Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Interventions in Developing Countries written by Nithin Umapathi and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Interventions in Developing Countries written by N. Umapathi and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Formation in Developing Countries written by Abhijeet Singh and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Formation in Developing Countries written by Alexander Sergeevich Ugarov and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Differences in human capital explain approximately one-half of the productivity variation across countries. Therefore, we need to understand drivers of human capital accumulation in order to design successful development policies. My dissertation studies formation and use of human capital with emphasis on its less tangible forms, including skills, abilities and know-how. The first chapter of my dissertation explores the effects of occupational and educational barriers on human capital stock and aggregate productivity. I find that students' academic skills have very small impact on occupational choice in most developing countries. This finding suggests a higher incidence of occupational barriers in developing countries. I evaluate the productivity losses resulting from occupational barriers by calibrating a general equilibrium model of occupational choice. According to my estimation, developing countries can increase their GDP by up to twenty percent by reducing the barriers to the level of a benchmark country (US). In the second chapter of my dissertation, I study the effects of economic growth on education quality. Several models of human capital accumulation predict that incomes have a positive causal effect on human capital for given levels of education by increasing the consumption of educational goods. The paper tests this prediction by using a within country variation in incomes per-capita across different cohorts of US immigrants. Wages of US migrants conditional on years of education serve as a measure of education quality. I find that average domestic incomes experienced by migrants in age from zero to twenty years have a significant positive effect on their future earnings in the US. The third chapter studies the effects of employee-driven technology spillovers on technology adoption. It challenges the theoretical result of Franco and Filson (2006) by assuming that workers are risk averse and that the number of competitors is finite. In this more realistic scenario spillovers significantly reduce payoffs from adopting advanced technologies.

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Investments in Developing Countries written by Emilie T. Bagby and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation encompasses three chapters that explore determinants of parental investments in their children0́9s health and education in developing countries. Below are the individual abstracts for each chapter. Chapter 1: Child Ability, Parental Investments and Child Nutrition in Ecuador This paper investigates the role of family composition and child cognitive ability in explaining how resource-constrained households make nutritional investment decisions in their children. Parents have private information about their children0́9s abilities and health that is typically not available to researchers. I use a unique panel household dataset from Ecuador0́9s Bono de Desarrollo Humano that contains a measure of child cognitive ability and allows me to estimate its affect on resource allocation. I address reverse causality due to the effects of investments on ability and I use within household fixed effects to look at children to look at the intra-household investment decision. Findings point to the existence of sibling rivalry due to resource constraints; children with more siblings, and children in poor households, are less likely to eat high-quality food. Children with higher abilities are less likely to share a nutritional supplement with another family member, suggesting that parents must decide how to invest their limited resources, and child ability informs that decision. Within households of more than one child, children with higher abilities are more likely to eat higher quality foods than their siblings, even after controlling for child body size. Chapter 2: Child Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children0́9s cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households0́9 decisions to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment. We explicitly incorporate direct measures of the ability of each child0́9s siblings (both absolute and relative measures) to show how sibling rivalry exerts an impact on the parent0́9s decision of whether and how much to invest in their child0́9s education. We find children with one standard deviation higher own ability are 16 percent more likely to be currently enrolled, while having a higher ability sibling lowers current enrollment by 16 percent and having two higher ability siblings lowers enrollment by 30 percent. Results are robust to addressing the potential reverse causality of schooling influencing child ability measures and using alternative cognitive tests to measure ability. Chapter 3: Risk and Protective Factors for School Dropout in Mexico and Chile Fourteen percent of Chilean youth and 30 percent of Mexican youth have dropped out prior to completing secondary school. Of these youth, 90 to 97 percent are considered 0́−at risk,0́+ meaning that they engage in or are at risk of engaging in risky behaviors that are detrimental to their own development and to the well-being of their societies. This paper uses youth surveys from Chile and Mexico to demonstrate that early school dropout is strongly correlated with a range of risky behaviors as well as typically unobservable risk and protective factors. We test which of a large set of potential factors are correlated with dropping out of school early and other risky behaviors. These factors range from relationships with parents and institutions to household behaviors (abuse, discipline techniques) to social exclusion. We use stepwise regressions to sort out which variables best explain the observed variance in risky behaviors. We also use a non-parametric methodology to characterize different sub-groups of youth according to the amount of risk in their lives. We find that while higher socioeconomic status emerges as key explanatory factors for school dropout and six additional risky behaviors for boys and girls in both countries, it is not the only one. A good relationship with parents and peers, strong connection with local governmental institutions and schools, urban residence, younger age, and spirituality also emerge as being strongly correlated with school dropout and different risky behaviors. Similarly, young people that leave school early also engage in other risky behaviors. The variety of factors associated with leaving school early suggests that while poverty is important, it is not the only risk factor. This points to a wider range of policy entry points than currently used, including targeting parents and the relationship with schools.

