Essays on Migration and Human Capital Accumulation

Essays on Migration and Human Capital Accumulation PDF Author: Xu Xu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
The first essay is The linkage between foreign direct investment and international migration. Immigration policy and policies regarding the flow of capital across borders are generally enacted separately. Such separation may not be appropriate if there are interactions between immigration and foreign direct investment (FDI). Although much research has focused on the determinants of international migration, little agreement has been made with respect to how FDI affects migration. In this paper, we attempt to clarify the influence of FDI on migration. We consider not only how aggregate FDI into country i affects migration from i to j but also how the FDI that i receives specifically from country j (which we denote as bilateral FDI) affects migration from i to j. We find that bilateral FDI stock has a positive and significant impact on the size of migrant stock through what we call an "ideological linkage". We show that this finding is robust across different estimation methods, including instrumental variables Tobit and Heckman selection models. We conclude that the influence of FDI on migration needs to be considered when designing economic policies. The second essay is Environmental quality and international migration. This essay examines the extent of which pollution is a factor that pushes people to migrate across borders. It provides an empirical analysis of the aspects of air quality and its unexplored role in the international migration. We allow pollution to affect migrants differently according to their gender and educational attainment. We also consider different types of air pollution such as sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. We then test for the interaction between environmental quality and income upon migration. We find that air pollution is a push factor but not necessarily for countries with very high incomes. We also find evidence supporting that there is a gender difference in the migration-environment association. Finally, the third essay is The effects of foreign universities on domestic human capital accumulation. In this essay, we focus on the impact of foreign direct investment in education (i.e., foreign universities opening up branches overseas) on human capital formation in the host countries. High ranking universities have the privilege to enter foreign market and usually enjoy subsidy from the host country. However, the entry of low quality foreign universities may have positive impact on domestic human capital accumulation with less uncertainty. In our model, we have three types of universities: high quality foreign universities located domestically, low quality foreign universities located domestically and domestic universities. Agents in the model represent students in the host country who decide upon their level of preparedness for a university education. As comparative statics exercises, we examine how effort changes when the slots of high quality or low quality foreign institutions change. Results from these comparative statics exercises could help a government choose the optimal size of high quality or low quality foreign universities where optimal means maximizing aggregate effort. We also examine the effect of foreign education premium on human capital accumulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first economics-based, theoretical study of this issue. We conclude that the entry of low quality foreign universities generally increases domestic human capital accumulation whereas allowing more high quality universities to enter the country produces less straightforward results. We also find that lowering the wage gap could have beneficial effects on human capital accumulation.

Essays on Migration and Human Capital Accumulation

Essays on Migration and Human Capital Accumulation PDF Author: Xu Xu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
The first essay is The linkage between foreign direct investment and international migration. Immigration policy and policies regarding the flow of capital across borders are generally enacted separately. Such separation may not be appropriate if there are interactions between immigration and foreign direct investment (FDI). Although much research has focused on the determinants of international migration, little agreement has been made with respect to how FDI affects migration. In this paper, we attempt to clarify the influence of FDI on migration. We consider not only how aggregate FDI into country i affects migration from i to j but also how the FDI that i receives specifically from country j (which we denote as bilateral FDI) affects migration from i to j. We find that bilateral FDI stock has a positive and significant impact on the size of migrant stock through what we call an "ideological linkage". We show that this finding is robust across different estimation methods, including instrumental variables Tobit and Heckman selection models. We conclude that the influence of FDI on migration needs to be considered when designing economic policies. The second essay is Environmental quality and international migration. This essay examines the extent of which pollution is a factor that pushes people to migrate across borders. It provides an empirical analysis of the aspects of air quality and its unexplored role in the international migration. We allow pollution to affect migrants differently according to their gender and educational attainment. We also consider different types of air pollution such as sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. We then test for the interaction between environmental quality and income upon migration. We find that air pollution is a push factor but not necessarily for countries with very high incomes. We also find evidence supporting that there is a gender difference in the migration-environment association. Finally, the third essay is The effects of foreign universities on domestic human capital accumulation. In this essay, we focus on the impact of foreign direct investment in education (i.e., foreign universities opening up branches overseas) on human capital formation in the host countries. High ranking universities have the privilege to enter foreign market and usually enjoy subsidy from the host country. However, the entry of low quality foreign universities may have positive impact on domestic human capital accumulation with less uncertainty. In our model, we have three types of universities: high quality foreign universities located domestically, low quality foreign universities located domestically and domestic universities. Agents in the model represent students in the host country who decide upon their level of preparedness for a university education. As comparative statics exercises, we examine how effort changes when the slots of high quality or low quality foreign institutions change. Results from these comparative statics exercises could help a government choose the optimal size of high quality or low quality foreign universities where optimal means maximizing aggregate effort. We also examine the effect of foreign education premium on human capital accumulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first economics-based, theoretical study of this issue. We conclude that the entry of low quality foreign universities generally increases domestic human capital accumulation whereas allowing more high quality universities to enter the country produces less straightforward results. We also find that lowering the wage gap could have beneficial effects on human capital accumulation.

