Addressing Barriers to Human Capital Accumulation: Essays in Development and Health Economics PDF Download
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Author: Sophie Ochmann
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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: Sophie Ochmann
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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: Hyunseok Kim (Ph.D.)
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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In this dissertation, I explore human capital accumulation and its implication for economic development. Chapter 1 and 2 focused on the mechanism behind the sustained economic growth of South Korea, which was a war-devastated, aid-recipient country two generations ago but now sells semiconductors and automobiles to the world. I ask how the country shifted its technology to capital-intensive production technique. These chapters consider educational policy change that led to an increase in college graduate. Chapter 3 studies the mechanism behind the divergence in employment between temporary and permanent workers in South Korea. The chapter considers the labor policy change that protects temporary employment. For each chapter, I construct a plant-level panel dataset from a series of censuses and connect it with an industry-level input-output table to consider a spillover effect. Chapter 1 studies how an increase in college graduates has affected the technology shift in South Korea. The analysis is based on the concept of complementarity in technology adoption - i.e., the idea that more adopters increase a marginal adopter's gain. I consider skilled labor as an adoption good needed for technology adoption. If complementarity exists in technology adoption, there could be multiple equilibria, possibly leading to undesirable results from coordination failure. I develop a theoretical framework which predicts that an increase in the adoption good of skilled labor could overcome coordination failure and promote a technology shift. Based on plant-level panel data from 1982-1996, I find that accumulation of more outside human capital, or more adopters, (i) benefits marginal adopting firm's profit and investment, and (ii) promotes the firm's technology shift by increasing the productivity of capital while decreasing that of unskilled workers. This paper contributes to the literature on aggregate growth theory by verifying that outside human capital accumulation and its spillover effect contribute to economic growth. Chapter 2 builds on Chapter 1, where human capital is considered an adoption good, by studying the specific role of human capital. Specifically, I explore whether research and development (R&D) is the channel through which human capital accumulation leads to a technology shift. The analysis is based on previous literature indicating that R&D generates new knowledge and the absorption of outside knowledge. The latter role of R&D, absorptive capacity, matches the concept of complementarity in chapter 1. Based on plant-level panel data, I find that (i) human capital accumulation due to the educational policy change promotes R&D in the manufacturing industries; (ii) the effect of R&D spillovers is increasing in a firm's own R&D, a finding which validates the concepts of absorptive capacity and complementarity; and (iii) more outside R&D promotes a firm's technology shift toward capital-intensity. This paper contributes to the literature on endogenous growth, which so far has focused on R&D spillover's effects on total factor productivity rather than on technology shift, by connecting absorptive capacity with complementarity in technology adoption. Chapter 3 investigates another dimension of human capital: permanent and temporary workers. The labor market in South Korea has witnessed a divergence in employment between permanent and temporary workers. The proportion of permanent workers, which had been stable between 50 and 60 percent for two decades in the 1990s and 2000s, has increased recently to above 70 percent. I point out that legislation requiring firms that hire a worker on a temporary basis for more than two years to offer them permanent status serves as a trigger for the divergence. This legislation limits the advantages (to firms) of flexibility in hiring and capacity for screening new workers. Hence, in a competitive labor market firms expect that other firms are more likely to hire permanent rather than temporary workers. If complementarity exists in permanent employment, the legislation serves as a Big Push to make the divergence happen. Based on plant-level panel data covering 2011-2019, I find that (i) flexibility and screening effect of temporary workers are overwhelmed by human capital effect, and (ii) complementarity in permanent employment holds after the temporary employment protection legislation. This paper deepens the understanding of the recent labor market phenomena in South Korea by adopting the concept of complementarity and a Big Push.
