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Author: Juan Ignacio Vizcaino
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Skills, Technologies and Development. I study how the productivity of skilled and unskilled labor varies with development. Using harmonized, occupational labor market outcomes for a broad set of countries across the development spectrum, I document that employment in high-skill occupations, or jobs that are relatively more intensive in non-routine cognitive tasks, grows with development. In addition, the income of workers in high-skill occupations falls relative to earnings in low-skill occupations as countries grow richer. To understand the forces driving these findings, I develop a stylized model of the labor market across development. In the model, labor productivity is determined endogenously as a result of the selection of heterogeneous workers into occupations and education. I use a quantitative version of the model to decompose the observed decline in relative labor income between less-developed countries and the US into a component embedded in technologies, or relative skilled labor efficiency, and a fraction due to workers’ characteristics, or relative skilled labor quality. I find that relative quality explains 25 percent of the decline in relative labor income, with the remaining fraction due to relative efficiency. In less-developed countries, the relatively few skilled workers are the most productive in performing high-skill jobs, which reduces the magnitude of skill-biased technological progress needed to rationalize the cross-country data by one half when compared to a world where labor quality is purely determined by educational attainment. Skill-Biased Structural Change. Using a broad panel of advanced economies, we document that increases in GDP per-capita are associated with a systematic shift in the composition of value added to sectors that are intensive in high-skill labor, a process we label as skillbiased structural change. It follows that further development in these economies leads to an increase in the relative demand for skilled labor. We develop a two-sector model of this process and use it to assess the contribution of skill-biased structural change to the rise of the skill premium in the US and a set of ten other advanced economies, over the period of 1977 to 2005. For the US, we find that these compositional changes in demand account for 20-27% of the overall increase of the skill premium due to technical change. Natural Disasters and Growth: The Role of Foreign Aid and Disaster Insurance. In this paper we develop a continuous time stochastic growth model that is suitable for studying the impact of natural disasters on the short run and long run growth rate of an economy. We find that the growth effects of a natural disaster depend in complicated ways on the details of expected foreign disaster aid and the existence of catastrophe insurance markets. We show that aid can have an influence on investments in prevention and mitigation activities and can delay the recovery from a natural disaster strike.
Author: Juan Ignacio Vizcaino
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
Skills, Technologies and Development. I study how the productivity of skilled and unskilled labor varies with development. Using harmonized, occupational labor market outcomes for a broad set of countries across the development spectrum, I document that employment in high-skill occupations, or jobs that are relatively more intensive in non-routine cognitive tasks, grows with development. In addition, the income of workers in high-skill occupations falls relative to earnings in low-skill occupations as countries grow richer. To understand the forces driving these findings, I develop a stylized model of the labor market across development. In the model, labor productivity is determined endogenously as a result of the selection of heterogeneous workers into occupations and education. I use a quantitative version of the model to decompose the observed decline in relative labor income between less-developed countries and the US into a component embedded in technologies, or relative skilled labor efficiency, and a fraction due to workers’ characteristics, or relative skilled labor quality. I find that relative quality explains 25 percent of the decline in relative labor income, with the remaining fraction due to relative efficiency. In less-developed countries, the relatively few skilled workers are the most productive in performing high-skill jobs, which reduces the magnitude of skill-biased technological progress needed to rationalize the cross-country data by one half when compared to a world where labor quality is purely determined by educational attainment. Skill-Biased Structural Change. Using a broad panel of advanced economies, we document that increases in GDP per-capita are associated with a systematic shift in the composition of value added to sectors that are intensive in high-skill labor, a process we label as skillbiased structural change. It follows that further development in these economies leads to an increase in the relative demand for skilled labor. We develop a two-sector model of this process and use it to assess the contribution of skill-biased structural change to the rise of the skill premium in the US and a set of ten other advanced economies, over the period of 1977 to 2005. For the US, we find that these compositional changes in demand account for 20-27% of the overall increase of the skill premium due to technical change. Natural Disasters and Growth: The Role of Foreign Aid and Disaster Insurance. In this paper we develop a continuous time stochastic growth model that is suitable for studying the impact of natural disasters on the short run and long run growth rate of an economy. We find that the growth effects of a natural disaster depend in complicated ways on the details of expected foreign disaster aid and the existence of catastrophe insurance markets. We show that aid can have an influence on investments in prevention and mitigation activities and can delay the recovery from a natural disaster strike.
