Download or read book Essays on Health Human Capital and Economic Development written by Minki Kim and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters. In Chapter 1, I study the macroeconomic consequences of eradicating malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. To do so, I combine a general-equilibrium overlapping generations model with reduced-form empirical evidence. I find eliminating malaria in a representative sub-Saharan Africa through vaccination would increase the GDP per capita by 30% in the long run, which is nearly ten times larger than previously estimated. I also find that the gains stem from larger investments in human capital, amplified over multiple generations. In Chapter 2, in work joint with Titan Alon, Natalie Cox, and Arlene Wong, we study the welfare and productivity consequences of rising student debts in the United States. We first empirically estimate how student debts affect workers' early career outcomes using NLSY panel data. Then we construct a quantitative life-cycle model calibrated to match the empirical evidence and evaluate the federal student loan policies. We find that student debt forgiveness or repayment elongation policies improve welfare and labor productivity. The model suggests that a big chunk of the productivity gain comes from a small fraction of the workforce, who switch occupations in response to the policies. In Chapter 3, in work joint with Titan Alon, David Lagakos, and Mitchell VanVuren, we provide a quantitative macroeconomic framework to study why emerging markets fared worse relative to advanced economies and low-income countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. We adopt a workhorse incomplete-markets macro model to include epidemiological dynamics alongside key economic and demographic characteristics that distinguish countries of different income levels. We conclude that emerging markets fared especially poorly due to their high employment share in occupations requiring social interactions and their low level of public transfers. In contrast, low-income countries fared relatively better due mainly to their younger population and larger agricultural sector.

Download or read book Addressing Barriers to Human Capital Accumulation Essays in Development and Health Economics written by Sophie Ochmann and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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...

Download or read book Human Capital and Economic Growth written by Alberto Bucci and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores the links between human capital (both in the form of health and in the form of education), demographic change, and economic growth. Using empirical as well as theoretical perspectives, the authors investigate several important issues in the context of human capital, namely population ageing, inequality, public policy, and long-term economic development. Ultimately, they demonstrate that the accumulation of human capital is of crucial importance to long-run economic growth.

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital and Economic Development written by Humna Ahsan and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Human Capital and Economic Growth written by Andreas Savvides and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth investigation of the link between human capital and economic growth. The authors take an innovative approach, examining the determinants of economic growth through a historical overview of the concept of human capital. The text fosters a deep understanding of the connection between human capital and economic growth through the exploration of different theoretical approaches, a review of the literature, and the application of nonlinear estimation techniques to a comprehensive data set. The authors discuss nonparametric econometric techniques and their application to estimating nonlinearities—which has emerged as one of the most salient features of empirical work in modeling the human capital-growth relationship, and the process of economic growth in general. By delving into the topic from theoretical and empirical standpoints, this book offers an insightful new view that will be extremely useful for scholars, students, and policy makers.

