Jordânia, Rússia e Polônia entre os primeiros colocados. O local onde os respondentes afirmaram que o suborno não era importante para subir na vida? Brasil.

Mas quando a pergunta era: "trabalhar duro" a escalo foi de 49 (entre 0 e 100).

Rir é o melhor remédio

Como seria a fotografia completa da capa de alguns álbuns:

E mais do nunca, neste tempo de extremos, Rir é o melhor remédio.

Fato da Semana

Fato da Semana:  A baixa qualidade das auditorias realizadas.

Qual a relevância disto? Anualmente o supervisor das auditorias dos Estados Unidos, o PCAOB, faz uma revisão selecionada dos trabalhos realizados. Na semana passada esta entidade divulgou que fiscalizou 50 trabalhos de auditorias e que 23 destes trabalhos não cumprem as normas do PCAOB. Isto é mais da metade dos trabalhos que foram investigados!

O relatório mostra o seguinte placar de problemas:

Deloitte: 28%PwC: 33,3%
KPMG 46%
EY: 50%

Metade dos trabalhos investigados da EY apresentaram problemas.

Positivo ou negativo? Negativo, sem dúvida nenhuma. Imagine que no maior mercado acionário do mundo temos esta elevada taxa de problemas. E nos demais?

Desdobramentos: Este relatório tem periodicidade anual e os problemas apontados são recorrentes. O resultado poderá ser usado no futuro para concluir que toda auditoria é de baixa qualidade. 

Geografia dos desempregados

IN THE OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, nearly 45m people are unemployed. Of these, 16m have been seeking work for over a year. Many put this apparently intractable scourge down to workers’ inadequate skills or overgenerous welfare states. But might geography also play a role?

In a paper* published in 1965, John Kain, an economist at Harvard University, proposed what came to be known as the “spatial-mismatch hypothesis”. Kain had noticed that while the unemployment rate in America as a whole was below 5%, it was 40% in many black, inner-city communities. He suggested that high and persistent urban joblessness was due to a movement of jobs away from the inner city, coupled with the inability of those living there to move closer to the places where jobs had gone, due to racial discrimination in housing. Employers might also discriminate against those that came from “bad” neighbourhoods. As a result, finding work was tough for many inner-city types, especially if public transport was poor and they did not own a car.


For the past 50 years, urban economists have argued over Kain’s theory. Some, like William Julius Wilson, then of Chicago University, pointed to the decline of inner-city manufacturing to explain the sharp spike in poverty in black inner-city neighbourhoods between 1970 and 1980—in keeping with Kain’s logic. Others, like Edward Glaeser, another Harvard economist, suggest that spatial mismatch is overblown. There may indeed be a correlation between where people live and their chances of finding a job. But the connection may not be causal: people may live in bad areas because they have been shunned by employers, either for lack of skills or because of racial discrimination.

Until recently economists did not have adequate data to back up their opinions. Studies used cross-sectional data—a snapshot of an economy at a single point in time—which made it hard to disentangle cause and effect. Did someone live in a bad area because they could not find a job, or was it more difficult to find a job because they lived in a bad area? It was also hard to know quite how inaccessible a particular job was. Researchers could calculate the distance between homes and job opportunities but struggled to estimate how much time it would take to get from one to the other by car or public transport. And the research was marred by small samples, often all from a single city.

A new paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, avoids these pitfalls. It looks at the job searches of nearly 250,000 poor Americans living in nine cities in the Midwest. These places contain pockets of penury: unemployment in inner Chicago, for instance, is twice the average for the remainder of the city. Even more impressive than the size of the sample is the richness of the data. They are longitudinal, not cross-sectional: the authors have repeated observations over a number of years (in this case, six). That helps them to separate cause and effect. Most importantly, the paper looks only at workers who lost their jobs during “mass lay-offs”, in which at least 30% of a company’s workforce was let go. That means the sample is less likely to include people who may live in a certain area, and be looking for work, for reasons other than plain bad luck.

For each worker the authors build an index of accessibility, which measures how far a jobseeker is from the available jobs, adjusted for how many other people are likely to be competing for them. The authors use rush-hour travel times to estimate how long a jobseeker would need to get to a particular job.

If a spatial mismatch exists, then accessibility should influence how long it takes to find a job. That is indeed what the authors find: jobs are often located where poorer people cannot afford to live. Those at the 25th percentile of the authors’ index take 7% longer to find a job that replaces at least 90% of their previous earnings than those at the 75th percentile. Those who commuted a long way to their old job find a new one faster, possibly because they are used to a long trek.

The annihilation of space with time

Other papers suggest that workers may be in the wrong place. A study from the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, finds that poverty in America has become more concentrated over the past decade. During the 2000s the number of neighbourhoods with poverty rates of 40% or more climbed by three-quarters. Unlike Kain’s day, though, poverty is growing fastest in the suburbs, not the inner cities. Pockets of concentrated poverty also tend to suffer from bad schools and crime, making them even more difficult to escape.

Spatial mismatch is not just an American problem. A paper by Laurent Gobillon of the French National Institute for Demographic Studies and Harris Selod of the Paris School of Economics finds that neighbourhood segregation prevents unemployed Parisians from finding work. Another study, conducted in England, concludes that those who live far from jobs spend less time looking for work than those who live nearby, presumably because they think they have little hope of finding one.

All this has big policy implications. Some suggest that governments should encourage companies to set up shop in areas with high unemployment. That is a tall order: firms that hire unskilled workers often need to be near customers or suppliers. A better approach would be to help workers either to move to areas with lots of jobs, or at least to commute to them. That would involve scrapping zoning laws that discourage cheaper housing, and improving public transport. The typical American city dweller can reach just 30% of jobs in their city within 90 minutes on public transport. That is a recipe for unemployment.

*Studies cited in this article

"Job displacement and the duration of joblessness: The role of spatial mismatch", by F. Andersson et al, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014

"The effect of segregation and spatial mismatch on unemployment: evidence from France", by L. Gobillon & H. Selod, Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2007

"The spatial mismatch hypothesis: three decades later", by J.F. Kain, Housing Policy Debate, 3(2), 371-460, 1992

"Spatial mismatch, transport mode and search decisions in England", by E. Patacchini, & Y. Zenou, Journal of Urban Economics, 58(1), 62-90, 2005.

"The Growth and Spread of Concentrated Poverty, 2000 to 2008-2012", by E. Kneebone, Brookings Institution

Fonte: aqui