Download or read book Three Essays on The Formation and Mobility of Human Capital in Developing Countries written by Maggie Yuanyuan Liu and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Labor and Migration in Developing Countries written by Tomoko Utsumi and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Investment written by Sarena Goodman and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains a collection of essays on human capital formation and social service provision in the United States. The chapters evaluate three policies targeted to populations for whom the development and retention of skills is particularly critical--young adults, children, and the near-homeless. The first and second chapters focus on uncovering methods that could enhance the performance of the U.S. educational system: the first chapter examines a policy that better aligns educational expectations and potential among secondary school students; the second chapter evaluates a policy that incentivizes teachers to improve achievement among students in high-poverty primary and secondary schools. The third chapter examines an intervention designed to assist high-need families on the brink of homelessness. The chapters are also linked methodologically: in each, I exploit the exact timing of policy events (i.e., testing mandates, the opportunity for teachers to earn bonuses, the availability of homelessness prevention services) to identify their causal effects.

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Investments written by Javaeria Ashraf Qureshi and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores topics related to the determinants of investments in education, social returns to education, and human capital production. The first two chapters investigate the effect of oldest sister's schooling on the human capital accumulation of younger siblings while the third chapter estimates the impact of school quality on student achievement. Together these studies shed light on the role of home and school inputs in the human capital formulation of children in both developing and developed countries.

Download or read book Essays on Developing Human Capital Among Disadvantaged Populations written by Rebecca Dizon-Ross and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three research papers that examine how to promote human capital, especially for more disadvantaged populations. The first chapter uses data from a field experiment conducted in Malawi to assess whether parents have inaccurate perceptions about their children's academic abilities, and whether parents' inaccurate perceptions distort their investments in their children's education. I find that the divergence between parents' beliefs about their children's achievement and their children's true achievement is large, and that this creates a wedge between parents' intended and actual educational investments. Providing parents with information significantly impacts their investments, causing them to become more closely aligned with their children's achievement. Poorer, less-educated parents have less accurate perceptions about their children's academic abilities than richer, more-educated parents, and update their beliefs more in response to improved information. Inaccurate perceptions may thus exacerbate inequalities in educational outcomes between richer and poorer families. The second chapter examines the effect of school accountability systems on teachers. A commonly-cited concern with holding schools accountable for student performance is that it could cause good teachers to leave low-performing schools. This chapter presents regression discontinuity estimates from New York City, which assigns schools grades based on student achievement, suggesting the opposite. At the bottom end of the grade distribution, lower accountability grades decrease teacher turnover, especially for high-quality teachers, and increase joiner teacher quality. One potential explanation is that accountability induces performance improvements at lower-graded schools. In contrast, at the top of the grade distribution, where accountability pressures are lower, lower grades have no turnover effects, but decrease joiner quality. The third chapter, co-authored with Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson, examines the efficacy of delivering targeted public health subsidies through existing government infrastructure by measuring the performance of free bed net distribution programs targeted towards pregnant women in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. If implemented correctly, such subsidies have the potential to substantially decrease child mortality in developing countries. However, with weak governance, government workers may perform poorly, thereby undermining the programs' efficacy. While the Kenya and Uganda distribution schemes were government-led, the program in Ghana was part of a randomized controlled trial we put in place to evaluate three commonly proposed schemes to improve performance: vouchers (so that health workers do not have control over the subsidized products themselves); flat bonus pay for health workers charged with delivering the subsidies; and threats of top-down audits. We evaluate performance through a rich set of data, including (1) home surveys of eligible women, (2) informal interviews with community members, and (3) decoy "mystery client" visits. Overall, we find that local delivery is surprisingly effective: around 80% of eligible women received the subsidy, less than 2% of eligible women were asked for a bribe, and only 4.5% of ineligible clients were able to obtain a subsidized net. In the Ghana experiments, we find no effect of either bonus pay or audit threats, and the voucher scheme appears dominated: it does not reduce leakage but it reduces coverage among eligibles. Survey evidence suggests that antenatal nurses and midwives in all three countries are positively selected in terms of other-regarding preferences and intrinsic motivation, and that they perceive their job continuation as contingent on performance.