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Health and Development written by Yao Yao and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies rich lifecycle behavior concerning human capital and health, and its implications for economic growth and development. It examines the impact of social institutions and government policies on individuals' lifetime choices which affect public health outcomes and economy-wide labor productivity. I apply macroeconomic approach and focus on aggregate effects, but both theoretical framework and quantitative analysis are built upon solid micro foundations of household behavior. By exploring the underlying channels, I derive policy implications for economic growth and development. This dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 studies the role of fertility motives in women's HIV risk in Sub-Saharan Africa, Chapter 2 studies the impact of higher education expansion along with economic reform on Chinas labor productivity, and Chapter 3 explores patterns of Chinas regional income disparity. Chapter 1 examines the role of social and cultural norms regarding fertility in women's HIV risk in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fertility, or the ability to bear children, is highly valued in most African societies, and premarital fertility is often encouraged in order to facilitate marriage. This, however, increases women's exposure to HIV risk by increasing unprotected premarital sexual activity. I construct a lifecycle model that relates a woman's decisions concerning sex, fertility and education to HIV risk. The model is calibrated to match Kenyan womens data on fertility, marriage and HIV prevalence. Quantitative results show that fertility motives play a substantial role in women's, especially young women's, HIV risk. If premarital births did not facilitate marriage, the HIV prevalence rate of young women in Kenya would be one-third lower. Policies that subsidize income, education, and HIV treatment are evaluated. Chapter 2 studies the impact of higher education expansion, along with economic reform of the state sector, in the late 1990's in China on its labor productivity. I argue that in an economy such as China, where allocation distortions widely exist, an educational policy affects average labor productivity not only through its effect on human capital stock, but also through its effect on human capital allocation across sectors. Thus, its impact could be very limited if misallocation becomes more severe following the policy. I construct a two- sector general equilibrium model with private enterprises (PE) and state-owned enterprises (SOE), with policy distortions favoring the latter. Households, heterogeneous in ability, make educational choices and occupational choices in a three-period overlapping-generations setting. Counterintuitively, quantitative analysis shows an overall negative effect of higher education expansion on average labor productivity (by 5 percent). Though it did increase China's skilled human capital stock significantly (by nearly 50 percent), the policy had the effect of reallocating relatively more human capital toward the less-productive state sector. It is the economic reform that greatly improves the efficiency of human capital allocation and complements educational policy in enhancing labor productivity (by nearly 50 percent). Chapter 3 explores patterns of China's regional income disparity. I document the stylized fact that the regional labor income disparity varies across industries with different skill in- tensities in China. While high-skill-intensive industries have larger income dispersions across regions than low-skill-intensive ones, this pattern tends to intensify over recent decades. I construct a model that interprets this pattern using the regional productivity variation of high-skilled firms, match-specific ability, firms' screening decision and workers' migration. In particular, firms in rich regions have higher productivity than those in poor regions. Workers are heterogeneous in ability, which is match-specific and unobservable before screening. Since ability and productivity are complements for high-skilled firms, these firms in rich regions pay more screening efforts to select workers with higher ability, and pay a higher wage in equilibrium. Workers live in different regions, and migration incurs a cost. This increases la- bor market tightness in rich regions and amplifies the regional income disparity. The model is quantified to match China's data. Counterfactual analysis shows that the screening process accounts for 45 percent of China's regional income disparity of high-skill-intensive industries, and migration barrier accounts for 10 percent.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Health and Human Capital written by Paloma Lopez de mesa Moyano and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Human Capital and Health written by Chiara Pastore and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Health Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intersection of health, inequality, and human capital is the source of some of the large and complex problems that continue to challenge our health care system and our health policy decision makers. My study touches on two areas at this nexus: socioeconomic determinants of health/development and economic costs (e.g., human capital, labor market) of chronic illness and disability. The first chapter examines the labor market outcomes of women co-residing with a disabled parent or parent-in-law. Because the vast majority of women providing this form of eldercare are still in their working years, informal care responsibilities may involve considerable opportunity costs. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I construct a longitudinal dataset documenting the labor market and co-residential eldercare experiences of sample women over 25 years. On average, I find that women co-residing with a disabled elder are less likely to engage in labor market work. However, responses vary over the life course. Co-residence prior to age 40 is associated with a 9 percentage point reduction in the likelihood of employment, an effect size twice that found for women over 50. The second chapter examines how poverty may affect brain structure and development. Little is known about how poverty is translated into deficits in cognition and achievement. Using a sample of children and adolescents (4 to 22 years) from the NIH Pediatric MRI Data Repository, we consider a potential neurobiological channel. We find that children from poor households display a maturational lag. Moreover, this atypical development is reflected in standardized assessments of academic ability and achievement. The third chapter examines the influence of sibling chronic illness or disability on children's early educational outcomes. Using a sample of sibling pairs from the PSID Child Development Supplement, we consider several categories of common childhood disabilities to explore whether and to what extent sibling health spillovers may vary according to the domain or severity of sibling impairment. We find evidence of substantial and heterogeneous effects of poor childhood health on well-sibling outcomes. Estimated spillovers in the case of developmental disabilities, in particular, are large and robust across a series of sensitivity analyses.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Macroeconomics of Human Capital and Growth written by Mercy Laita Palamuleni and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation encompasses three essays on the macroeconomics of human capital and economic growth. Below are the individual abstracts for each essay. Essay 1: Does Public Education Spending Increase Human Capital? I investigate the effect of public education spending on the quality of human capital as measured by international student test scores in science and mathematics, conditional on the efficiency of a country's governance. Combining World Bank country level data on government efficiency with rich micro data from the OECD PISA-2009, I estimate a human capital production function from student level data. Prior work suggests that public education expenditures are inconsequential for student achievement. I illustrate that public education spending matters for student test scores when one uses student level data instead of aggregate country level data. These results are robust to controlling for governance measures such as corruption control and regulatory quality. An implication is that less efficient government does not preclude improving test scores through education spending. Essay 2: Inequality of Opportunity in Education: International Evidence from PISA. I provide lower-bound estimates of inequality of opportunity in education (IEO) using micro-data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The measure represents variation in student mathematics test scores which can be explained by predetermined circumstances (including parental education, gender, and additional community variables). I explore the heterogeneity of the measure at the top and bottom of the test score distribution, and demonstrate that IEO accounts for 10 percent of the variation in test scores for students at the top and bottom of the test score distribution. Using this inequality measure I establish three main conclusions. (1) IEO decreases overall in response to an increase in preprimary enrollment rates. An implication here is that improvements in early childhood education might mitigate the effects of IEO factors for some students. (2) IEO increases in a manner which relates to overall inequality. This indicates the possibility of a more general persistence to inequality factors. An implication is that equity-based education policies can be a key tool for reducing income inequality. (3) There is evidence of an equity-efficiency tradeoff in education. An implication here is that public education policies aimed at reducing IEO might hinder overall education efficiency, in that it decreases academic achievement for some groups of students. Essay 3: Public Education Spending and Economic Growth: The Role of Governance. Although the theoretical literature often connects public education spending to growth, individual empirical findings sometimes conflict. In this paper I propose that inefficiencies in public education spending might explain these inconsistencies. Using a dataset from both developed and developing countries observed over the period of 1995 to 2010, I demonstrate that the efficiency of public education spending on growth depends on a country's level and quality of governance. I also find evidence that increasing educational spending is associated with higher economic growth only in countries that are less corrupt. These findings have important implications for the formation of effective education policies in developing countries. They illustrate that efficient public education spending augments economic growth in a way that increased spending alone does not match.

