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 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 Human Capital Accumulation and Inequality written by Claudia Trentini and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Development and Human Capital Investment written by Evelyn Monteiro Pereira Nunes and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present dissertation consists of three essays related to economic development and human capital investment. The first essay investigates the choice between public and private schools in Brazil. I use cross-sectional survey data to show that families with higher income and schooling are less likely to enroll their children in public school. But if their race is black or brown, they are more likely to choose public schools, even when controlling for income, education and location. I do not find any evidence that this result comes from scarcity of private schools, race preferences, or residential segregation. But it is likely caused by the lower returns to education that black and brown individuals have. This essay shows that not only income and education matter for school choice in Brazil, but also race. The second essay explores the theory behind parental educational investments in the presence of heterogeneous returns. I build on the overlapping generations literature to study the investment that parents make on the education of their children, in a setting with private and public schools and different returns by group. This assumption is motivated by the findings in the first essay, and it results in different school choices based on income and returns. This difference in the educational investment leads to school segregation in equilibrium and may result in poverty traps. The third essay uses a quantitative approach to study the effects of implementing a voucher program in Brazil. I use simulated method of moments to estimate some parameters in a parental choice model, while calibrating others to the Brazilian economy. The estimation is used to evaluate how implementing private education vouchers compares with the non-voucher case. I find that vouchers increase the average human capital of the economy and reduce inequality measured by the Gini coefficient and coefficient of variation. In some cases it improves the welfare of the first generation affected by the voucher, while in others it will impose a welfare cost. For future generations there are large welfare gains of continuing this policy.

Download or read book Essays on Education and Child Labor in Developing Countries written by Noha Abdelfattah and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Child labor can affect human capital investment of children, as the daily available time is limited and an increase in time devoted to child labor reduces the available time for investment in human capital. The tradeoff between child labor and human capital investment is important, as the accumulation of human capital is a crucial factor in curtailing poverty and accelerating development plans undertaken by developing countries. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child emphasizes the importance of education and urges nations not to engage children in work that may interfere with their education. This research is comprised of four chapters that study the relationship between human capital investment and child labor. In the first chapter, I examine the available theoretical and empirical literature to determine the main factors that affect the tradeoff between child labor and human capital investment. The literature identifies income, access to credit, returns to education, and parental preferences as the main factors. In chapter 2, I investigate and analyze the Egyptian's SYPE dataset that I use in chapter 3 and chapter 4. The SYPE is the most recent household survey dataset that provides data on education and child labor of Egyptian young people.

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 Determinants of Human Capital Accumulation written by Maya Sherpa and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of two self-contained essays, which examine two different factors that could affect human capital accumulation in a developing country. Both essays utilize cross-sectional data from the second round (2003/04) of national level household survey from Nepal. In the first essay, I estimate the impact of remittances on school attendance of children in Nepal. Over the last decade Nepal has experienced an increase in both domestic and international migration and consequently, Nepal has also seen a large surge in remittances from expatriates, growing from less than 3 percent of the GDP in 1995 to about 17 percent in 2004, to 22 percent in 2008, becoming one of the top ten recipients in terms of the share of remittance to GDP. In developing countries, investment in human capital is often viewed as significantly constrained by household resources. The premise of this essay is that remittances, by relaxing household resource constraints, can promote investment in education of the children living in remittance-receiving household. I use the proportion of households receiving remittances and the migrant's age as instrumental variables to identify remittance-receiving households and level of remittance flow. I find that remittances increase the probability of school attendance for young girls (ages 6-10) and for older boys (ages 11-18). But the positive effect does not extend to younger boys (ages 6-10) and older girls (ages 11-18). In the second essay, I estimate the causal effect of child's number hours worked on school attendance and school attainment. Here, number of hours worked is defined broadly to include hours worked in market and non-market activities within and outside the household as well as hours worked on domestic chores within the household. The central identification problem in estimating the causal effect of child labor on schooling is that these two decisions are simultaneously driven by different confounding factors such as household income, family preferences, child characteristics, availability and quality of school, etc. All of these are likely to induce a negative (or a positive) relationship between schooling and child labor. To abstract from these confounding factors, I use community level average daily agricultural wage for children and the distance to water source to provide variation in the demand for child labor. The results show that the effect of hours worked on schooling outcomes differ by demographic subgroups. For girls, the number of hours worked adversely affects both school attendance and grade attainment. For boys, the results are significantly different. The results of this study suggest that working up to 12.7 and 14.5 hours per week have no adverse effect on school attendance of boys of ages 5-9 and ages 10-16, respectively. Whereas, working less than 15 hours a week has no detrimental effect on grade attainment of older boys. I find no effect of the number of hours worked on grade attainment of younger boys aged 5-9.

