Three Essays on Human Capital, Child Care and Growth, and on Mobility

Three Essays on Human Capital, Child Care and Growth, and on Mobility PDF Author: Rizwana Alamgir-Arif
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child care
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
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.

Three Essays on Human Capital, Child Care and Growth, and on Mobility

Three Essays on Human Capital, Child Care and Growth, and on Mobility PDF Author: Rizwana Alamgir-Arif
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child care
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Three Essays on Human Capital

Three Essays on Human Capital PDF Author: Xiaoyan Chen Youderian
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
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.

Three Essays on The Formation and Mobility of Human Capital in Developing Countries

Three Essays on The Formation and Mobility of Human Capital in Developing Countries PDF Author: Maggie Yuanyuan Liu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Development and economic growth take place through the more efficient allocation of inputs into more productive uses. Human capital is a key input since it is the main asset of the majority of the population, especially of the poor, in developing countries. What factors attribute to existing barriers to physical and social mobility of human capital in developing countries? How has expanded global trade affected the allocation and accumulation of skill in developing economies? In three chapters, I study the education and internal migration in China and India, and provide answer to these questions.

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.

Three Essays on Investments in Children's Human Capital

Three Essays on Investments in Children's Human Capital PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Investment in Human Capital, Labor Mobility and Inequality

Investment in Human Capital, Labor Mobility and Inequality PDF Author: Elisabeth Magnani
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Three Essays on the Economics of Human Capital Development

Three Essays on the Economics of Human Capital Development PDF Author: Emma Louise Gorman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Parental Investments and Children's Human Capital in Low-to-Middle-Income Countries

Parental Investments and Children's Human Capital in Low-to-Middle-Income Countries PDF Author: Jere R. Behrman
Publisher: Elements in Development Econom
ISBN: 1009336169
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 71

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Book Description
This Element reviews what we know about parental investments and children's human capital in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs). First, it presents definitions and a simple analytical framework; then discusses determinants of children's human capital in the form of cognitive skills, socioemotional skills and physical and mental health; then reviews estimates of impacts of these forms of human capital; next considers the implications of such estimates for inequality and poverty; and concludes with a summary suggesting some positive impacts of parental investments on children's human capital in LMICs and a discussion of gaps in the literature pertaining to both data and methodology. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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...

Human Capital Policy

Human Capital Policy PDF Author: Aysun Aygü̈n
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child care services
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
Chapter 1: Vaccination Effects of Family Medicine in Turkey. As a component of the Health Transformation Program reforms, the family medicine system was introduced in Turkey as the main source of primary care. With a gradual implementation process, provinces switched to the family medicine system at different points in time between 2005 and 2010. Using a nationally representative survey of health care service utilization and outcomes for maternal and child-care services, we test whether on-time vaccination rates for children under age two are causally affected by access to family medicine centers and health care workers. A regression discontinuity design shows that availability of family medicine doctors significantly increases on-time application of vaccinations in the national infant immunization program. Specifically, we find that access to family medicine centers increases on-time vaccination rates for the follow-up shots. Chapter 2: Child Care Regulations and Demand for Formal Child Care. Formal child care centers are licensed and regulated by state governments. Both the stringency of regulations and the price of paid child care show great variability across states. Strict regulations often come with high prices for paid child care, making regulated child care unaffordable for families. Using changes in regulations for different states over time and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), this study shows that strict regulations affect use of regulated care by decreasing the number of formal care providers without a direct impact on price. Based on the estimation results, I conclude that demand for formal care is highly elastic and informal child care arrangements are close substitutes for formal care for consumers. Strict regulations create an incentive to substitute informal types of child care for center-based organized care. Chapter 3: Social Norms and Women in the Labor Force. Social norms and gender roles are argued to shape the prevalent gap in labor force participation of men and women in developed countries. This study aims to understand whether female labor force participation is affected by social norms by using the election of female senators and governors as a possible cause of norms that support working women. Using regression discontinuity design with the election data for U.S. Senate and state governors, I estimate the relative change in women's labor force participation after a woman wins the Senate seat or governor's office by a narrow margin of victory. Consistent with the literature, my estimation results do not provide evidence to reject the null hypotheses of no demonstration effect of female senators and governors on labor force participation of women.