Essays on the Economics of Education and Fertility

Essays on the Economics of Education and Fertility PDF Author: Tiloka de Silva
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays on the Economics of Education and Fertility

Essays on the Economics of Education and Fertility PDF Author: Tiloka de Silva
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays on the Economics of Education, Fertility, and Well-being

Essays on the Economics of Education, Fertility, and Well-being PDF Author: Miriam Mäder
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays on the Economics of Fertility and Education

Essays on the Economics of Fertility and Education PDF Author: Frederik Wiynck
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays on the Economics of Education

Essays on the Economics of Education PDF Author: Peter Sturmthal Bergman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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I study three separate questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I examine how information frictions between parents and their children affect human capital investment, and how much reducing those friction can improve student effort and achievement. I find that providing additional information to parents regarding missing assignments is a potentially cost-effective strategy to increase parental investments and improve student achievement. In Chapter 2, we measure the impact of high-quality charter schools on teen fertility using admission lotteries to several Los Angeles charter schools as a natural experiment. We find evidence that admission to high-quality charter schools can substantially reduce teen pregnancies. In Chapter 3, we semi-parametrically estimate teacher effects on student test scores using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District. We document that there is significantly more within-teacher variation in teachers' effects than across teacher variation. We find that interacting the teacher indicator variables with a function of the students' lagged test scores captures most of the nonlinearities, preserves the heterogeneity of teacher effects, and provides more accurate estimates.

Essays on the Economics of Health and Fertility

Essays on the Economics of Health and Fertility PDF Author: Anupam B. Jena
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : AIDS (Disease)
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Three Essays in Labor Economics

Three Essays in Labor Economics PDF Author: Liang Choon Wang
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ISBN:
Category : Fertility, Human
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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This dissertation is comprised of three autonomous chapters on topics in labor economics. The first chapter exploits the quasi-random assignment of students into classrooms in a large secondary school in Malaysia to estimate the effects of peers on student outcomes. The estimates show that having better achieving classmates improves a student's math achievement and reduces the student's incidence of class absences and discipline violations. There is also evidence of non-linear peer effects and that average achievement may increase as a result of ability grouping. The second chapter extends Iannaccone's (1992) religious club model to explain why the Amish would collectively object to high school education and refuse to comply with compulsory schooling laws. I utilize the surprising 1972 U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Wisconsin vs. Yoder, which exempts Amish children from compulsory high school education, as a policy shock to test the predictions of the model. The results show that the successful restriction on high school education helped the Amish sect exclude individuals who have high labor productivity and would lower the quality of the sect from joining. The evidence supports the idea that the Amish use the restriction on secular education as a religious sacrifice to screen out uncommitted members. The third chapter investigates the effect of higher immigration on native fertility. Previous research shows that immigration affects wages, income, and the cost of child rearing, while standard fertility model predicts that changes in wages, income, and the cost of child rearing would affect fertility. Using the cross-state variation in the total fertility rates of native-born American women and the share of immigrants in the population between 1970 and 2005, this chapter estimates that for every one percentage point increase in the share of immigrants in the population, native total fertility rate is predicted to increase by roughly 0.01 children. The negative effect of immigration on wages is the most likely explanation, because the fertility of less educated women and women who resided in their states of birth is most affected.

Essays on the Economics of Education

Essays on the Economics of Education PDF Author: Elizabeth Dhuey
Publisher: ProQuest
ISBN: 9780549306092
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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The final chapter is "The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects." A continuum of ages exists at school entry due to the use of a single school cut-off date--making the "oldest" children approximately twenty percent older than the "youngest" children. We provide substantial evidence that these initial maturity differences have long lasting effects on student performance across OECD countries. In particular, the youngest members of each cohort score 4-12 percentiles lower than the oldest members in grade four and 2-9 percentiles lower in grade eight. In fact, data from Canada and the United States shows that the youngest members of each cohort are even less likely to attend university.

