Essays on Educational Attainment and Labor Outcomes

Essays on Educational Attainment and Labor Outcomes PDF Author: Audrieanna Tremise Burgin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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My dissertation includes three essays on educational attainment and labor outcomes, where each paper details an interesting topic related to education. Chapter 1 is the introduction of my dissertation. In Chapter 2, I estimate the correlation between parental wealth and educational attainment across age groups of 0-5, 6-10, 11-14, 15-18, and 19-25. Chapter 2 matches individual data to their corresponding family data. The data is compiled from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore whether parental wealth during childhood correlates to the individual's educational attainment. I hypothesize that wealth has a positive relationship to educational attainment and that parental wealth during these age groups of childhood is an essential driver of differences in achievement later in life. My analysis concludes that parental wealth has a statistically significant correlation to educational attainment. When analyzed across age groups, parental wealth has the most substantial relationship to ages 0-5, the individual's early childhood education years. In Chapter 3, I explore the relationship of spousal education on labor outcomes for women using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. The main research question is whether the husband's level of education correlates to the wife's earnings. The sample includes controls for race and educational level for the females. Additionally, for comparison, my analysis is also estimated for men. Then, the additional regressions compare how spousal education correlates to females' earnings versus how spousal education correlates to earnings for males. I find that the perceived benefits of marriage are more robust for men and women. In Chapter 4, I analyze academic achievement and efficacy in the Lake Wales Charter School System of Lake Wales, Florida. I use school-level data to conduct a difference-in-difference estimation of Lake Wales Charter Schools compared to Polk County Public Schools. Additionally, I run a difference-in-difference estimation for the Lake Wales Charter School system up to four years post-implementation. Chapter 5 is the conclusion of my dissertation.

Essays on Educational Attainment and Labor Outcomes

Essays on Educational Attainment and Labor Outcomes PDF Author: Audrieanna Tremise Burgin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
My dissertation includes three essays on educational attainment and labor outcomes, where each paper details an interesting topic related to education. Chapter 1 is the introduction of my dissertation. In Chapter 2, I estimate the correlation between parental wealth and educational attainment across age groups of 0-5, 6-10, 11-14, 15-18, and 19-25. Chapter 2 matches individual data to their corresponding family data. The data is compiled from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore whether parental wealth during childhood correlates to the individual's educational attainment. I hypothesize that wealth has a positive relationship to educational attainment and that parental wealth during these age groups of childhood is an essential driver of differences in achievement later in life. My analysis concludes that parental wealth has a statistically significant correlation to educational attainment. When analyzed across age groups, parental wealth has the most substantial relationship to ages 0-5, the individual's early childhood education years. In Chapter 3, I explore the relationship of spousal education on labor outcomes for women using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. The main research question is whether the husband's level of education correlates to the wife's earnings. The sample includes controls for race and educational level for the females. Additionally, for comparison, my analysis is also estimated for men. Then, the additional regressions compare how spousal education correlates to females' earnings versus how spousal education correlates to earnings for males. I find that the perceived benefits of marriage are more robust for men and women. In Chapter 4, I analyze academic achievement and efficacy in the Lake Wales Charter School System of Lake Wales, Florida. I use school-level data to conduct a difference-in-difference estimation of Lake Wales Charter Schools compared to Polk County Public Schools. Additionally, I run a difference-in-difference estimation for the Lake Wales Charter School system up to four years post-implementation. Chapter 5 is the conclusion of my dissertation.

