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Author: Arianna Lucia Zanolini
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ISBN: 9781267611079
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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This dissertation explores the role of early maternal investments on children's human capital accumulation through three co-authored essays.
Author: Arianna Lucia Zanolini
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781267611079
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
This dissertation explores the role of early maternal investments on children's human capital accumulation through three co-authored essays.
Author: Xiaoyan Chen Youderian
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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The first essay considers how the timing of government education spending influences the intergenerational persistence of income. We build a life-cycle model where human capital is accumulated in early and late childhood. Both families and the government can increase the human capital of young agents by investing in education at each stage of childhood. Ability in each dynasty follows a stochastic process. Different abilities and resultant spending histories generate a stochastic steady state distribution of income. We calibrate our model to match aggregate statistics in terms of education expenditures, income persistence and inequality. We show that increasing government spending in early childhood education is effective in lowering intergenerational earnings elasticity. An increase in government funding of early childhood education equivalent to 0.8 percent of GDP reduces income persistence by 8.4 percent. We find that this relatively large effect is due to the weakening relationship between family income and education investment. Since this link is already weak in late childhood, allocating more public resources to late childhood education does not improve the intergenerational mobility of economic status. Furthermore, focusing more on late childhood may raise intergenerational persistence by amplifying the gap in human capital developed in early childhood. The second essay considers parental time investment in early childhood as an education input and explores the impact of early education policies on labor supply and human capital. I develop a five-period overlapping generations model where human capital formation is a multi-stage process. An agent's human capital is accumulated through early and late childhood. Parents make income and time allocation decisions in response to government expenditures and parental leave policies. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy so that the generated data matches the Gini index and parental participation in education expenditures. The general equilibrium environment shows that subsidizing private education spending and adopting paid parental leave are both effective at increasing human capital. These two policies give parents incentives to increase physical and time investment, respectively. Labor supply decreases due to the introduction of paid parental leave as intended. In addition, low-wage earners are most responsive to parental leave by working less and spending more time with children. The third essay is on the motherhood wage penalty. There is substantial evidence that women with children bear a wage penalty of 5 to 10 percent due to their motherhood status. This wage gap is usually estimated by comparing the wages of working mothers to childless women after controlling for human capital and individual characteristics. This method runs into the problem of selection bias by excluding non-working women. This paper addresses the issue in two ways. First, I develop a simple model of fertility and labor participation decisions to examine the relationships among fertility, employment, and wages. The model implies that mothers face different reservation wages due to variance in preference over child care, while non-mothers face the same reservation wage. Thus, a mother with a relatively high wage may choose not to work because of her strong preference for time with children. In contrast, a childless woman who is not working must face a relatively low wage. For this reason, empirical analysis that focuses only on employed women may result in a biased estimate of the motherhood wage penalty. Second, to test the predictions of the model, I use 2004-2009 data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) and include non-working women in the two-stage Heckman selection model. The empirical results from OLS and the fixed effects model are consistent with the findings in previous studies. However, the child penalty becomes smaller and insignificant after non-working women are included. It implies that the observed wage gap in the labor market appears to overstate the child wage penalty due to the sample selection bias.
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.
Author: Maya Sherpa
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ISBN:
Category : Child labor
Languages : en
Pages : 108
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This dissertation is composed of two self-contained essays, which examine two different factors that could affect human capital accumulation in a developing country. Both essays utilize cross-sectional data from the second round (2003/04) of national level household survey from Nepal. In the first essay, I estimate the impact of remittances on school attendance of children in Nepal. Over the last decade Nepal has experienced an increase in both domestic and international migration and consequently, Nepal has also seen a large surge in remittances from expatriates, growing from less than 3 percent of the GDP in 1995 to about 17 percent in 2004, to 22 percent in 2008, becoming one of the top ten recipients in terms of the share of remittance to GDP. In developing countries, investment in human capital is often viewed as significantly constrained by household resources. The premise of this essay is that remittances, by relaxing household resource constraints, can promote investment in education of the children living in remittance-receiving household. I use the proportion of households receiving remittances and the migrant's age as instrumental variables to identify remittance-receiving households and level of remittance flow. I find that remittances increase the probability of school attendance for young girls (ages 6-10) and for older boys (ages 11-18). But the positive effect does not extend to younger boys (ages 6-10) and older girls (ages 11-18). In the second essay, I estimate the causal effect of child's number hours worked on school attendance and school attainment. Here, number of hours worked is defined broadly to include hours worked in market and non-market activities within and outside the household as well as hours worked on domestic chores within the household. The central identification problem in estimating the causal effect of child labor on schooling is that these two decisions are simultaneously driven by different confounding factors such as household income, family preferences, child characteristics, availability and quality of school, etc. All of these are likely to induce a negative (or a positive) relationship between schooling and child labor. To abstract from these confounding factors, I use community level average daily agricultural wage for children and the distance to water source to provide variation in the demand for child labor. The results show that the effect of hours worked on schooling outcomes differ by demographic subgroups. For girls, the number of hours worked adversely affects both school attendance and grade attainment. For boys, the results are significantly different. The results of this study suggest that working up to 12.7 and 14.5 hours per week have no adverse effect on school attendance of boys of ages 5-9 and ages 10-16, respectively. Whereas, working less than 15 hours a week has no detrimental effect on grade attainment of older boys. I find no effect of the number of hours worked on grade attainment of younger boys aged 5-9.
