Author: Jeremy Arkes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Author: Elisabeth Lång
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
ISBN: 9176854639
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of how several individual characteristics, namely education (years of schooling), health indicators (height, weight, smoking, alcohol consumption, and exercise), criminal behavior, and crime victimization, influence labor market outcomes in the short and long run. The first part of the thesis consists of three studies in which I adopt a within-twin-pair difference approach to analyze how education, health indicators, and earnings are associated with each other over the life cycle. The second part of the thesis includes two studies in which I use field experiments in order to test the employability of exoffenders and crime victims. The first essay, Learning for life?, describes an analysis of the education premium in earnings and health-related behaviors throughout adulthood among twins. The results show that the education premium in earnings, net of genetic inheritance, is rather small over the life cycle but increases with the level of education. The results also show that the education premium in health-related behaviors is mainly concentrated on smoking habits. The influences of education on earnings and health-related behaviors seem to work independently of each other, and there are no signs that health-related behaviors influence the education premium in earnings or vice versa. The second essay, Blowing up money?, details an analysis of the association between smoking and earnings in two different historical social contexts in Sweden: the 1970s and the 2000s. I also consider possible differences in this association in the short and long run as well as between the sexes. The results show that the earnings penalty for smoking is much stronger in the 2000s as compared to the 1970s (for both sexes) and that it is larger in the long run as compared to the short run (for men). The third essay, Two by two, inch by inch, describes an analysis of the height premium among Swedish twins. The results show that the height premium is relatively constant over the life cycle and that it is larger below median height for men and above median height for young women. The estimates are similar for monozygotic and dizygotic twins, indicating that environmentally and genetically induced height differences are similarly associated with earnings over the life cycle. The fourth essay, The employability of ex-offenders, published in IZA Journal of Labor Policy (2017), 6:6, details an analysis of whether male and female exoffenders are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. The results show that employers do discriminate against exoffenders but that the degree of discrimination varies across occupations. Discrimination against ex-offenders is pronounced in female-dominated and high-skilled occupations. The magnitude of discrimination against exoffenders does not vary by applicants’ sex. The fifth essay, Victimized twice?, describes an analysis of whether male and female crime victims are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. This study is the first to consider potential hiring discrimination against crime victims. The results show that employers do discriminate against crime victims. The discrimination varies with the sex of the crime victim and occupational characteristics and is concentrated among high-skilled jobs for female crime victims and among femaledominated jobs for male crime victims.

Author: Mina Alizadehsadrdaneshpour
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay examines a dynamic effect of diabetes on employment. The second essay uses a broader measure of health and investigates its interaction with employment. The third essay explores a dynamic effect of education on hourly wage. The first essay investigates the diabetes effect on employment in Canada. The data is taken from the National Population Health Survey and men and women between age 25 and 64 are analysed separately. In contrast to the previous static studies on the effect of diabetes on labour market outcomes, this essay uses a dynamic model to identify the impacts of diabetes on employment in Canada. Results show that diabetes has a positive but insignificant effect on employment for men. The effect of diabetes on employment for women is negative and significant. The results confirm the signs and significance of diabetes coefficients estimated by static studies; however, the numbers are much smaller. Particularly, precise estimates of diabetes effect on employment would be helpful for policy makers to know the economic burden and design the appropriate policies. The second essay uses a broader measure of health to explore the relationship with employment. In contrast to previous static Canadian studies on the impact of health on labour market outcomes, this essay estimates a dynamic model using simultaneous equations to obtain more precise model specification for the interaction of health and labour market outcome. Results show that there is a high state dependency in employment and health for both men and women. Moreover, there is a highly significant and positive effect of health on employment for both men and women. As a result, health policies that have positive and direct effects on health can have positive and indirect effects on employment. The third essay investigates the return to education using a dynamic approach in Canada. This essay uses the longitudinal Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics and estimates the dynamic model for men and women between the age of 25 and 64 separately. In contrast to the previous static Canadian studies on the return to education, this essay estimates a dynamic Mincer model through a system GMM method to obtain more precise model specification for the return to education. Results demonstrate that the hourly wage is highly persistent for both men and women between age 25 and 64. The results also show that the return to schooling is increasing at the beginning of the working life for both men and women compared to a constant return to schooling by static Mincer function. Identifying the return to education can be useful for policy makers to decide on education expenditures and finance schooling programs.

