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Author: N. Umapathi
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Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: N. Umapathi
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Languages : en
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Author: Nithin Umapathi
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Abhijeet Singh
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Category : Developing countries
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Emilie T. Bagby
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Languages : en
Pages :
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This dissertation encompasses three chapters that explore determinants of parental investments in their children0́9s health and education in developing countries. Below are the individual abstracts for each chapter. Chapter 1: Child Ability, Parental Investments and Child Nutrition in Ecuador This paper investigates the role of family composition and child cognitive ability in explaining how resource-constrained households make nutritional investment decisions in their children. Parents have private information about their children0́9s abilities and health that is typically not available to researchers. I use a unique panel household dataset from Ecuador0́9s Bono de Desarrollo Humano that contains a measure of child cognitive ability and allows me to estimate its affect on resource allocation. I address reverse causality due to the effects of investments on ability and I use within household fixed effects to look at children to look at the intra-household investment decision. Findings point to the existence of sibling rivalry due to resource constraints; children with more siblings, and children in poor households, are less likely to eat high-quality food. Children with higher abilities are less likely to share a nutritional supplement with another family member, suggesting that parents must decide how to invest their limited resources, and child ability informs that decision. Within households of more than one child, children with higher abilities are more likely to eat higher quality foods than their siblings, even after controlling for child body size. Chapter 2: Child Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children0́9s cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households0́9 decisions to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment. We explicitly incorporate direct measures of the ability of each child0́9s siblings (both absolute and relative measures) to show how sibling rivalry exerts an impact on the parent0́9s decision of whether and how much to invest in their child0́9s education. We find children with one standard deviation higher own ability are 16 percent more likely to be currently enrolled, while having a higher ability sibling lowers current enrollment by 16 percent and having two higher ability siblings lowers enrollment by 30 percent. Results are robust to addressing the potential reverse causality of schooling influencing child ability measures and using alternative cognitive tests to measure ability. Chapter 3: Risk and Protective Factors for School Dropout in Mexico and Chile Fourteen percent of Chilean youth and 30 percent of Mexican youth have dropped out prior to completing secondary school. Of these youth, 90 to 97 percent are considered 0́−at risk,0́+ meaning that they engage in or are at risk of engaging in risky behaviors that are detrimental to their own development and to the well-being of their societies. This paper uses youth surveys from Chile and Mexico to demonstrate that early school dropout is strongly correlated with a range of risky behaviors as well as typically unobservable risk and protective factors. We test which of a large set of potential factors are correlated with dropping out of school early and other risky behaviors. These factors range from relationships with parents and institutions to household behaviors (abuse, discipline techniques) to social exclusion. We use stepwise regressions to sort out which variables best explain the observed variance in risky behaviors. We also use a non-parametric methodology to characterize different sub-groups of youth according to the amount of risk in their lives. We find that while higher socioeconomic status emerges as key explanatory factors for school dropout and six additional risky behaviors for boys and girls in both countries, it is not the only one. A good relationship with parents and peers, strong connection with local governmental institutions and schools, urban residence, younger age, and spirituality also emerge as being strongly correlated with school dropout and different risky behaviors. Similarly, young people that leave school early also engage in other risky behaviors. The variety of factors associated with leaving school early suggests that while poverty is important, it is not the only risk factor. This points to a wider range of policy entry points than currently used, including targeting parents and the relationship with schools.
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: Maggie Yuanyuan Liu
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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: Tomoko Utsumi
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Javaeria Ashraf Qureshi
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ISBN: 9781267472755
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 163
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This dissertation explores topics related to the determinants of investments in education, social returns to education, and human capital production. The first two chapters investigate the effect of oldest sister's schooling on the human capital accumulation of younger siblings while the third chapter estimates the impact of school quality on student achievement. Together these studies shed light on the role of home and school inputs in the human capital formulation of children in both developing and developed countries.