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Garrett Anstreicher
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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In this dissertation, I study the interplay of familial and geographic factors in influencing human capital development and economic mobility in the United States. The first chapter extends a canonical model of intergenerational human capital investment to a geographic context in order to study the role of migration in determining optimal human capital accumulation and income mobility in the United States. The main result is that migration is considerably influential in shaping the high rates of economic mobility observed among children from low-wage areas, with human capital investment behavioral responses being important to consider. Equalizing school quality across locations does more to reduce interstate inequality in income mobility than equalizing skill prices, and policies that attempt to decrease human capital flight from low-wage areas via cash transfers are unlikely to be cost-effective. The second chapter, joint with Joanna Venator, studies how childcare costs, the location of extended family, and fertility events influence both the labor force attachment and labor mobility of women in the United States. We begin by empirically documenting strong patterns of women returning to their home locations in anticipation of fertility events, indicating that the desire for intergenerational time transfers is an important motivator of home migration. Moreover, women who reside in their parent's location experience a substantial long-run reduction in their child earnings penalty. Next, we build a dynamic model of labor force participation and migration to assess the incidence of counterfactual scenarios and childcare policies. We find that childcare subsidies increase lifetime earnings and labor mobility for women, with particularly strong effects for women who are ever single mothers and Blacks. Ignoring migration understates these benefits by a meaningful extent. The third chapter, joint with Owen Thompson and Jason Fletcher, studies the long-run impacts of court-ordered desegregation. Court ordered desegregation plans were implemented in hundreds of US school districts nationwide from the 1960s through the 1980s, and were arguably the most substantive national attempt to improve educational access for African American children in modern American history. Using large Census samples that are linked to Social Security records containing county of birth, we implement event studies that estimate the long run effects of exposure to desegregation orders on human capital and labor market outcomes. We find that African Americans who were relatively young when a desegregation order was implemented in their county of birth, and therefore had more exposure to integrated schools, experienced large improvements in adult human capital and labor market outcomes relative to Blacks who were older when a court order was locally implemented. There are no comparable changes in outcomes among whites in counties undergoing an order, or among Blacks who were beyond school ages when a local order was implemented. These effects are strongly concentrated in the South, with largely null findings in other regions. Our data and methodology provide the most comprehensive national assessment to date on the impacts of court ordered desegregation, and strongly indicate that these policies were in fact highly effective at improving the long run socioeconomic outcomes of many Black students.
Author: Javaeria Ashraf Qureshi
Publisher:
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: Rizwana Alamgir-Arif
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child care
Languages : en
Pages :
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This thesis contributes to the fields of Public Economics and Development Economics by studying human capital formation under three scenarios. Each scenario is represented in an individual paper between Chapters 2 to 4 of this thesis. Chapter 2 examines the effect of child care financing, through human capital formation, on growth and welfare. There is an extensive literature on the benefits of child care affordability on labour market participation. The overall inference that can be drawn is that the availability and affordability of appropriate child care may enhance parental time spent outside the home in furthering their economic opportunities. In another front, the endogenous growth literature exemplifies the merits of subsidizing human capital in generating growth. Again, other contributions demonstrate the negative implications of taxes on the returns from human capital on long run growth and welfare. This paper assesses the long run welfare implications of child care subsidies financed by proportional income taxes when human capital serves as the engine of growth. More specifically, using an overlapping-generations framework (OLG) with endogenous labour choice, we study the implications of a distortionary wage income tax on growth and welfare. When the revenues from proportional income taxes are channelled towards improving economic opportunities for both work and schooling investments in the form of child care subsidies, long run physical and human capital stock may increase. A higher level of growth may ensue leading to higher welfare. Chapter 3 answers the question of how child care subsidization works in the interest of skill formation, and specifically, whether child care subsidization policies can work to the effect of human capital subsidies. Ample studies have highlighted the significance of early childhood learning through child care in determining the child's longer-term outcomes. The general conclusion has been that the quality of life for a child, higher earnings during later life, as well as the contributions the child makes to society as an adult can be traced back to exposures during the first few years of life. Early childhood education obtained through child care has been found to play a pivotal role in the human capital base amongst children that can benefit them in the long run. Based on this premise, the paper develops a simple Overlapping Generations Model (OLG) to find out the implications of early learning on future investments in human capital. It is shown that higher costs of child care will reduce skill investments of parents. Also, for some positive child care cost, higher human capital obtained through early childhood education can induce further skill investments amongst individuals with a higher willingness to substitute consumption intertemporally. Finally, intervention that can internalize the intra-generational human capital externalities arising from parental time spent outside the home - for which care/early learning is required to be purchased for the child - can unambiguously lead to higher skill investments by all individuals. Chapter 3 therefore proposes policy intervention, such as child care subsidization, as the effect of such will be akin to a human capital subsidy. The objective of Chapter 4 is to understand the implications of inter-regional mobility on higher educational investments of individuals and to study in detail the impact of mobility on government spending for education under two particular scenarios --one in which human capital externalities are non-localized and spill over to other regions (e.g. in the form of R & D), and another in which the externalities are localized and remain within the region. It is shown that mobility enhances private investments in education, and all else equal, welfare should be higher with increased migration. The impacts on government educational expenditures are studied and some policy implications are drawn. In general, with non-localized externalities, all public expenditures decline under full-migration. Finally under localized externalities, the paper finds that governments will increase their financing of education to increasingly mobile individuals only when agglomeration benefits outweigh congestion costs from increases in regional population.
Author: Emilie T. Bagby
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ISBN:
Category :
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.
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Languages : en
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This thesis consists of four self-contained papers in macroeconomics and population dynamics. The first two chapters deal with long run endogenous growth whereas the last two chapters deal with accumulation of human and physical capital in modern economies. The first essay analyses the interaction of child mortality, child labor and human capital investment. The second essay analyses the evolution of fertility as a function of adult life expectancy depending on the availability of a formal schooling system. The third essay studies investment into human capital and physical capital in an aging society within the framework of a 2-period OLG model. The last essay quantifies the welfare effects of aging in a calibrated model with endogenous labor supply and endogenous human capital accumulation.
