Trade and Divergence in Education Systems

This paper presents a theory on the endogenous choice of a country's education policy and the two-way causal relationship between trade and education systems. The setting of a country's education system determines its talent distribution and comparative advantage in trade; the possibility of trade by raising the returns to the sector of comparative advantage in turn induces countries to further differentiate their education systems and reinforces the initial pattern of comparative advantage. Speci…cally, the Nash equilibrium choice of education systems by two countries interacting strategically are necessarily more divergent than their autarky choices,although the difference is still less than what is socially optimal for the world. We provide some preliminary empirical evidence on the relationship between education, talent distribution, and trade.Education System, Talent Distribution, Comparative Advantage, Trade Pattern

Trade and divergence in education systems

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier 1Published in International Economic Review, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1111/iere.12089</p

Musical experience may help the brain respond to second language reading

A person's native language background exerts constraints on the brain's automatic responses while learning a second language. It remains unclear, however, whether and how musical experience may help the brain overcome such constraints and meet the requirements of a second language. This study compared native Chinese English learners who were musicians, non-musicians and native English readers on their automatic brain automatic integration of English letter-sounds with an ERP cross-modal audiovisual mismatch negativity paradigm. The results showed that native Chinese-speaking musicians successfully integrated English letters and sounds, but their non-musician peers did not, despite of their comparable English learning experience and proficiency level. However, native Chinese-speaking musicians demonstrated enhanced cross-modal MMN for both synchronized and delayed letter-sound integration, while native English readers only showed enhanced cross-modal MMN for synchronized integration. Moreover, native Chinese-speaking musicians showed stronger theta oscillations when integrating English letters and sounds, suggesting that they had better top-down modulation. In contrast, native English readers showed stronger delta oscillations for synchronized integration, and their cross-modal delta oscillations significantly correlated with English reading performance. These findings suggest that long-term professional musical experience may enhance the top-down modulation, then help the brain efficiently integrating letter-sounds required by the second language. Such benefits from musical experience may be different from those from specific language experience in shaping the brain's automatic responses to reading.Peer reviewe