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 Fostering Human Capital in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries written by Sameh El-Saharty and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The formation of human capital--the knowledge, skills, and health that people accumulate over their lifetimes--is critical for the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Human capital contributes not only to human development and employment but also to the long-term sustainability of a diversified economic growth model that is knowledge based and private sector driven. This approach is critical, given that income from oil and gas will eventually decline and that the nature of work is evolving in response to rapid technological changes, in turn demanding new skill sets. The GCC governments have demonstrated their strong political will for this shift: four of them are among the first countries to join the World Bank’s Human Capital Project—a global effort to improve investments in people as measured by the Human Capital Index. The GCC countries face four main challenges: • Low levels of basic proficiency among schoolchildren • A mismatch between education and the labor market • A relatively high rate of adult mortality and morbidity • A unique labor market , in which wages in the public sector are more generous than in the private sector and government employment of nationals is virtually guaranteed To address these challenges, this report outlines four strategies in a“whole-of-government†? approach: • Investing in high-quality early childhood development • Preparing healthier, better educated, and skilled youth for the future • Enabling greater adult labor force participation • Creating an enabling environment for human capital formation These strategies are based on best practices in other countries and feature some of the GCC countries’ plans, including their national “Visions,†? to take their economies and societies further into the twenty-first century. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the GCC countries face additional challenges that may worsen some preexisting vulnerabilities and erode human capital. In response, the GCC governments have taken multiple measures to protect their populations’ health and their economies. Any country’s decision to reopen its economy needs to closely consider public health consequences to avoid a resurgence of infections and any further erosion of its human capital. The COVID-19 crisis underscores that the need to accelerate and improve investment in human capital has never been greater. Once the GCC countries return to a “new normal,†? they will be in a position to achieve diversified and sustainable growth by adopting, and then tailoring, the strategies presented in this report.

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 Essays on Human Capital and Institutional Development in Poor Economies written by Ashish Bhushan Garg and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Early Life Shocks and Human Capital in a Developing World written by Mochamad Pasha and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Human Capital Over the Life Cycle written by Catherine Sofer and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . . . I am convinced that it should occupy a high position on the desk of policymakers. . . This book constitutes a good state-of-the-art study in this field and paves the way for further research in this direction. Marie-Claire Villeval, Economic Record This attractive publication is carried out as a clear attempt to gain access to a wider audience, relaxing formal and technical details, which makes the lecture easier. . . An international comparison of literature or educational and labour experiences is provided in every contribution in the book, helping to obtain a wider perspective of the problems tackled. Carmen García and Julio López, Education Economics This book makes a novel contribution to economics of education in several key respects. It highlights a broad number of crucial factors over the individual s life cycle that underlie inequalities in education and in the labour market. . . It is amazing how limited our knowledge is about these interactions despite their high priority in national as well as EU-level policy-making. This is a timely book concerned with topics of high policy relevance. Moreover, the authors have well succeeded in their attempt to write "in a style that makes this work accessible to a wider audience", using the editor s words. It is most important that academics as well as politicians are made aware of the considerable knowledge gaps that still prevail in our understanding of the role of education and training for the individual s success or failure in school and in working life. Rita Asplund, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA), Finland In the last decade, changes occurring in the demand for skills have produced significant effect on the functioning of labour markets in Europe and elsewhere. The challenge posed by a knowledge based society for sustained growth has been at the centre of the European strategy for employment and has important implications for the design of labour market policies. This book brings together a wide range of contributions written by leading experts on key issues such as: schooling systems, transition from school to work and lifelong learning, thereby providing an essential reference for both researchers and policymakers. Claudio Lucifora, Università Cattolica, Italy Human Capital Over the Life Cycle synthesises comparative research on the processes of human capital formation in the areas of education and training in Europe, in relation to the labour market. The book proposes that one of the most important challenges faced by Europe today is to understand the link between education and training on the one hand and economic and social inequality on the other. The authors focus the analysis on three main aspects of the links between education and social inequality: educational inequality, differences in access to labour markets and differences in lifelong earnings and training. Almost all the stages in the life cycle are tracked from early childhood to stages late in the working life: firstly the characteristics and effects of schooling systems, then the transitions from school to work and, finally, human capital and the working career. Academics and researchers of European studies, labour economics and the economics of education will all find this novel and analytically sound book of interest, as will sociologists and policymakers in Europe.

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.