Author: Crawford Hoyt Bleakley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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This dissertation consists of three independent essays, all of which are empirical treatments of different types of investment. The first essay evaluates the economic consequences of the successful eradication of hookworm disease from the American South in the early twentieth century. I find that reducing hookworm infection in this region brought about large increases in human capital and earnings. I then place these results in the context of contemporaneous questions about the economic burden of tropical disease. The second essay (joint with Kevin Cowan) examines the role that partial dollarization of debt may have played in recent emerging-market financial crises. Much has been written recently about the problems that result from "mismatches" between foreign-currency denominated liabilities and assets (or income flows) denominated in local currency. Specifically, it is supposed that the expansion in the "peso" value of "dollar" liabilities resulting from a devaluation could, via a net-worth effect, offset the expansionary competitiveness effect. Our results suggest that, for this sample of firms in these episodes, this net-worth channel is likely small in comparison with the more traditional competitiveness effect. The final essay (joint with Aimee Chin) considers the role that English-language skill plays in the economic performance of immigrants to the United States. This study exploits the fact that younger children tend to learn languages more easily than adolescents or adults to construct an instrumental variable for English proficiency. We find that low English proficiency significantly lowers earnings and educational attainment. Indeed, much of the effect of language skills on wages in our sample appears to be mediated by years of schooling.
Author: Nagham Sayour
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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"This thesis is comprised of three empirical essays on the theme of human capital. The essays use natural and laboratory experiments to study the determinants, returns and components of human capital. We first consider the determinants of human capital by studying the effects of maternal care as a determinant of children's human capital. Then we investigate the returns to human capital by studying the effects of immigration policies on immigrants' characteristics and labour market outcomes. Lastly, we examine specific components of human capital through an experiment on non-cognitive skills and preferences. The first essay estimates the causal impact of maternal care on the developmental outcomes of children aged 2-3 years using a parental leave reform implemented in Canada at the end of 2000 as an exogenous variation to maternal care. The reform increased the time mothers spend with their newborns by 3 months without affecting their income net of taxes, transfers and child care costs. Using the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, we employ a difference-in-differences methodology to compare children with a sibling born after the reform to those with a sibling born before the reform, relative to children of the same birth cohorts who did not have a younger sibling in the period surrounding the reform. We find that treated children enjoy a 16 percent increase in the time they spend with their mothers, with maternal care crowding out informal care. The increase in maternal care does not translate into better cognitive, non-cognitive or health outcomes in the short-run or the medium-run. The second essay uses a natural experiment to study the effects of a change in the point system, a system that selects immigrants based on specific observable characteristics, on immigrants' characteristics and labor market outcomes. Specifically, in 2001, Quebec changed its point system, by increasing the points for education and French language and decreasing the points for a subjective category "adaptability". The objective of the reform was to increase the number of French-speaking immigrants without deteriorating their labor market performance. Using a difference-in-differences and triple differences methodology, we show that, compared to immigrants to the Rest of Canada, immigrants to Quebec after the reform hold more bachelor's degrees and know more French than immigrants to Quebec before the reform. However, this does not translate into better labor market outcomes. This essay shows how point systems can be used to shape the immigrant workforce according to policy goals. Non-cognitive skills are a recently incorporated component of human capital in the economics literature. In the third essay, we contribute to this literature through a laboratory experiment on personality traits and risk and ambiguity preferences. We also study the effects of personality traits prevalence in a group on the decision making of each group member. In the experiment, subjects reveal their risk and ambiguity preferences through lottery choices. They then participate in an unstructured group chat. Afterwards, they are given the chance to revise their initial lottery choices. Results show that personality traits affect risk and ambiguity preferences before the chat. Specifically, conscientiousness is negatively related to risk and ambiguity aversion and agreeableness is negatively related to ambiguity aversion. We also show that the probability of changing decisions after the chat is affected by the individual's non-cognitive traits but not by the traits of the other group members." --
Author: Thomas Eriksson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789174735918
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 109
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Author: Anastasia Driva
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Nina Schwarz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Sofia Maier
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789057286377
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Author: Gary Brant Morefield
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Families
Languages : en
Pages : 141
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"This dissertation studies two dynamic processes, the production of human capital and evolution of health. The first essay uses data on parents and their children in the longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics and PSID-Child Development Supplement to estimate the effect negative changes in parental health on the children's development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The analysis suggests that the onset of a parental health event, on average, does not affect children's cognitive measures and has small negative effects on the level of children's noncognitive skills. However, small average effects mask heterogeneous effects across: the sex of the parent, sex of the child, and the type of health condition. Parental health events are found to significantly impair noncognitive skill development when a father is afflicted with a health event, affect sons more negatively than daughters, and are worse for certain--vascular or cancerous--conditions. Further exploration shows that effects of parental health events on skill development are related to changes in the hypothesized mechanism, changes in skill investments. Specifically, when parental health events are estimated to create the poorest behavior outcomes, large reductions in one measure of skill investment, time that parents participate in activities with children, is also commonly found. The second essay (joint with David Ribar and Christopher Ruhm) uses longitudinal data from the 1984 through 2007 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine how occupational status is related to the health transitions of 30 to 59 year-old U.S. males. A recent history of blue-collar employment predicts a substantial increase in the probability of transitioning from very good into bad self-assessed health, relative to white-collar employment, but with no evidence of occupational differences in movements from bad to very good health. These findings are robust to a series of sensitivity analyses. The results suggest that blue-collar workers "wear out" faster with age because they are more likely, than their white-collar counterparts, to experience negative health shocks. This partly reflects differences in the physical demands of blue-collar and white-collar jobs. The third essay (joint with Jeremy Bray) uses the framework of Bray (2005) to develop a theoretical and accompanying empirical model examining how the productivities of the human capital inputs work and school are affected if individuals work while enrolled in school. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we model the dynamic processes of work and school input decisions jointly with the effects of these decisions on future wages to discern whether work and school are contemporaneous complements or substitutes in the production of human capital. Endogeneity is corrected through the use of the Discrete Factor Method. The model shows that, on average, work and school are indeed complementary in the production of human capital. However, examination of in-school work at differing schooling levels or across different student occupations shows that certain types of work and school are complementary when simultaneously undertaken while others are substitutes in the production of human capital."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.
Author: Gary S. Becker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226041220
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Human Capital is Becker's classic study of how investment in an individual's education and training is similar to business investments in equipment. Recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, Gary S. Becker is a pioneer of applying economic analysis to human behavior in such areas as discrimination, marriage, family relations, and education. Becker's research on human capital was considered by the Nobel committee to be his most noteworthy contribution to economics. This expanded edition includes four new chapters, covering recent ideas about human capital, fertility and economic growth, the division of labor, economic considerations within the family, and inequality in earnings. "Critics have charged that Mr. Becker's style of thinking reduces humans to economic entities. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mr. Becker gives people credit for having the power to reason and seek out their own best destiny."—Wall Street Journal
Author: Darrell James Glaser
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Author: Bethlehem Asres Argaw
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Human capital, labour market outcomes, causal relations. - Humankapital, Arbeitsmarktergebnisse, kausale Wirkungen