Author: Osaretin Olurotimi
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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The broad goal of this dissertation is to quantify the effect of shocks, policies, and programs on human capital, firms, and communities, especially in Africa. This is motivated by the need to provide empirical estimates of the impact of humanitarian crises and policy to undergird effective development policy and praxis. In my dissertation, I show how conflict and climate shocks affect children's human capital in Uganda and how foreign direct investment impacts domestic firms in Cote D'Ivoire. My dissertation papers share three themes. First, I provide improved (or initial) micro-level estimates of the impact of some shocks on economic agents in two African countries. Second, all three of my dissertation chapters attempt to answer questions about developing countries in Africa by unearthing and exploring new data sources. Third, the findings from my research have clear implications for contemporaneous education, industrial and climate policy in developing economies that grapple with similar challenges. My research on human capital is motivated by human capital's centrality to livelihoods and national economic growth and the crisis of learning poverty many African countries face. Learning poverty is the inability of children who have completed particular schooling levels to demonstrate cognitive outcomes related to that level. For instance, data from the World Bank showed that up to 83% of children in Uganda of primary completion age were below the minimum proficiency level, while over 95% of children in Chad and Niger were unable to read. This crisis deserves attention to understand the drivers and causes, potentially highlighting solutions. In this dissertation, I look at the role of exogenous factors such as conflict and climate and weather shocks in affecting human capital. For example, in Chapter 1, I examine the effect of historical exposure to an East African insurgency group-The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA)-and contemporaneous exposure to armed conflict on children's learning outcomes. Although there has been a decline in the number of civil wars in Africa since the 1990s, there has been a rise in itinerant and cross-border terrorist groups like Boko-Haram and Al-Shabaab. The LRA has been noted as one of the terrorist groups that have elicited the most humanitarian damage in East Africa. Empirically, I combine data from UWEZO's citizen-led household survey of learning outcomes in Uganda with geo-located conflict data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). Using a model with fixed effects estimation approach, I find that exposure to the LRA reduced children's learning outcomes in Math and English but did not affect their schooling. The cohort exposed to LRA did not have worse dropout rates or nonenrolment than their peers who were not exposed to LRA conflict. My contributions to the literature on conflict and educational outcomes include the first specific estimates of how exposure to a conflict in childhood impacts learning and schooling differently in an East African context. Also, I provide results on the impact of conflict on out-of-school children, who are overlooked in studies that only consider schooling outcomes. Exposure to LRA is worse for out-of-school children in English. Asides from measuring the medium-term effect of exposure to terrorism. I also measure the impact of contemporaneous conflict, i.e., the conflict that happened in the year children were surveyed and which is more likely to comprise riots and protests than violence against civilians. I use variation in the timing of first exposure to conflict by comparing children exposed in one year to those not yet treated by conflict. The effects of these contemporary conflicts are relatively muted in size and statistical significance compared to the effect of LRA. The results of this work imply a need to measure to impact of the same shock on schooling and learning differently and beyond the short term, as learning could be impacted even after schooling has recovered. Although I provide evidence that schooling quality via teacher absenteeism is affected by conflict in this context, future related work could explore the first-order effects of LRA on parental outcomes to elucidate the mechanisms through exposure to terrorism that affected children's learning in Uganda. Along similar lines, Chapter 3 uses remote sensing data to examine how abnormal rainfall and temperature patterns in early childhood affect human capital outcomes, including children's educational outcomes. I also document how unusually high test date temperatures impact test performance. Analytically, I combine learning outcome data from the UWEZO learning assessments in East Africa with the CHIRTS and CHIRPS temperature and rainfall data from the Climate Hazards Centre at UC Santa Barbara. I find that high test date temperature harms only the learning outcomes of girls and children under 10, while rainfall shocks in-utero have adverse effects. However, positive rainfall shocks at ages 1-4 positively impact learning outcomes. The paper also provides suggestive evidence that possessing some adaption technology like electricity may make children more likely to experience thermal stress when the technology is not in use. Thus, this paper provides an essential accounting of the effects of climate change on African children and highlights the need for additional demographic considerations in testing environments. Another theme that my research examines is the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in improving the performance of domestically connected local firms. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), African countries only received about 4% and 5% of global Foreign Direct Investment in 2020 and 2021, respectively. However, despite its meager share of global FDI, African governments have high hopes for the role that FDI can play in their local economies, evidenced by the growth in the number of investment promotion agencies, incentives, and bilateral and multilateral treaties. Therefore, in Chapter 2, coauthored with Jeremy Foltz and Nohoum Traore, using new, high-quality panel data on firms in Ivory Coast, we revisit an open question on the impact of FDI on productivity and other relevant outcomes among domestic firms in Africa. Africa has not yet experienced the kind of industrial revolution that has supercharged the economies of, for example, South Asian countries. Accordingly, various African countries have initiated policy initiatives such as tax holidays for foreign firms to encourage industrialization. However, our research shows that horizontal FDI reduces domestic firm productivity in Ivory Coast, especially for domestic firms operating in the Service, Commerce, and Manufacturing sectors.In contrast, downstream FDI reduces the likelihood that firms export and the intensity of exports only for firms located in Abidjan, the defacto economic capital. The results of this work are essential for similar African countries as they develop their investment and tax policies. A natural extension of this work is research that accounts more fully for the general equilibrium effects of FDI on the whole economy, including government revenue and community welfare.
Author: Rebecca Dizon-Ross
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Languages : en
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This dissertation consists of three research papers that examine how to promote human capital, especially for more disadvantaged populations. The first chapter uses data from a field experiment conducted in Malawi to assess whether parents have inaccurate perceptions about their children's academic abilities, and whether parents' inaccurate perceptions distort their investments in their children's education. I find that the divergence between parents' beliefs about their children's achievement and their children's true achievement is large, and that this creates a wedge between parents' intended and actual educational investments. Providing parents with information significantly impacts their investments, causing them to become more closely aligned with their children's achievement. Poorer, less-educated parents have less accurate perceptions about their children's academic abilities than richer, more-educated parents, and update their beliefs more in response to improved information. Inaccurate perceptions may thus exacerbate inequalities in educational outcomes between richer and poorer families. The second chapter examines the effect of school accountability systems on teachers. A commonly-cited concern with holding schools accountable for student performance is that it could cause good teachers to leave low-performing schools. This chapter presents regression discontinuity estimates from New York City, which assigns schools grades based on student achievement, suggesting the opposite. At the bottom end of the grade distribution, lower accountability grades decrease teacher turnover, especially for high-quality teachers, and increase joiner teacher quality. One potential explanation is that accountability induces performance improvements at lower-graded schools. In contrast, at the top of the grade distribution, where accountability pressures are lower, lower grades have no turnover effects, but decrease joiner quality. The third chapter, co-authored with Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson, examines the efficacy of delivering targeted public health subsidies through existing government infrastructure by measuring the performance of free bed net distribution programs targeted towards pregnant women in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. If implemented correctly, such subsidies have the potential to substantially decrease child mortality in developing countries. However, with weak governance, government workers may perform poorly, thereby undermining the programs' efficacy. While the Kenya and Uganda distribution schemes were government-led, the program in Ghana was part of a randomized controlled trial we put in place to evaluate three commonly proposed schemes to improve performance: vouchers (so that health workers do not have control over the subsidized products themselves); flat bonus pay for health workers charged with delivering the subsidies; and threats of top-down audits. We evaluate performance through a rich set of data, including (1) home surveys of eligible women, (2) informal interviews with community members, and (3) decoy "mystery client" visits. Overall, we find that local delivery is surprisingly effective: around 80% of eligible women received the subsidy, less than 2% of eligible women were asked for a bribe, and only 4.5% of ineligible clients were able to obtain a subsidized net. In the Ghana experiments, we find no effect of either bonus pay or audit threats, and the voucher scheme appears dominated: it does not reduce leakage but it reduces coverage among eligibles. Survey evidence suggests that antenatal nurses and midwives in all three countries are positively selected in terms of other-regarding preferences and intrinsic motivation, and that they perceive their job continuation as contingent on performance.