Author: Francisco Haimovich Paz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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In these essays, I study the long-term effects of education policies and birth order on educational and labor market outcomes. In my first chapter I study the long-term effects of one of the first early education programs in the US - the Kindergarten Movement (1890-1910). I collected unique data on the opening of public kindergartens across cities in the US during this period. I then link over 100,000 children living in these cities to subsequent Censuses where their adult outcomes can be observed. I find that kindergarten attendance had large effects on adult outcomes. On average, the affected cohorts had about 0.6 additional years of schooling and six percent more income (as measured by occupational score). These effects were substantially larger for second generation immigrant children. The effects of this early intervention are most likely due to language acquisition and the attainment of various "soft skills" early in childhood. The second chapter was co-authored with Maria Laura Alzua and Leonardo Gasparini, who directed the project. In this chapter, we study the long-term effects of an educational reform in Argentina. In the nineties Argentina implemented a large education reform that mainly implied the extension of compulsory education in two additional years. The timing in the implementation substantially varied across provinces, providing a source of identification of the causal effects of the reform. The estimations from difference-in-difference models suggest that the reform had a positive impact on years of education and the probability of high school graduation. The impact on labor market outcomes was positive for the non-poor youths, but almost null for the poor. In my third chapter I use US historical data to empirically test whether long-term birth order effects differ across the leading and lagging regions of the country in the Pre-War World II period. To do so, I create a large panel dataset by linking more than two million children across the 1920 and the 1940 full census counts, and to the World War II army enlistment records. I then study birth order effects on various long-term outcomes (with emphasis on educational outcomes). I find that in general, birth order effects are positive in the "developing" south--i.e. younger siblings do better than older siblings-- and negative in the relatively modern north, which is consistent with the available evidence from contemporary data for developed and developing countries. I then exploit state level variation to show that birth order effects are positively correlated with the share of rural population, child labor rates and negatively correlated with the level mechanization in agriculture. I also show that, regardless the state of birth, the effects tend to be larger for the poor. Finally, I complement the analysis by looking at birth order effects on earnings and adult height. While I find relatively similar results for earnings, I find no birth order effects on adult height, which suggests that we can rule out improvements in health or nutrition as the potential mechanisms behind the effects on education and labor outcomes.

Author: Lawrence Costa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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I study the effect of higher education on lifecycle earnings and focus on three ways in which education may help drive earnings: the effect of higher education on one’s skills, the effect on one’s ability to accumulate new skills in the future, and the relationship between education and one’s likelihood of unemployment.

Author: Shoya Ishimaru
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The first chapter examines the importance of college and labor market options associated with childhood location in shaping educational and labor market outcomes experienced by a person later in life. I estimate a dynamic model that considers post-high school choices of whether and where to attend college and where to work, subject to home preferences, mobility costs, and spatial search frictions. The estimated model suggests that spatial gaps in local college and labor market options in the United States give rise to a 6 percentage point gap in the college attendance rate and an 11% gap in the wage rate at 10 years of experience between the 90th and 10th percentiles of across-county variation in each outcome. The second chapter suggests how the difference between linear IV and OLS coefficients can be interpreted and empirically decomposed when the treatment effect is nonlinear and heterogeneous in the true causal relationship. I show that the IV-OLS coefficient gap consists of three components: the difference in weights on treatment levels, the difference in weights on observables, and the difference in identified marginal effects. Using my framework, I revisit return to schooling estimates with compulsory schooling and college availability instruments. The third chapter investigates equilibrium impacts of federal policies such as free-college proposals, taking into account that human capital production is cumulative and that state governments have resource constraints. In the model, a state government cares about household welfare and aggregate educational attainment. Realizing that household choices vary with its decisions, the government chooses income tax rates, per-student expenditure levels on public K-12 and college education, college tuition and the provision of other public goods, subject to its budget constraint. We estimate the model using data from the U.S. Using counterfactual simulations, we find that free-public-college policies, mandatory or subsidized, would decrease state expenditure on and hence the quality of public education. More students would obtain college degrees due to increased enrollment. Over 86% of all households would lose while about 60% of the lowest income quintile would gain from such policies.