Author: Guan Lin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Human capital has long been recognized as a crucial determinant of economic development. The main contribution of my dissertation is to both theoretically and empirically demonstrate the idea that the composition (different types of education) of human capital determines technological progress and affects long-run economic growth. As compared to traditional human capital and growth literature, it emphasizes the composition effect of human capital, rather than the level effect, on economic development. It provides a new perspective in characterizing the stages of economic development along the growth path. Optimal human capital composition benefits not only lesser developed countries who usually lack educational resources but also developed countries with limited population growth potential. The first chapter, titled ``Education, Technology, Human Capital Composition and Economic Development'', develops a framework of endogenous educational decisions and technological progress to explore the human capital composition and its effects on economic growth. In this model, growth is driven by technological advancement, which depends on the human capital composition. Individuals can choose from different types of workers: unskilled workers, generalists or specialists. Both generalists and specialists, through technological progress, are able to enhance growth. The model considers the role of technology stock, coordination cost, education cost and worker's innate ability on the human capital composition and economic growth. The main result shows the improvement in the composition of human capital promotes economic growth in most economic stages. However, this positive effect tapers off as the economy reaches complete specialization. This provides a possible explanation for the convergence of economic growth to zero asymptotically in the long run. I extend the argument into an open economy framework in the second chapter, titled ``Migration Effects on Home Country's Composition of Human Capital and Economic Development''. This chapter examines migration effects on domestic composition of human capital and economic growth. The net effect of migration depends on two facets. On one hand, the possibility of migration provides incentives for workers to invest in education and consequently increases the fraction of skilled workers in home country's human capital composition. On the other hand, increased population of skilled emigrants hinders the accumulation of human capital. A sufficient condition for beneficial migration is derived: if the ex ante domestic fraction of unskilled worker is relatively high, allowing the home country to achieve faster economic growth with migration. The last chapter, titled ``The Effect of Tertiary Education Composition on Economic Growth'', differentiates types of tertiary education by ISECD levels and empirically investigates their effects on economic growth. I use panel data on a group of 77 countries for the period 1998-2011. In dynamic panel data estimation, a potential endogeneity bias could arise due to the inclusion of lagged dependent variables. Several methods are applied to overcome the issue, such as Anderson-Hsiao estimator, the Difference Generalized Method of Moments estimator and the System Generalized Method of Moments estimator. The study shows a significantly positive relationship between short-cycle tertiary education and real GDP per capita for both developed and developing countries. However, undergraduate and graduate education only positively correlate to economic growth in developed countries. The empirical results are informative for developed countries as well as developing countries. Understanding the contribution of tertiary education in different levels allows them to effectively allocate resources and appropriately integrate it in growth policies.
Author: Babar Hussain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Sophie Ochmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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While health and education, jointly referred to as human capital, are important ends in themselves, they are also important drivers of poverty alleviation and economic growth. Understanding and overcoming the barriers that constrain human capital accumulation is hence crucial for economic development. This dissertation examines three barriers to human capital accumulation in three essays. Essay one studies whether providing school-based management committees with a grant and training can improve primary educational attainment in Sokoto, Nigeria. We thereby contribute evidence from an unders...
Author: Wan-Jung Cheng
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 100
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Chapter 1 proposes a new perspective to explain job polarization over the past few decades. Consisting of employment and wage polarization, job polarization is a widely documented phenomenon that involves the decline in both the employment shares and relative wages of middle-skill occupations with respect to high- and low-skill occupations. I present empirical evidence and build a task-based model demonstrating that job polarization stems from the interaction of the decrease in the relative price of capital goods, heterogeneity in job task production, and the complementarity of job tasks in final goods production. First, I construct a measure of occupation-level capital intensities and document that the tasks of middle-skill workers tend to be more capital intensive. Second, I build a task-based model with two goods sectors and three job tasks, where the job task production differs in capital intensity and how a worker's skill is utilized. The model shows that when there is a decrease in the price of capital goods, employment shifts away from capital-intensive tasks, and the relative wages are driven down, implying that decreasing price of capital goods predicts job polarization. A quantitative analysis suggests that the model can account for approximately one-third to one-half of the employment polarization and approximately half of the upper tail of the wage polarization in the U.S. between 1980 and 2010. Chapter 2 studies the endogenous formation of economic policies and its interplay with political institutions. Both the degree and the content of industrial policies are dispersed across countries. Some countries have active industrial policies while some do not. Among those with active industrial policies, some tend to target large conglomerates, while others target small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper studies how the industrial policy in an economy is endogenously determined under a political economy framework with lobbying. Two political parties compete for votes in the election; the one that takes office will decide the industrial policy. The two parties announce policy platforms prior to the election, and voters make decisions based on their expected welfare but may be swayed by election campaigns depending on their political awareness. The campaign is financed by political donations, and its effectiveness is determined by the party's influence on mass media. Contingent on the political environment, the model can capture three major types of policy schemes: no active industrial policies, active pro-conglomerates policies, and active pro-SMEs policies. Chapter 3 studies the influence of employers' quality on growth when talents are imperfect information. I build an innovation choice model that differentiates two types of innovations: incremental and radical innovations; the former is a productivity improvement over an existing product line, and the latter, the construction of a new product line with superior productivity. The arrival rate of successful innovations depends on worker's human capital, while innovation choices are made by managers. Worker's human capital is imperfect information to managers--only high-type managers can distinguish the necessary human capital for radical innovations. The mass of high-type managers thus determines the distribution of innovation implementation and affects individuals' incentives to invest in human capital. Since incremental innovations are subject to diminishing returns while radical innovations create space for future incremental innovations, a society lacking consistent inflow of high-type managers will suffer from slower growth in the long run.
