Essays on Macroeconomics of Human Capital Accumulation

Essays on Macroeconomics of Human Capital Accumulation PDF Author: Iuliia Dudareva
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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In the first chapter, I study how pre-college parental investment affects sorting of students into colleges. I estimate the efficiency of the decentralized allocation and explore the implications of pre-college investment for intergenerational mobility. I embed a student-to-college assignment model into a two-period overlapping generations model with endogenous human capital investment. I calibrate the model to NLSY97 cohort and find that the race to the top induces overinvestment in pre-college human capital and associated output losses relative to the first best. The effect is more pronounced for high-income families which promotes income persistence at the top of the college distribution. In the second chapter, we explore one aspect of U.S. education that has not garnered a lot of attention until fairly recently that is occupational choice. We add an education sector to an otherwise standard Hsieh et al. (2019)-style model to explore the extent to which changes in career opportunities in other occupations affect the selection of workers into teaching careers. In our model, changes in the allocation of teaching talent have implications for the evolution of class size as well as quality of instruction and hence the accumulation of human capital during the workers' formative years. This gives rise to a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency, which we quantify by way of a structural model.

Essays on Macroeconomics of Human Capital Accumulation

Essays on Macroeconomics of Human Capital Accumulation PDF Author: Iuliia Dudareva
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the first chapter, I study how pre-college parental investment affects sorting of students into colleges. I estimate the efficiency of the decentralized allocation and explore the implications of pre-college investment for intergenerational mobility. I embed a student-to-college assignment model into a two-period overlapping generations model with endogenous human capital investment. I calibrate the model to NLSY97 cohort and find that the race to the top induces overinvestment in pre-college human capital and associated output losses relative to the first best. The effect is more pronounced for high-income families which promotes income persistence at the top of the college distribution. In the second chapter, we explore one aspect of U.S. education that has not garnered a lot of attention until fairly recently that is occupational choice. We add an education sector to an otherwise standard Hsieh et al. (2019)-style model to explore the extent to which changes in career opportunities in other occupations affect the selection of workers into teaching careers. In our model, changes in the allocation of teaching talent have implications for the evolution of class size as well as quality of instruction and hence the accumulation of human capital during the workers' formative years. This gives rise to a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency, which we quantify by way of a structural model.

Essays on the Economics of Human Capital Accumulation

Essays on the Economics of Human Capital Accumulation PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Essays in Macroeconomics

Essays in Macroeconomics PDF Author: Wei-Kang Wong
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Two Essays on Human Capital Accumulation and Economic Growth

Two Essays on Human Capital Accumulation and Economic Growth PDF Author: Alexandros T. Mourmouras
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Essays on the Economics of Human Capital Accumulation

Essays on the Economics of Human Capital Accumulation PDF Author: Lucia Rizzica
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Three Essays on the Macroeconomics of Human Capital and Growth

Three Essays on the Macroeconomics of Human Capital and Growth PDF Author: Mercy Laita Palamuleni
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation encompasses three essays on the macroeconomics of human capital and economic growth. Below are the individual abstracts for each essay. Essay 1: Does Public Education Spending Increase Human Capital? I investigate the effect of public education spending on the quality of human capital as measured by international student test scores in science and mathematics, conditional on the efficiency of a country's governance. Combining World Bank country level data on government efficiency with rich micro data from the OECD PISA-2009, I estimate a human capital production function from student level data. Prior work suggests that public education expenditures are inconsequential for student achievement. I illustrate that public education spending matters for student test scores when one uses student level data instead of aggregate country level data. These results are robust to controlling for governance measures such as corruption control and regulatory quality. An implication is that less efficient government does not preclude improving test scores through education spending. Essay 2: Inequality of Opportunity in Education: International Evidence from PISA. I provide lower-bound estimates of inequality of opportunity in education (IEO) using micro-data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The measure represents variation in student mathematics test scores which can be explained by predetermined circumstances (including parental education, gender, and additional community variables). I explore the heterogeneity of the measure at the top and bottom of the test score distribution, and demonstrate that IEO accounts for 10 percent of the variation in test scores for students at the top and bottom of the test score distribution. Using this inequality measure I establish three main conclusions. (1) IEO decreases overall in response to an increase in preprimary enrollment rates. An implication here is that improvements in early childhood education might mitigate the effects of IEO factors for some students. (2) IEO increases in a manner which relates to overall inequality. This indicates the possibility of a more general persistence to inequality factors. An implication is that equity-based education policies can be a key tool for reducing income inequality. (3) There is evidence of an equity-efficiency tradeoff in education. An implication here is that public education policies aimed at reducing IEO might hinder overall education efficiency, in that it decreases academic achievement for some groups of students. Essay 3: Public Education Spending and Economic Growth: The Role of Governance. Although the theoretical literature often connects public education spending to growth, individual empirical findings sometimes conflict. In this paper I propose that inefficiencies in public education spending might explain these inconsistencies. Using a dataset from both developed and developing countries observed over the period of 1995 to 2010, I demonstrate that the efficiency of public education spending on growth depends on a country's level and quality of governance. I also find evidence that increasing educational spending is associated with higher economic growth only in countries that are less corrupt. These findings have important implications for the formation of effective education policies in developing countries. They illustrate that efficient public education spending augments economic growth in a way that increased spending alone does not match.