Download or read book Empirical Essays on Health and Human Capital written by Thomas Eriksson and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Institutions and Economic Growth written by Babar Hussain and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Natural Resources Human Capital and Health written by Alina Kovalenko and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the role of natural resource booms in human capital investment decisions, labor market outcomes and public health. The first chapter examines the role of local economic conditions in human capital accumulation decisions. To study this question, I exploit geographic and temporal variation in the recent fracking oil and gas boom, which improved labor market opportunities for young men and women. Using administrative panel data on the universe of students attending public schools in Texas, I find that exposure to the fracking boom during high school led to higher absence and grade retention rates, and lower rates of high school graduation. When I link students to their administrative employment records, I show that students in areas affected by the boom are more likely to be employed and have higher earnings while in high school, with effects concentrated in the food and retail sectors. I also show that both educational and labor market effects are largest for students in the bottom of the ability distribution. My results suggest that opportunity cost of schooling plays an important role in students' decisions in the short run. The second chapter builds upon the first by considering long-term effects of the fracking boom. I follow up on the same cohorts of high school students and examine their later-life outcomes as they transition into post-secondary education and the labor market. Using administrative college records, I find that the fracking boom is associated with decreased college enrollment. This decrease is almost entirely driven by enrollment in community colleges, suggesting that it is affecting students who were on the margin between not going to college and obtaining an associate's degree. Finally, administrative records on individuals' employment and earnings allow me to follow students' outcomes until their late twenties. I show that affected students experience increases in employment and earnings that persist for at least six years past expected high school graduation, implying that reduced educational attainment for these individuals may represent a rational response to improved outside options. Taken together, my results suggest that natural resource booms may improve individuals' short- and long-run economic outcomes even when they lead to lower educational investment. The third chapter analyzes how rapid economic development in the context of the fracking boom can have negative impacts on public health. Using recent economic shocks associated with localized fracking booms, this paper documents one such externality -- increased incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. I exploit plausibly exogenous geographic distribution of shale deposits and temporal expansion of the drilling activity in the Marcellus region. Using detailed county-level data from 2002-2016, I find that counties with fracking exposure are associated with an increase in the incidence of gonorrhea infection. These results suggest the importance of public health concerns associated with the changing demographic composition of the local population and specific occupational conditions in the fracking industry

