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This thesis studies the impacts of school entry policy and information revelation on student outcomes using a sample of students from the province of British Columbia (BC), Canada. The questions examined by the first two essays arise from a policy used by many industrialized countries, whereby students born within a 1-year time span all begin school at the same time. This policy creates large differences in age among students in the same class, which are thought to affect their academic performance along a number of dimensions. In the first essay, I contribute to the literature by establishing the persistence in test score differentials among students in the same class who differ in age. I show that in grade 4 older students outperform younger students by a large margin in numeracy, reading and writing, an effect that persists to a lesser magnitude until grade 10. The persistence is strongest for the writing skill, and it is also much stronger for girls than for boys. The strength of the test score differential in grade 10 suggests that the effects of age could have more lasting effects on cognitive and labour market outcomes. In the second essay, I take a closer look at how age affects outcomes, by disentangling the entry age effect from the test age effect. Nearly all studies in this literature interpret age-related differences in student outcomes as the result of entry age, but because students who enter later are also older at every stage in compulsory schooling, the entry age effect has not been separated from the test age effect. Using a set of students entering school at the time of BC's dual entry experiment, I show that test age is largely responsible for age-related differences in the probability of repeating grade 3, and entry age is largely responsible for age-related differences in grade 10 numeracy and reading scores. I show further that having an extra year of schooling reduces the likelihood that a student repeats grade 3, but has a negligible impact on grade 10 test scores. Both the entry age and test age effects are stronger for boys than they are for girls. The final essay examines whether school choices change when parents are exposed to a new source of information on school quality. I model the effect of new information on choices using a simple expected utility framework and show that parents will use the new information to make different choices if they do not perceive it to be too noisy and if they have poor prior information on school quality. Furthermore, they make increasing use of the new information as more observations become available, since it becomes a more accurate predictor of true quality. Using the sudden release of BC's new standardized testing regime, I then study whether there is empirical support for the model. I show that the likelihood of switching out of a school increases when a school performs worse on the test, and that enrollment into kindergarten responds positively to increases in test scores. The response becomes stronger when more test score observations are available. Finally, I show variance in the response among parents living in less-educated neighbourhoods and among those who do not speak English at home, suggesting that prior information does play a role in the information use. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

A pension plan administrator promises certain benefits in the future in exchange for labor today. In order to budget for this expense and create more security for the participant, the administrator uses a pension cost method. Each cost method assigns a portion of the future liability to the current year. This is called the normal cost. We calculate the normal cost under three cost methods using different annuity, interest and inflation assumptions. Then we make comparisons between cost methods as well as between assumption changes. The cost methods considered in this paper are the unit credit cost method, projected unit credit cost method, and the entry age cost method. Both the constant dollar and the constant percent versions of the entry age cost method are considered.

Des nombreux aspects des fonds de pension, nous nous intéressons ici à leur modélisation et à l'organisation des systèmes de retraites dans le monde. Dans une première partie, nous présentons les différentes organisations de systèmes de retraites et la modélisation des fonds de pension en général suivie de la modélisation dynamique discrète avec la modélisation statique comme cas particulier de la discrète. Ainsi, nous constatons que les différents systèmes de retraites sont caractérisés par une grande diversité, mais restent néanmoins regroupés sous trois grands groupes qui se croisent souvent. Ce sont : les retraites par répartition, les retraites par capitalisation et les retraites par subvention. Nous introduisons la modélisation des systèmes de retraites par capitalisation en commençant par donner une vision générale incorporant une typologie des risques de fonds de pension. Nous présentons ensuite les méthodes pratiques et courantes de la modélisation en temps discret. La deuxième partie de la thèse accueille les développements de la modélisation en temps continu. Dans une économie dynamique et un marché non nécessairement complet, avec une expression stochastique des évolutions de l'inflation et des prix, nous usons du zéro-coupon nominal et du zéro-coupon indexé sur les prix de la consommation. Grâce aux outils et principes des assurances, des valeurs actuarielles des flux continus de cotisations et pensions sont fournies. Tout en faisant le lien avec les résultats issus de la littérature, nous appuyons, aussi bien en première partie qu'en deuxième, les portefeuilles optimaux de fonds de pension avec leurs probabilités de ruine, par des illustrations à travers des exemples concrets et des simulations numériques.