Author: Anjali Priya Verma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation examines the determinants of disparity in education and labor market outcomes. The first chapter, co-authored with Imelda, examines the impact of clean energy access on adult health and labor supply outcomes by exploiting a nationwide roll-out of clean cooking fuel program in Indonesia. This program led to a large-scale fuel switching, from kerosene, a dirty fuel, to liquid petroleum gas, a cleaner one. Using longitudinal survey data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and exploiting the staggered structure of the program rollout, we find that access to clean cooking fuel led to a significant improvement in women’s health, particularly among those who spend most of their time indoors doing housework. We also find an increase in women’s work hours, suggesting that access to cleaner fuel can improve women’s health and plausibly their productivity, allowing them to supply more market labor. For men, we find an increase in the work hours and propensity to have an additional job, mainly in households where women accrued the largest health and labor benefits from the program. These results highlight the role of clean energy in reducing gender disparity in health and point to the existence of positive externalities from the improved health of women on other members of the household. The second paper studies the labor supply response of women to changes in expected alimony income. Using an alimony law change in the US that significantly reduced the post-divorce alimony support among women, I first show that this led to an increase in divorce probability. Second, consistent with the theoretical prediction from a simple model of labor supply, the reform led to an increase in the female labor force participation, with a larger increase among ever-married and more educated samples of women. As a result, the average female wage income increased after the reform. While labor supply increased, I show that most of this increase was concentrated in part-time employment, which may not be sufficient to compensate for the expected loss in alimony income. In light of the recent movement in the US to reform alimony laws, these findings are pertinent to understand its implications on women’s labor supply and economic well-being. The third chapter, co-authored with Akiva Yonah Meiselman, studies the long-run effects of disruptive peers in disciplinary schools on educational and labor market outcomes of students placed at these institutions. Students placed at disciplinary schools tend to have significantly worse future outcomes. We provide evidence that the composition of peers at these institutions plays an important role in explaining this link. We use rich administrative data of high school students in Texas which provides a detailed record of each student’s disciplinary placements, including their exact date of placement and assignment duration. This allows us to identify the relevant peers for each student based on their overlap at the institution. We leverage within school-year variation in peer composition at each institution to ask whether a student who overlaps with particularly disruptive peers has worse subsequent outcomes. We show that exposure to peers in highest quintile of disruptiveness relative to lowest quintile when placed at a disciplinary school increases students’ subsequent removals, reduces their educational attainment, and worsens labor market outcomes. Moreover, these effects are stronger when students have a similar peer group in terms of the reason for removal, or when the distribution of disruptiveness among peers is more concentrated than dispersed around the mean. Our findings draw attention to an unintended consequence of student removal to disciplinary schools, and highlights how brief exposures to disruptive peers can affect an individual’s long-run trajectories

Author: Riley Acton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Chapter 1: Effects of Reduced Community College Tuition on College Choices and Degree CompletionRecent efforts to increase college access concentrate on reducing tuition rates at community colleges, but researchers and policymakers alike have expressed concern that such reductions may not lead to long-run college completion gains. In this chapter, I use detailed data on students' college enrollment and completion outcomes to study how community college tuition rates affect students' outcomes across both public and private colleges. By exploiting spatial variation in tuition rates, I find that reducing tuition at a student's local community college by $1,000 increases enrollment at the college by 3.5 percentage points (18%) and reduces enrollment at non-local community colleges, for-profit institutions, and other private, vocationally-focused colleges, by 1.9 percentage points (15%). This shift in enrollment choices increases students' persistence in college, the number of credits they complete, and the probability that they transfer to and earn bachelor's degrees from four-year colleges.Chapter 2: Community College Program Choices in the Wake of Local Job LossesDeciding which field to study is one of the most consequential decisions college students make, but most research on the topic focuses on students attending four-year colleges. In this chapter, I study the extent to which community college students' program choices respond to changes in local labor market conditions in related occupations. To do so, I exploit the prevalence of mass layoffs and plant closings across counties, industries, and time, and create occupation-specific layoff measures that align closely with community college programs. I find that declines in local employment deter students from entering closely related community college programs and instead induce them to enroll in other vocationally-oriented programs. Using data on occupational skill composition, I document that students predominantly shift enrollment between programs that require similar skills. These effects are strongest when layoffs occur in business, health, and law enforcement occupations, as well as when they take place in rural counties.Chapter 3: Do Health Insurance Mandates Spillover to Education? Evidence from Michigan's Autism Insurance Mandate (with Scott Imberman and Michael Lovenheim)Social programs and mandates are usually studied in isolation, but interaction effects could create spillovers to other public goods. In this paper, we examine how health insurance coverage affects the education of students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the context of state-mandated private therapy coverage. Since Medicaid benefits under the mandate were far weaker than under private insurance, we proxy for Medicaid ineligibility and estimate effects via triple-differences. We find little evidence of an overall shift in ASD identification, but we do find substantial crowd-out of special education services for students with ASD from the mandate. The mandate led to increased mainstreaming of students in general education classrooms and a reduction in special education support services like teacher consultants. There is little evidence of changes in achievement, which supports our interpretation of the service reductions as crowd-out.