Essays on Education and Labor Market

Essays on Education and Labor Market PDF Author: Shoya Ishimaru
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The first chapter examines the importance of college and labor market options associated with childhood location in shaping educational and labor market outcomes experienced by a person later in life. I estimate a dynamic model that considers post-high school choices of whether and where to attend college and where to work, subject to home preferences, mobility costs, and spatial search frictions. The estimated model suggests that spatial gaps in local college and labor market options in the United States give rise to a 6 percentage point gap in the college attendance rate and an 11% gap in the wage rate at 10 years of experience between the 90th and 10th percentiles of across-county variation in each outcome. The second chapter suggests how the difference between linear IV and OLS coefficients can be interpreted and empirically decomposed when the treatment effect is nonlinear and heterogeneous in the true causal relationship. I show that the IV-OLS coefficient gap consists of three components: the difference in weights on treatment levels, the difference in weights on observables, and the difference in identified marginal effects. Using my framework, I revisit return to schooling estimates with compulsory schooling and college availability instruments. The third chapter investigates equilibrium impacts of federal policies such as free-college proposals, taking into account that human capital production is cumulative and that state governments have resource constraints. In the model, a state government cares about household welfare and aggregate educational attainment. Realizing that household choices vary with its decisions, the government chooses income tax rates, per-student expenditure levels on public K-12 and college education, college tuition and the provision of other public goods, subject to its budget constraint. We estimate the model using data from the U.S. Using counterfactual simulations, we find that free-public-college policies, mandatory or subsidized, would decrease state expenditure on and hence the quality of public education. More students would obtain college degrees due to increased enrollment. Over 86% of all households would lose while about 60% of the lowest income quintile would gain from such policies.

Three Essays on Examining the Relationship Between Education and Labor Market and Health Outcomes

Three Essays on Examining the Relationship Between Education and Labor Market and Health Outcomes PDF Author: Jeremy Arkes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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THREE ESSAYS ON EDUCATIONAL DECISIONS AND LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES OF YOUTHS

THREE ESSAYS ON EDUCATIONAL DECISIONS AND LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES OF YOUTHS PDF Author: Xingfei Liu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Short- and Long-Term Influences of Education, Health Indicators, and Crime on Labor Market Outcomes: Five Essays in Empirical Labor Economics

Short- and Long-Term Influences of Education, Health Indicators, and Crime on Labor Market Outcomes: Five Essays in Empirical Labor Economics PDF Author: Elisabeth Lång
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
ISBN: 9176854639
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of how several individual characteristics, namely education (years of schooling), health indicators (height, weight, smoking, alcohol consumption, and exercise), criminal behavior, and crime victimization, influence labor market outcomes in the short and long run. The first part of the thesis consists of three studies in which I adopt a within-twin-pair difference approach to analyze how education, health indicators, and earnings are associated with each other over the life cycle. The second part of the thesis includes two studies in which I use field experiments in order to test the employability of exoffenders and crime victims. The first essay, Learning for life?, describes an analysis of the education premium in earnings and health-related behaviors throughout adulthood among twins. The results show that the education premium in earnings, net of genetic inheritance, is rather small over the life cycle but increases with the level of education. The results also show that the education premium in health-related behaviors is mainly concentrated on smoking habits. The influences of education on earnings and health-related behaviors seem to work independently of each other, and there are no signs that health-related behaviors influence the education premium in earnings or vice versa. The second essay, Blowing up money?, details an analysis of the association between smoking and earnings in two different historical social contexts in Sweden: the 1970s and the 2000s. I also consider possible differences in this association in the short and long run as well as between the sexes. The results show that the earnings penalty for smoking is much stronger in the 2000s as compared to the 1970s (for both sexes) and that it is larger in the long run as compared to the short run (for men). The third essay, Two by two, inch by inch, describes an analysis of the height premium among Swedish twins. The results show that the height premium is relatively constant over the life cycle and that it is larger below median height for men and above median height for young women. The estimates are similar for monozygotic and dizygotic twins, indicating that environmentally and genetically induced height differences are similarly associated with earnings over the life cycle. The fourth essay, The employability of ex-offenders, published in IZA Journal of Labor Policy (2017), 6:6, details an analysis of whether male and female exoffenders are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. The results show that employers do discriminate against exoffenders but that the degree of discrimination varies across occupations. Discrimination against ex-offenders is pronounced in female-dominated and high-skilled occupations. The magnitude of discrimination against exoffenders does not vary by applicants’ sex. The fifth essay, Victimized twice?, describes an analysis of whether male and female crime victims are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. This study is the first to consider potential hiring discrimination against crime victims. The results show that employers do discriminate against crime victims. The discrimination varies with the sex of the crime victim and occupational characteristics and is concentrated among high-skilled jobs for female crime victims and among femaledominated jobs for male crime victims.