Essays on Human Capital Accumulation and Inequality

Essays on Human Capital Accumulation and Inequality PDF Author: Claudia Trentini
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ISBN:
Category : Economic development
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Essays on the Macroeconomics of Development

Essays on the Macroeconomics of Development PDF Author: Luis A. Rivas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780599721906
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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The second chapter studies some aspects of the labor market in developing economies and their effects on physical and human capital accumulation and welfare. In particular, this essay presents an overlapping-generations model which complies with three historical regularities: Child labor declines throughout the accumulation process, its incidence depends on technological parameters, and the economy does not necessarily converge to a steady state equilibrium with no child labor. The model is then used to study the effect of introducing a compulsory schooling law. It is shown that the introduction of such policy may, under certain conditions, lead to lower welfare.

Three Essays in Macroeconomics

Three Essays in Macroeconomics PDF Author: Rosemary Kaiser
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation is comprised of three divergent chapters in macroeconomics. In the first chapter, I document how many countries have employment protections that create two-tiered labor markets in which some jobs are more secure than others. I model the selection of younger workers into more precarious jobs, as documented empirically. I then estimate the effects of changes to employment protection legislation. By including human capital accumulation in employment and human capital loss during unemployment, the effects of reducing employment protections differ qualitatively from previous work, which ignores the human capital channel. Reducing employment protections increases the job-finding rate for young workers while reducing average income and employment. This result is driven by lower average human capital in the economy without employment protections. The second chapter discusses how wage-proportional staffing fees provide motivation for domestically outsourced workers to invest less in human capital under certain conditions. This may partially explain why, after controlling for observables, workers in these positions earn about 10\% less. I document wage and wage growth differences among workers in the employment services industry. A simple model with firm-specific skill investment is then used to generate endogenous firm-specific skill and wage differences between outsourced and non-outsourced workers. Additionally, the model shows how the prevalence of outsourcing responds to changes in policy and aggregate conditions. The third chapter considers policies to promote the spread of technologies that drive the growth of whole eras and entire sectors. Recent years have seen interest in using regulatory power to internalize the benefits of one such technology: broadband internet. This chapter develops a framework to study how competition among providers affects firm and household technology adoption and subsequent macroeconomic outcomes. With a novel data set on broadband availability, speed, and prices, a model of broadband provider entry and quality choice relates prices to market structure. These pricing results then inform a model of household and firm decisions. An additional provider is estimated to be most effective in boosting firm profitability in markets with relatively educated populations with previously few to no providers. In terms of increasing household adoption, an additional low-speed provider is most effective where median household income is low. An additional high-speed provider is most effective in markets with no high-speed and few low-speed providers.

Addressing Barriers to Human Capital Accumulation: Essays in Development and Health Economics

Addressing Barriers to Human Capital Accumulation: Essays in Development and Health Economics PDF Author: Sophie Ochmann
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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...