Essays in the Economics of Education

Essays in the Economics of Education PDF Author: Ling Shao
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781321853001
Category : Education, Higher
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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This dissertation explores questions in financial aid, student loans, and homework time use. In chapter one, I use quarter of birth instruments to estimate the relationship between calculated financial need and actual financial aid received. A dollar increase in financial need is associated with 15 cents in federal grants and 47 cents in loans. However, the relationship between financial need and institutional aid is, on average, small and statistically insignificant. In chapter two, I use instrumental variables to estimate the effect of student loans on fertility later in life. First, I exploit a FAFSA loan-eligibility rule along with state-level variation in the school-entrance age to instrument for differences in loan availability. Next, I exploit state-by-SAT-score variation in tuition at public universities to instrument for differences in loan demand. I find that an increase in undergraduate loans, due to an increase in loan availability, does not significantly affect fertility. However, an increase in loans, due to higher tuition, decreases the number of children the student has 10 years after graduation. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that doubling tuition at in- state public colleges will lead to a 14 percent decrease in total fertility 10 years after graduation. In chapter three, we use the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to document that Asian-American high-school students, on average, spend 2.3 times more time on homework compared to white students and 3.9 times more time on homework compared to black students. Our estimates suggest that the Asian-white homework gap is approximately 7.4 hours per week. Contrary to certain stereotypes, Asian-American students do not spend less time on leisure or sleep compared to white students. Rather, Asian-American students spending less time working for pay, doing household chores, and playing sports account for the entire Asian-white homework gap. We hypothesize that the differences in time use across ethnic groups may be related to the differences in educational outcomes across ethnic group.

Essays on the Economics of Education

Essays on the Economics of Education PDF Author: Richard Wells Patterson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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This dissertation examines various economic factors that influence student academic performance. In the first essay, I explore the role of behavioral factors in educational performance by testing whether time-management tools can improve academic outcomes for online students. I design three software tools including (1) a commitment device that allows students to pre-commit to time limits on distracting Internet activities, (2) a reminder tool that is triggered by time spent on distracting websites, and (3) a focusing tool that allows students to block distracting sites when they go to the course website. I test the impact of these tools in a large-scale randomized experiment (n=657) conducted in a massive open online course (MOOC) hosted by Stanford University. Relative to students in the control group, students in the commitment device treatment spend 24% more time working on the course, receive course grades that are 0.29 standard deviations higher, and are 40% more likely to complete the course. In contrast, outcomes for students in the reminder and focusing treatments are not statistically distinguishable from the control. These results suggest that tools designed to address procrastination can have a significant impact on online student performance. In the second essay, I examine whether trends in parenting time could help explain the black-white test score gap. I use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to examine the patterns in the time black and white children receive from mothers at each age between birth and age 14 and compare these patterns to corresponding test-score gaps documented in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K). I observe that black children spend significantly less time with their mothers than white children in the first years of life and that differences are concentrated in activities that may be especially important during these years. Differences in parenting time, however, rapidly decline with age. Contrastingly, when socioeconomic variables are controlled, black-white test score gaps are small in kindergarten, but then grow over time. The results of this study suggest that contemporaneous differences in parent time are unlikely to be a significant factor in black-white test score trends. In the third essay, coauthored with Jordan Matsudaira, I study whether charter school unionization impacts student academic outcomes. We use administrative school-level data coupled with data on the timing of union recognition collected via our own public records requests (PRR) and records of unionization from the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to construct difference-in-difference estimates the of the impact of teacher unionization on student outcomes. We find that unionization has a positive and statically significant impact on student math performance and a positive but only marginally significant impact on english performance. In our preferred estimates, we find that unions increase average grade-level math test scores by 0.17-0.21 standard deviations (SD) and English scores by 0.06-0.08 SD. These estimates allow us to rule out even modest negative effects of unionization on student academic outcomes.

Essays on Education and Stages of Growth

Essays on Education and Stages of Growth PDF Author: Elisa Rizzo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This work is composed by three chapters, two of them deal with education and public education policies related to crime, one focuses on the relationship between education and birth spacing and fertility. In the first chapter I study the mechanisms at play between education and crime when the government introduces a policy to increase the access to education and whether choosing the right policy design we are able to reduce crime despite the raise in the aggregate wealth generated by human capital growth. In the second chapter I analyse the dynamic relation between education access, education quality and crime deterrence technology, to characterize the conditions under which crime drops and the implied role of education. The third chapter is an empirical study of the relationship between education and fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa, between economics and demography. Even if the topic and the methods of the first two papers differ a lot from the third one, they are all related by the interest to understand better the role of education in economic growth. Both crime and violence and high fertility rates and population growth, for diverse reasons and through peculiar dynamics, undermine economic investment and growth potential. The goal of this thesis is therefore to give a contribution to understand these reasons and these dynamics, with special attention to developing countries where free access to education is a recent achievement and where there is still work to do to improve the quality of the education system and teaching.