Author: Cristina Adelaida Bellés Obrero
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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This dissertation consists of three chapters that investigate students' and teachers' incentive programs, and the intergenerational infant health consequences of a labor market policy. In the first chapter, I perform a randomized control trial at a distance learning university to compare three different monetary incentive schemes varying students' performance target in the same educational environment. I show that the performance target implemented interacts with some of the characteristics of the students incentivized, such as intrinsic motivation and experience with the incentivized task. Moreover, a novel finding of this study is that incentives foster students' strategic behavior that is triggered by the way performance is measured. In the second chapter, I examine how tying teachers' pay to students' performance affects the latter's achievements. I show that a nationwide program implemented in Peru giving monetary rewards to teachers conditional on their students' performance, has a precisely estimated zero impact on students' grades. Finally, in the third chapter I investigate the effect of a child labor regulation that increased the minimum legal age to work from 14 to 16 years old, on fertility and infant health outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that the reform increased educational attainment, and decreased marriage and fertility. Interestingly, I show that the reform was detrimental for the health of the offspring at the moment of delivery.

Author: Shamma Adeeb Alam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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This dissertation is on three essays on issues in development and health economics. In these essays, I try to examine how different health issues affect economic outcomes and vice versa. I examine individual and household responses to different economic and health issues in Bangladesh and Tanzania. In the first two chapters, I examine how different shocks affect family's fertility decisions and decision to make investments on their children in Tanzania. In the third chapter, I examine how information regarding dangers of pesticide affects the likelihood of pesticide exposure for farmers in Bangladesh. In the first chapter, I examine how parental illness affects child labor and schooling outcomes using panel data from Tanzania. Prior literature provides limited empirical evidence on the impact of parental illness on child labor and schooling outcomes. I examine if parental illness causes households to reallocate children's time from school to work. I find that a father's illness hinders child schooling by decreasing attendance and hours spent in school. These effects on schooling are substantially greater for severe illnesses. There is also evidence that a father's illness has long-term impact on child education, as it decreases their likelihood of completing primary school and leads to fewer total years of schooling. However, a father's illness has no effect on child labor. In contrast, a mother's illness does not affect child education, but does cause a small increase in children's work. Surprisingly, parental illness does not have a differential impact by children's gender. Additionally, illness of other household members, such as grandparents, adult siblings, and child siblings, has no effect on children's schooling. Thus, overall, there is no evidence that parental illness or illness of other household members affects children's schooling through increased child labor. Instead, the results suggest that only illness of fathers, who are typically the primary income earners in Tanzanian households, reduces household income and severely decreases the family's ability to afford child education. In the second chapter, which is a joint work with Claus Portner, we examine the relationship between household income shocks and fertility decisions. Using panel data from Tanzania, we estimate the impact of agricultural shocks on contraception use, pregnancy, and the likelihood of childbirth. To account for unobserved household characteristics that potentially affect both shocks and fertility decisions we employ a fixed effects model. Households significantly increase their contraception use in response to income shocks from crop loss. Furthermore, pregnancies and childbirth are significantly delayed for households experiencing a crop shock. We argue that these changes in behavior are the result of deliberate decisions of the households rather than income shocks' effects on other factors that in influence fertility, such as women's health status, the absence or migration of spouse, and dissolution of partnerships. In the third chapter, which is a joint work with Hendrik Wolff, we examine how different information sources influence precautionary behavior when using pesticide and likelihood of pesticide exposure. Modern agriculture heavily depends on the use of pesticides and has successfully increased productivity, but also led to increasing concerns regarding farmers' health. Mishandling of pesticides continues to pose a serious health problem for farmers especially in developing countries. This chapter describes supply side and demand side regulations for pesticide handling, health outcomes and adoption of health technologies using a detailed household level dataset from Bangladesh. The dataset is unique as it spans the chain from: `where do farmers obtain information from', `which precautionary tools (i.e. masks, gloves) are used' and `what are subsequent health outcomes after spraying'. Previous studies hypothesized that pesticide sellers in developing countries misguide farmers regarding pesticide use. On the other hand, government field extension workers reduce pesticide exposure by training farmers in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) techniques. In our dataset we cannot confirm these hypotheses. In contrast, we find that those famers that use information from pesticide sellers increase the adoption of precautionary tools. These same farmers also enjoy subsequently improved health outcomes. Further, our results show that the agricultural extension program does not significantly impact technology adoption or health. We find instead evidence of social learning as peer farmers, especially those trained in handling pesticides, have a substantial influence. We conclude with policy recommendations.