Author: Chang Gyu Kwag
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Human capital
Languages : en
Pages : 414
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Essay one is concerned with how and why an individual invests in human capital and how tax policy affects investment in human capital. We examine optimal investment in human capital and the effect of tax policy on human capital formation, and test several hypotheses derived from the theory using U.S. time-series data. Investment in human capital in terms of college enrollment rates is positively related to family income, rate of return to human capital, and unemployment rates, while it is negatively related to educational cost, and rate of return to physical capital. In addition, the average income tax rates show a negative effect on college enrollment rates. Essay two discusses human capital and economic growth. We first investigate the elasticities of substitution among inputs using the nested constant elasticity of substitution production function to focus on the so-called capital-skill complementarity hypothesis. We here compare two models: one is a model with human capital and raw labor, and the other is a model with higher skilled labor and lower skilled labor. In both models, the elasticities of substitution among inputs are very low, but the complementarity hypothesis is still weakly confirmed. Human capital turns out to be essential in achieving medium-term economic growth empirically. We also demonstrate the key role of human capital in the long-term steady state within the context of the endogenous growth model. Essay three considers the role of human capital on income distribution. Using the nested CES production function, we first derive factor shares, and then examine the relationship between functional and personal income distribution. An increase in share of labor income reduces overall income inequality, while an increase in share of transfer income has a negative effect on income distribution. Human capital, especially primary and secondary level of human capital stock, is a crucial factor in reducing income inequality. Finally, this study develops and presents new estimates of human capital stock in the United States, as well as annual earnings, and labor force by education level for the period 1947-1989. Data shows that the growth rate of GNP is very closely related to that of human capital stock. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)
Author: Michael Frei
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656472297
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 14
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Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Economics - Economic Cycle and Growth, grade: 31 von 31, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (School of Economics and Management), language: English, abstract: In his speech at the Inaugural Convention of the African Federation of Human Resource Management Association in Botswana, Professor David Abulai (2008) stated that quality and quantity of human capital is becoming increasingly evident for the economic development of nations in today’s knowledge era. In fact the world of today is influenced by steady technological and scientific progress; by means of these new developments the socio-economic conditions in which people live are increasingly improving. Nevertheless a big part of the world is still lagging behind and social and economic distinctions still exist and developing countries are trying to catch up. Professor Abulai (2008) argued that the key to this catching up in development is the population itself, which has to be educated, healthy and qualified in order to deal with new scientific and technological inventions and to exploit this new opportunities in the best possible way. The aim of this paper will be in the first part to analyze the impact of education, human capital and knowledge for economic growth and development. In the second part of this paper the incorporation of human capital into endogenous growth models will be examined, focusing on the two main branches of growth analysis pioneered by Romer (1990) and Lucas (1988).
Author: Alexandros T. Mourmouras
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Author: Maggie Yuanyuan Liu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Development and economic growth take place through the more efficient allocation of inputs into more productive uses. Human capital is a key input since it is the main asset of the majority of the population, especially of the poor, in developing countries. What factors attribute to existing barriers to physical and social mobility of human capital in developing countries? How has expanded global trade affected the allocation and accumulation of skill in developing economies? In three chapters, I study the education and internal migration in China and India, and provide answer to these questions.
Author: Debbie Blair
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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