Essays in Labor Economics

Essays in Labor Economics PDF Author: John M. McAdams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781303175671
Category : Advanced placement programs (Education)
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays in labor economics. The first chapter tackles a classic problem in labor economics: estimating the returns to schooling. Compulsory schooling laws have been used extensively as an instrument for years of completed schooling in estimating the causal effect of education on a number of outcomes. But pre-existing state-level trends in educational attainment induce a spurious positive relationship between educational attainment and compulsory schooling laws. An event study model reveals that the laws have no effect on the distribution of educational attainment, thus making them inappropriate as an instrument. The laws' ineffectiveness can be explained by non-compliance and by measurement error in the proxy used to assign the laws in typical micro datasets. The second chapter investigates the impact of school starting age policy on the propensity to commit crime. The timing of school entry will affect the maturity and readiness to learn of those whose entry decision is directly affected by the policy, and students who are not directly affected by changes in school entry policies may benefit from an older average cohort through positive peer effects. I find that a higher school starting age cutoff leads to lower rates of incarceration among both those directly affected by the laws and those who were only indirectly affected. However, the reduction in crime among those directly affected is smaller in magnitude, implying that delaying school entry is harmful with respect to crime outcomes. The third chapter examines whether expanding access to advanced coursework--in particular, Advanced Placement (AP) courses--in high school leads to greater student participation and changes in post-secondary outcomes. I study the receipt of two federal grants to expand student participation in AP within a large, urban school district. Exposure to the grant led to a 38 percent increase in average AP course taking, as well as higher enrollment at two-year colleges and persistence to the second year of college.

Essays on Determinants of Disparity in Education and Labor Market Outcomes

Essays on Determinants of Disparity in Education and Labor Market Outcomes PDF Author: Anjali Priya Verma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation examines the determinants of disparity in education and labor market outcomes. The first chapter, co-authored with Imelda, examines the impact of clean energy access on adult health and labor supply outcomes by exploiting a nationwide roll-out of clean cooking fuel program in Indonesia. This program led to a large-scale fuel switching, from kerosene, a dirty fuel, to liquid petroleum gas, a cleaner one. Using longitudinal survey data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and exploiting the staggered structure of the program rollout, we find that access to clean cooking fuel led to a significant improvement in women’s health, particularly among those who spend most of their time indoors doing housework. We also find an increase in women’s work hours, suggesting that access to cleaner fuel can improve women’s health and plausibly their productivity, allowing them to supply more market labor. For men, we find an increase in the work hours and propensity to have an additional job, mainly in households where women accrued the largest health and labor benefits from the program. These results highlight the role of clean energy in reducing gender disparity in health and point to the existence of positive externalities from the improved health of women on other members of the household. The second paper studies the labor supply response of women to changes in expected alimony income. Using an alimony law change in the US that significantly reduced the post-divorce alimony support among women, I first show that this led to an increase in divorce probability. Second, consistent with the theoretical prediction from a simple model of labor supply, the reform led to an increase in the female labor force participation, with a larger increase among ever-married and more educated samples of women. As a result, the average female wage income increased after the reform. While labor supply increased, I show that most of this increase was concentrated in part-time employment, which may not be sufficient to compensate for the expected loss in alimony income. In light of the recent movement in the US to reform alimony laws, these findings are pertinent to understand its implications on women’s labor supply and economic well-being. The third chapter, co-authored with Akiva Yonah Meiselman, studies the long-run effects of disruptive peers in disciplinary schools on educational and labor market outcomes of students placed at these institutions. Students placed at disciplinary schools tend to have significantly worse future outcomes. We provide evidence that the composition of peers at these institutions plays an important role in explaining this link. We use rich administrative data of high school students in Texas which provides a detailed record of each student’s disciplinary placements, including their exact date of placement and assignment duration. This allows us to identify the relevant peers for each student based on their overlap at the institution. We leverage within school-year variation in peer composition at each institution to ask whether a student who overlaps with particularly disruptive peers has worse subsequent outcomes. We show that exposure to peers in highest quintile of disruptiveness relative to lowest quintile when placed at a disciplinary school increases students’ subsequent removals, reduces their educational attainment, and worsens labor market outcomes. Moreover, these effects are stronger when students have a similar peer group in terms of the reason for removal, or when the distribution of disruptiveness among peers is more concentrated than dispersed around the mean. Our findings draw attention to an unintended consequence of student removal to disciplinary schools, and highlights how brief exposures to disruptive peers can affect an individual’s long-run trajectories