Download or read book Human Capital Economic Growth and Income Distribution written by Chang Gyu Kwag and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay one is concerned with how and why an individual invests in human capital and how tax policy affects investment in human capital. We examine optimal investment in human capital and the effect of tax policy on human capital formation, and test several hypotheses derived from the theory using U.S. time-series data. Investment in human capital in terms of college enrollment rates is positively related to family income, rate of return to human capital, and unemployment rates, while it is negatively related to educational cost, and rate of return to physical capital. In addition, the average income tax rates show a negative effect on college enrollment rates. Essay two discusses human capital and economic growth. We first investigate the elasticities of substitution among inputs using the nested constant elasticity of substitution production function to focus on the so-called capital-skill complementarity hypothesis. We here compare two models: one is a model with human capital and raw labor, and the other is a model with higher skilled labor and lower skilled labor. In both models, the elasticities of substitution among inputs are very low, but the complementarity hypothesis is still weakly confirmed. Human capital turns out to be essential in achieving medium-term economic growth empirically. We also demonstrate the key role of human capital in the long-term steady state within the context of the endogenous growth model. Essay three considers the role of human capital on income distribution. Using the nested CES production function, we first derive factor shares, and then examine the relationship between functional and personal income distribution. An increase in share of labor income reduces overall income inequality, while an increase in share of transfer income has a negative effect on income distribution. Human capital, especially primary and secondary level of human capital stock, is a crucial factor in reducing income inequality. Finally, this study develops and presents new estimates of human capital stock in the United States, as well as annual earnings, and labor force by education level for the period 1947-1989. Data shows that the growth rate of GNP is very closely related to that of human capital stock. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

Download or read book Essays on Social Capital and Economic Development written by Ngoc Minh Nguyen (Auteur d'une thèse en Economie).) and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My thesis analyses social capital, its sources and its role in economic development using a multidimensional approach. First, considering social groups as an essential source of social capital in modern societies, we analyze the inter-linkages of social groups to understand how social capital is allocated among people in society. The existence of two decisive types of agents, the grand star and the mini stars, allow all social groups in a community to be efficiently connected in equilibrium under specific conditions. Second, we theoretically put social capital side by side with physical capital and human capital into a model of firm growth and find out that social capital is a metaphor rather than a real form of capital. Firms can use social capital to facilitate their activities but its efficiency depends on both the level of initial investment and the magnitude of firm revenue. The empirical results using the data of SMEs in Vietnam concretely support our theoretical model, social capital only facilitates the performance of firms between the quantile range from 14% to 98%. Finally, the thesis summarizes the role of social capital in the Vietnamese context. Besides the influence on firm performance, social capital also reveals certain effects with different indicators of quality of life including income, life satisfaction and health outcome. Dimensions of social capital, however, affects people's life in different ways and the effects are not always positive.

Download or read book Health and Growth written by Michael Spence and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2009 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book containes a series of "state of the art" essays on topics related to health and growth. The Commission on Growth and Development (CGD)--in preparing its own Growth Report--wished to take stock of the current state of knowledge and understanding of economic growth, and thus commissioned a series of essays on a range of thematic areas. One such area is health. The following questions are discussed in the book:Does investing in health raise economic growth? Can governments achieve rapid growth or high incomes without investing in health? What are the options and benefits of different an.

Download or read book Empirical Essays in Health and Human Capital written by Gary Brant Morefield and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.