Author: Alexandros T. Mourmouras
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Author: Alexander Sergeevich Ugarov
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Category : Human capital
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Differences in human capital explain approximately one-half of the productivity variation across countries. Therefore, we need to understand drivers of human capital accumulation in order to design successful development policies. My dissertation studies formation and use of human capital with emphasis on its less tangible forms, including skills, abilities and know-how. The first chapter of my dissertation explores the effects of occupational and educational barriers on human capital stock and aggregate productivity. I find that students' academic skills have very small impact on occupational choice in most developing countries. This finding suggests a higher incidence of occupational barriers in developing countries. I evaluate the productivity losses resulting from occupational barriers by calibrating a general equilibrium model of occupational choice. According to my estimation, developing countries can increase their GDP by up to twenty percent by reducing the barriers to the level of a benchmark country (US). In the second chapter of my dissertation, I study the effects of economic growth on education quality. Several models of human capital accumulation predict that incomes have a positive causal effect on human capital for given levels of education by increasing the consumption of educational goods. The paper tests this prediction by using a within country variation in incomes per-capita across different cohorts of US immigrants. Wages of US migrants conditional on years of education serve as a measure of education quality. I find that average domestic incomes experienced by migrants in age from zero to twenty years have a significant positive effect on their future earnings in the US. The third chapter studies the effects of employee-driven technology spillovers on technology adoption. It challenges the theoretical result of Franco and Filson (2006) by assuming that workers are risk averse and that the number of competitors is finite. In this more realistic scenario spillovers significantly reduce payoffs from adopting advanced technologies.
Author: Andrew Martin Simons
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Understanding how the poor respond to programs, policies, and shocks in the developing world is central to the study of development economics. In this dissertation, I examine how households and communities respond to various stressors at three scales and in three different contexts. First, I examine how changes in rainfall and temperature affect household's investment in schooling for their children in Indonesia. Secondly, I examine how communities alter the distribution of aid in a large social safety net program in rural Ethiopia when communities are not given sufficient resources to implement the program as designed. Thirdly, I examine the behavioral response to the presence of researchers during the data collection process of a field evaluation of fuel-efficient cookstoves in Uganda. By examining the varied responses to stressors, these essays contribute to understanding the processes of development around the world.
Author: Claudia Trentini
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Category : Economic development
Languages : en
Pages : 139
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Author: Wolfgang Keller
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 29
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Author: Babar Hussain
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Author: Yibo Zhang
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Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 122
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First Chapter: Endogenous Skill Acquisition and Taxation (with James Bullard) This paper studies dynamic Mirrleesian-style taxation in a lifecycle economy. In contrast to the recent Mirrleesian dynamic optimal taxation literature, in which individual skills are subject to shocks but are otherwise fixed over time, agents in our model make a conscious decision about human capital acquisition (as well as when to retire) given their own aptitude for learning. This aptitude is private information. Human capital accumulation is the engine of growth in our model. We find that there will be no human capital accumulation, and hence no growth, in the economy when there is no taxation of any sort. We suggest a taxation scheme which will induce human capital accumulation and hence economic growth in this stylized environment. The key feature of the tax scheme is to provide incentives for human capital accumulation for those that have high aptitude by credibly transferring resources to them later in life, after they have revealed their aptitude. We show that only a moderate transfer is called for to induce growth in our calibrated economy. We also find that the timing of the tax-transfer may or may not matter for the income distribution depending on the exact form in which the taxation is levied (labor or capital income tax), but in general the tax-transfer scheme is highly non-monotonic. Second Chapter: Brain Drain and Brain Drain Reversal Departing from the previous theoretical studies on Brain Drain, which mainly focus on the welfare impact of the migration of skilled workers on the home country and on the foreign country, I build a theoretical model to study a somewhat different twin phenomena "brain drain" and "brain drain reversal". The brain drain and brain drain reversal of interest here is the trend that people from developing countries (most prominently from East Asian countries) who have studied in developed countries such as the U.S. go back to their home country sooner or later for good. I study these two phenomena in a two-period lifecycle economy where home country agents choose not only education location but also work location possibly multiple times in their lifetime. The model captures the crucial factors in agents' location choice decision including work-place premium, education-location premium, market opportunity gap (between home and foreign countries) as well as adaptability of skills. I solve the model analytically and conduct comparative statics analysis followed by calibration exercises based on data from Mainland China (1985-2006). Third Chapter: Human Capital Intensity, Education and Growth (with Jiaren Pang and Haibin Wu) Using the methodology of Rajan and Zingales (1998), we revisit the issue of human capital and economic growth by examining whether industries with higher human capital intensity tend to grow faster in countries with higher human capital stock. Not only are we able to avoid the many problems that have plagued the conventional cross-country growth regressions but the results are no longer mixed. We do not find that education improvement has a differential effect on industries with different human capital intensities. However, we have discovered that in countries with higher education levels and quality, high human capital intensity industries grow faster than low human capital intensity ones.
Author: Subha Mani
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Languages : en
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