Three Essays on the Economics of Education and Early Childhood

Three Essays on the Economics of Education and Early Childhood PDF Author: Francisco Haimovich Paz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
In these essays, I study the long-term effects of education policies and birth order on educational and labor market outcomes. In my first chapter I study the long-term effects of one of the first early education programs in the US - the Kindergarten Movement (1890-1910). I collected unique data on the opening of public kindergartens across cities in the US during this period. I then link over 100,000 children living in these cities to subsequent Censuses where their adult outcomes can be observed. I find that kindergarten attendance had large effects on adult outcomes. On average, the affected cohorts had about 0.6 additional years of schooling and six percent more income (as measured by occupational score). These effects were substantially larger for second generation immigrant children. The effects of this early intervention are most likely due to language acquisition and the attainment of various "soft skills" early in childhood. The second chapter was co-authored with Maria Laura Alzua and Leonardo Gasparini, who directed the project. In this chapter, we study the long-term effects of an educational reform in Argentina. In the nineties Argentina implemented a large education reform that mainly implied the extension of compulsory education in two additional years. The timing in the implementation substantially varied across provinces, providing a source of identification of the causal effects of the reform. The estimations from difference-in-difference models suggest that the reform had a positive impact on years of education and the probability of high school graduation. The impact on labor market outcomes was positive for the non-poor youths, but almost null for the poor. In my third chapter I use US historical data to empirically test whether long-term birth order effects differ across the leading and lagging regions of the country in the Pre-War World II period. To do so, I create a large panel dataset by linking more than two million children across the 1920 and the 1940 full census counts, and to the World War II army enlistment records. I then study birth order effects on various long-term outcomes (with emphasis on educational outcomes). I find that in general, birth order effects are positive in the "developing" south--i.e. younger siblings do better than older siblings-- and negative in the relatively modern north, which is consistent with the available evidence from contemporary data for developed and developing countries. I then exploit state level variation to show that birth order effects are positively correlated with the share of rural population, child labor rates and negatively correlated with the level mechanization in agriculture. I also show that, regardless the state of birth, the effects tend to be larger for the poor. Finally, I complement the analysis by looking at birth order effects on earnings and adult height. While I find relatively similar results for earnings, I find no birth order effects on adult height, which suggests that we can rule out improvements in health or nutrition as the potential mechanisms behind the effects on education and labor outcomes.

Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education

Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education PDF Author: Petra Maria Thiemann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This thesis combines five essays in the fields of Labor Economics and the Economics of Education. The goal of the thesis is to understand the factors that influence individuals' choices with respect to their educational attainment and their labor supply. The thesis is motivated by the notion that policies at different institutional levels (e.g., at the university or at the government level) can influence these choices to some extent. The first two chapters examine the role of peer groups for student outcomes in post-secondary education. Many university entrants rely on friends and study partners as sources of information and support. To determine the effect of peer group composition on academic achievement, I exploit random assignment to orientation week groups at the University of St. Gallen. Chapter 1 examines the effect of the composition of these peer groups with respect to students' predicted performance ("peer quality"). The results are as follows: First, students' outcomes are positively influenced by their peers' quality. Second, a simulation analysis shows that a policy maker who cares about average achievement should compose groups so that peer quality across groups balances. Chapter 2 examines gender peer effects in the same context. The analysis shows that while female students seem to benefit from higher shares of females in their peer group, no clear policy rule for gender group composition can be established. Chapter 3 (co-authored with Darjusch Tafreschi and Sharon Pfister) examines the effect of course repetition in higher education. Students who do not meet a certain performance cut-off have to repeat the full first year or to drop out otherwise. We compare individuals to both sides of this cut-off, but close to the cut-off, to determine the effect of grade repetition. Grade repetition positively and persistently affects subsequent grades. The last two chapters investigate labor supply decisions. Chapter 4.

Essays on Education and Lifecycle Labor Market Outcomes

Essays on Education and Lifecycle Labor Market Outcomes PDF Author: Lawrence Costa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
I study the effect of higher education on lifecycle earnings and focus on three ways in which education may help drive earnings: the effect of higher education on one’s skills, the effect on one’s ability to accumulate new skills in the future, and the relationship between education and one’s likelihood of unemployment.