Essays on International Migration and Human Capital Accumulation

Essays on International Migration and Human Capital Accumulation PDF Author: Sandra Spirovska
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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In this dissertation, I explore how international migration and environmental pollution shape human capital accumulation and labor market outcomes. The first chapter examines how college enrollment and major choice decisions of young adults in migrant-sending countries are affected by the removal of international migration barriers. My identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in migration costs during the 2004 European Union (EU) enlargement to compare enrollment in newly admitted sending countries and incumbent destination countries. I use microlevel data from the EU Labor Force Survey and an event study framework to show that college enrollment in new states increased 15-25% in anticipation of better migration opportunities, and up to 30% once borders opened. College students in new states were more likely to enroll in college majors related to occupations with labor shortages in destination countries. To disentangle the effects of migration costs and wages on enrollment, I develop a model of college major choice with a migration option. Counterfactual policy experiments indicate that sending country enrollment is highly sensitive to migration penalties, but less sensitive to domestic college wage increases. The second chapter explores the effect of large migration outflows on localwages and the gender wage gap. I estimate the short-run net effect of emigration on real gross monthly earnings in 10 Central and Eastern European countries using a simple structural factor demand model. The model assumes that workers across education, workers within education and across age, and workers within education-age groups and across gender are imperfect substitutes. I find that the large emigration occurring due to EU accession increases average wages as much as 3.5%. In most countries, these gains are concentrated among young and highly educated female and male workers, while workers with an intermediate level of education see negligible wage gains or even losses. Finally, female workers exhibit higher wage gains than men, which indicates a possible decrease in the gender wage gap as a result of emigration. The third chapter is co-authored with Ludovica Gazze and Claudia Persicoand explores the long-run spillover effects of lead. Children exposed to pollutants like lead have lower achievement in school and are more likely to engage in risky behavior. Because children interact daily in the classroom, lead-exposed children might affect the long-run outcomes of their non-lead exposed peers. We estimate these spillover effects using unique data on preschool blood lead levels (BLLs) matched to education data for all students in North Carolina public schools. We compare siblings whose school-grade cohorts differ in the proportion of children with elevated BLLs, holding constant school and peers' demographics. Having more lead-exposed peers is associated with lower high-school graduation and SAT-taking rates and increased suspensions and absences. Peer effects are larger for black students. Based on the lower likelihood of graduating high school alone, we estimate that the spillover effect of lead exposure is $9.2 billion per birth-year cohort.

Essays on the Effects of Migration and Demographic Factors on Labor Markets and Human Capital Accumulation

Essays on the Effects of Migration and Demographic Factors on Labor Markets and Human Capital Accumulation PDF Author: Zainab Iftikhar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays on Determinants of Human Capital Accumulation

Essays on Determinants of Human Capital Accumulation PDF Author: Maya Sherpa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child labor
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
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.

Essays on Human Capital Externalities and Migration

Essays on Human Capital Externalities and Migration PDF Author: Junjie Guo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The three chapters of my dissertation explore the role of human capital externalities in accounting for the geographic variation in both wage level and wage growth, and the role of search capital in understanding the patterns of interstate migration in the US. Chapter 1 shows that wage grows faster with experience in labor markets with larger shares of college-educated workers (college share). An instrumental variable and panel data with individual fixed effects are used to address the potential endogeneity of college share and the sorting of workers across labor markets respectively. The effect of the college share of a labor market is shown to persist after workers leave the market, suggesting that a larger college share raises returns to experience through the accumulation of human capital valuable in all markets. In chapter 2, using measures of Compulsory Schooling Laws as instruments for state average schooling, we find that one more year of average schooling leads to a 6-8% increase in individual wages. The effect is statistically significant and robust to different specifications. We construct a model where the average human capital of an economy is allowed to affect the productivity of a typical firm in the economy. We estimate that the elasticity of a firm's productivity with respect to the average human capital of the economy is around 0.121. Chapter 3 builds a model of job search and migration with search capital to understand two major patterns of interstate migration in the US: (1) Around 90% of migrants move in order to take a new job or for job transfer rather than to look for work, and (2) over half of all moves are repeated and return migration. The model allows workers to receive job offers from all locations in the economy and to accumulate search capital that increases the location-specific job arrival rate. The model explains both migration patterns under reasonable parameters.

