Empirical Essays on the Effects of the Economic Cycle on Human Capital, Health and Fertility

Empirical Essays on the Effects of the Economic Cycle on Human Capital, Health and Fertility PDF Author: Sofia Maier
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789057286377
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Empirical Essays on the Effects of the Economic Cycle on Human Capital, Health and Fertility

Empirical Essays on the Effects of the Economic Cycle on Human Capital, Health and Fertility PDF Author: Sofia Maier
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789057286377
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description


Essays on Human Capital, Health, and Development

Essays on Human Capital, Health, and Development PDF Author: Yao Yao
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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This dissertation studies rich lifecycle behavior concerning human capital and health, and its implications for economic growth and development. It examines the impact of social institutions and government policies on individuals' lifetime choices which affect public health outcomes and economy-wide labor productivity. I apply macroeconomic approach and focus on aggregate effects, but both theoretical framework and quantitative analysis are built upon solid micro foundations of household behavior. By exploring the underlying channels, I derive policy implications for economic growth and development. This dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 studies the role of fertility motives in women's HIV risk in Sub-Saharan Africa, Chapter 2 studies the impact of higher education expansion along with economic reform on Chinas labor productivity, and Chapter 3 explores patterns of Chinas regional income disparity. Chapter 1 examines the role of social and cultural norms regarding fertility in women's HIV risk in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fertility, or the ability to bear children, is highly valued in most African societies, and premarital fertility is often encouraged in order to facilitate marriage. This, however, increases women's exposure to HIV risk by increasing unprotected premarital sexual activity. I construct a lifecycle model that relates a woman's decisions concerning sex, fertility and education to HIV risk. The model is calibrated to match Kenyan womens data on fertility, marriage and HIV prevalence. Quantitative results show that fertility motives play a substantial role in women's, especially young women's, HIV risk. If premarital births did not facilitate marriage, the HIV prevalence rate of young women in Kenya would be one-third lower. Policies that subsidize income, education, and HIV treatment are evaluated. Chapter 2 studies the impact of higher education expansion, along with economic reform of the state sector, in the late 1990's in China on its labor productivity. I argue that in an economy such as China, where allocation distortions widely exist, an educational policy affects average labor productivity not only through its effect on human capital stock, but also through its effect on human capital allocation across sectors. Thus, its impact could be very limited if misallocation becomes more severe following the policy. I construct a two- sector general equilibrium model with private enterprises (PE) and state-owned enterprises (SOE), with policy distortions favoring the latter. Households, heterogeneous in ability, make educational choices and occupational choices in a three-period overlapping-generations setting. Counterintuitively, quantitative analysis shows an overall negative effect of higher education expansion on average labor productivity (by 5 percent). Though it did increase China's skilled human capital stock significantly (by nearly 50 percent), the policy had the effect of reallocating relatively more human capital toward the less-productive state sector. It is the economic reform that greatly improves the efficiency of human capital allocation and complements educational policy in enhancing labor productivity (by nearly 50 percent). Chapter 3 explores patterns of China's regional income disparity. I document the stylized fact that the regional labor income disparity varies across industries with different skill in- tensities in China. While high-skill-intensive industries have larger income dispersions across regions than low-skill-intensive ones, this pattern tends to intensify over recent decades. I construct a model that interprets this pattern using the regional productivity variation of high-skilled firms, match-specific ability, firms' screening decision and workers' migration. In particular, firms in rich regions have higher productivity than those in poor regions. Workers are heterogeneous in ability, which is match-specific and unobservable before screening. Since ability and productivity are complements for high-skilled firms, these firms in rich regions pay more screening efforts to select workers with higher ability, and pay a higher wage in equilibrium. Workers live in different regions, and migration incurs a cost. This increases la- bor market tightness in rich regions and amplifies the regional income disparity. The model is quantified to match China's data. Counterfactual analysis shows that the screening process accounts for 45 percent of China's regional income disparity of high-skill-intensive industries, and migration barrier accounts for 10 percent.