Essays on Human Capital Externalities and Migration

Essays on Human Capital Externalities and Migration PDF Author: Junjie Guo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The three chapters of my dissertation explore the role of human capital externalities in accounting for the geographic variation in both wage level and wage growth, and the role of search capital in understanding the patterns of interstate migration in the US. Chapter 1 shows that wage grows faster with experience in labor markets with larger shares of college-educated workers (college share). An instrumental variable and panel data with individual fixed effects are used to address the potential endogeneity of college share and the sorting of workers across labor markets respectively. The effect of the college share of a labor market is shown to persist after workers leave the market, suggesting that a larger college share raises returns to experience through the accumulation of human capital valuable in all markets. In chapter 2, using measures of Compulsory Schooling Laws as instruments for state average schooling, we find that one more year of average schooling leads to a 6-8% increase in individual wages. The effect is statistically significant and robust to different specifications. We construct a model where the average human capital of an economy is allowed to affect the productivity of a typical firm in the economy. We estimate that the elasticity of a firm's productivity with respect to the average human capital of the economy is around 0.121. Chapter 3 builds a model of job search and migration with search capital to understand two major patterns of interstate migration in the US: (1) Around 90% of migrants move in order to take a new job or for job transfer rather than to look for work, and (2) over half of all moves are repeated and return migration. The model allows workers to receive job offers from all locations in the economy and to accumulate search capital that increases the location-specific job arrival rate. The model explains both migration patterns under reasonable parameters.

Trade and Human Capital Accumulation

Trade and Human Capital Accumulation PDF Author: Dörte Dömeland
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Comparative Advantage
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Book Description
This study provides empirical evidence that trade increases on-the-job human capital accumulation by estimating the effect of home country openness on estimated returns to home country experience of U.S. immigrants. The positive effect of trade on on-the-job human capital accumulation remains significant when controlling for GDP, educational attainment, and institutional quality. It is not the result of self-selection, heterogeneity in returns to experience, English-speaking origin, or cultural background. The effect persists when restricting the sample to non-OECD countries, thereby resolving the theoretical ambiguity of whether trade increases or decreases learning-by-doing. The role of trade in generating economic growth is therefore likely to be more important than generally considered.

Essays on Human Capital, Geography, and the Family

Essays on Human Capital, Geography, and the Family PDF Author: Garrett Anstreicher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

Essays on Human Capital Formation of Youth in the Middle East

Essays on Human Capital Formation of Youth in the Middle East PDF Author: Wael Mansour
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Human capital formation is a fundamental requirement for countries' long term economic development and societal prosperity. This process can be enhanced or disrupted by internal factors such as migration and remittances, or external ones like wars. This thesis is interested in investigating both phenomena. The following questions are addressed: what is the impact of migrant remittances on human capital formation, do these private inflows induce any changes in the behavior of remittance-receivers towards education expenditure, and finally what is the short term micro-economic effect of armed conflicts on education in post war countries. In investigating these issues, focus is made on two perspectives: first youth, an active group in the society whose age matches up higher education levels and labor force entry simultaneously; second gender differentials both in terms of impact and behavior. The research explores new surveys from the Middle East, datasets that have not been analyzed previously from an education angle and that are not generally available to researchers. These datasets come from Jordan and Lebanon, two middle income non-oil producer countries. The thesis is composed of three independent essays. The first examines the impact of migrant remittances on human capital accumulation among youth in Jordan and highlights the various ways in which remittances influence education outcomes. The analysis takes a gender dimension and examines whether the effects and magnitude of such impact is different between males and females. The second essay considers remittances receipt, from both domestic and international sources, and examines their impact on Jordanian households' education spending patterns. Following the literature on intra-household bargaining and gender expenditure preferences, the analysis examines whether such impact is potentially different between male and female headed households. The third essay tackles the impact of the 2006 war on education attendance of youth in Lebanon. The chapter captures households' schooling responses in the aftermath of the war. By looking at the implications of a diversified array of damages sustained; reflecting physical, human, income and employment losses; the chapter examines possible linkages between the nature of the damage incurred and the manner and magnitude in which such damage affects education.

Essays on Human Capital Formation, Living Standards and Selective Migration

Essays on Human Capital Formation, Living Standards and Selective Migration PDF Author: Yvonne Stolz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Human capital
Languages : en
Pages :

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