Essays on Health, Human Capital and Economic Development

Essays on Health, Human Capital and Economic Development PDF Author: Minki Kim
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation consists of three chapters. In Chapter 1, I study the macroeconomic consequences of eradicating malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. To do so, I combine a general-equilibrium overlapping generations model with reduced-form empirical evidence. I find eliminating malaria in a representative sub-Saharan Africa through vaccination would increase the GDP per capita by 30% in the long run, which is nearly ten times larger than previously estimated. I also find that the gains stem from larger investments in human capital, amplified over multiple generations. In Chapter 2, in work joint with Titan Alon, Natalie Cox, and Arlene Wong, we study the welfare and productivity consequences of rising student debts in the United States. We first empirically estimate how student debts affect workers' early career outcomes using NLSY panel data. Then we construct a quantitative life-cycle model calibrated to match the empirical evidence and evaluate the federal student loan policies. We find that student debt forgiveness or repayment elongation policies improve welfare and labor productivity. The model suggests that a big chunk of the productivity gain comes from a small fraction of the workforce, who switch occupations in response to the policies. In Chapter 3, in work joint with Titan Alon, David Lagakos, and Mitchell VanVuren, we provide a quantitative macroeconomic framework to study why emerging markets fared worse relative to advanced economies and low-income countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. We adopt a workhorse incomplete-markets macro model to include epidemiological dynamics alongside key economic and demographic characteristics that distinguish countries of different income levels. We conclude that emerging markets fared especially poorly due to their high employment share in occupations requiring social interactions and their low level of public transfers. In contrast, low-income countries fared relatively better due mainly to their younger population and larger agricultural sector.

Population Policies, Fertility, Women's Human Capital, and Child Quality

Population Policies, Fertility, Women's Human Capital, and Child Quality PDF Author: T. Paul Schultz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Population policies are defined here as voluntary programs which help people control their fertility and expect to improve their lives. There are few studies of the long-run effects of policy-induced changes in fertility on the welfare of women, such as policies that subsidize the diffusion and use of best practice birth control technologies. Evaluation of the consequences of such family planning programs almost never assess their long-run consequences, such as on labor supply, savings, or investment in the human capital of children, although they occasionally estimate the short-run association with the adoption of contraception or age-specific fertility. The dearth of long-run family planning experiments has led economists to consider instrumental variables as a substitute for policy interventions which not only determine variation in fertility but are arguably independent of the reproductive preferences of parents or unobserved constraints that might influence family life cycle behaviors. Using these instrumental variables to estimate the effect of this exogenous variation in fertility on family outcomes, economists discover these quot;cross effectsquot; of fertility on family welfare outcomes tend to be substantially smaller in absolute magnitude than the OLS estimates of partial correlations referred to in the literature as evidence of the beneficial social externalities associated with the policies that reduce fertility. The paper summarizes critically the empirical literature on fertility and development and proposes an agenda for research on the topic.

Fertility Timing, Wages, and Human Capital

Fertility Timing, Wages, and Human Capital PDF Author: McKinley L. Blackburn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Human capital
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Essays on the Economics of Health and Fertility

Essays on the Economics of Health and Fertility PDF Author: Anupam B. Jena
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : AIDS (Disease)
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Three Essays on the Linkages Between Fertility Decisions, Human Capital Information with Intrinsic Motivation, Government Spending and Old Age Security

Three Essays on the Linkages Between Fertility Decisions, Human Capital Information with Intrinsic Motivation, Government Spending and Old Age Security PDF Author: Supian bin Mat Salleh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family size
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Household and Economy

Household and Economy PDF Author: Marc Nerlove
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 1483274683
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Household and Economy: Welfare Economics of Endogenous Fertility deals with welfare economics and the socially optimal population size, as well as the social consequences of individual choice with respect to family size within each generation. The general equilibrium implications of endogenous fertility for a number of issues of population policy are discussed. In addition to their own consumption, the number of children and the utility of each child is assumed to enter the utility function of the parents. Comprised of 10 chapters, this volume begins with a review of social welfare criteria for optimal population size and the static theory of optimal population size, optimal population growth with exogenous fertility, and the theory of endogenous fertility. The reader is then introduced to the basic principles of welfare economics and the economics of externalities, followed by a summary of the traditional theory of household behavior. Subsequent chapters focus on optimal population size according to various social welfare criteria; real and potential externalities generated by the endogeneity of fertility; and the principal alternative reason for having children: to transfer resources from the present to support the future consumption of parents in old age. The book concludes by assessing the implications of endogenous fertility for within-generation income distribution policies and reflecting on the directions in which future research may be fruitful. This monograph will be of value to economists, social scientists, students of welfare economics, and those who wish to understand the contribution of economic analysis to an improved understanding of population policy.

Essays on the Economics of Human Capital and Health

Essays on the Economics of Human Capital and Health PDF Author: Chiara Pastore
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Human capital, fertility, and economic growth

Human capital, fertility, and economic growth PDF Author: Javier M. de Bedoya
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : es
Pages :

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