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 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 Shocks and Human Capital in African Countries written by Osaretin Olurotimi and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The broad goal of this dissertation is to quantify the effect of shocks, policies, and programs on human capital, firms, and communities, especially in Africa. This is motivated by the need to provide empirical estimates of the impact of humanitarian crises and policy to undergird effective development policy and praxis. In my dissertation, I show how conflict and climate shocks affect children's human capital in Uganda and how foreign direct investment impacts domestic firms in Cote D'Ivoire. My dissertation papers share three themes. First, I provide improved (or initial) micro-level estimates of the impact of some shocks on economic agents in two African countries. Second, all three of my dissertation chapters attempt to answer questions about developing countries in Africa by unearthing and exploring new data sources. Third, the findings from my research have clear implications for contemporaneous education, industrial and climate policy in developing economies that grapple with similar challenges. My research on human capital is motivated by human capital's centrality to livelihoods and national economic growth and the crisis of learning poverty many African countries face. Learning poverty is the inability of children who have completed particular schooling levels to demonstrate cognitive outcomes related to that level. For instance, data from the World Bank showed that up to 83% of children in Uganda of primary completion age were below the minimum proficiency level, while over 95% of children in Chad and Niger were unable to read. This crisis deserves attention to understand the drivers and causes, potentially highlighting solutions. In this dissertation, I look at the role of exogenous factors such as conflict and climate and weather shocks in affecting human capital. For example, in Chapter 1, I examine the effect of historical exposure to an East African insurgency group-The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA)-and contemporaneous exposure to armed conflict on children's learning outcomes. Although there has been a decline in the number of civil wars in Africa since the 1990s, there has been a rise in itinerant and cross-border terrorist groups like Boko-Haram and Al-Shabaab. The LRA has been noted as one of the terrorist groups that have elicited the most humanitarian damage in East Africa. Empirically, I combine data from UWEZO's citizen-led household survey of learning outcomes in Uganda with geo-located conflict data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). Using a model with fixed effects estimation approach, I find that exposure to the LRA reduced children's learning outcomes in Math and English but did not affect their schooling. The cohort exposed to LRA did not have worse dropout rates or nonenrolment than their peers who were not exposed to LRA conflict. My contributions to the literature on conflict and educational outcomes include the first specific estimates of how exposure to a conflict in childhood impacts learning and schooling differently in an East African context. Also, I provide results on the impact of conflict on out-of-school children, who are overlooked in studies that only consider schooling outcomes. Exposure to LRA is worse for out-of-school children in English. Asides from measuring the medium-term effect of exposure to terrorism. I also measure the impact of contemporaneous conflict, i.e., the conflict that happened in the year children were surveyed and which is more likely to comprise riots and protests than violence against civilians. I use variation in the timing of first exposure to conflict by comparing children exposed in one year to those not yet treated by conflict. The effects of these contemporary conflicts are relatively muted in size and statistical significance compared to the effect of LRA. The results of this work imply a need to measure to impact of the same shock on schooling and learning differently and beyond the short term, as learning could be impacted even after schooling has recovered. Although I provide evidence that schooling quality via teacher absenteeism is affected by conflict in this context, future related work could explore the first-order effects of LRA on parental outcomes to elucidate the mechanisms through exposure to terrorism that affected children's learning in Uganda. Along similar lines, Chapter 3 uses remote sensing data to examine how abnormal rainfall and temperature patterns in early childhood affect human capital outcomes, including children's educational outcomes. I also document how unusually high test date temperatures impact test performance. Analytically, I combine learning outcome data from the UWEZO learning assessments in East Africa with the CHIRTS and CHIRPS temperature and rainfall data from the Climate Hazards Centre at UC Santa Barbara. I find that high test date temperature harms only the learning outcomes of girls and children under 10, while rainfall shocks in-utero have adverse effects. However, positive rainfall shocks at ages 1-4 positively impact learning outcomes. The paper also provides suggestive evidence that possessing some adaption technology like electricity may make children more likely to experience thermal stress when the technology is not in use. Thus, this paper provides an essential accounting of the effects of climate change on African children and highlights the need for additional demographic considerations in testing environments. Another theme that my research examines is the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in improving the performance of domestically connected local firms. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), African countries only received about 4% and 5% of global Foreign Direct Investment in 2020 and 2021, respectively. However, despite its meager share of global FDI, African governments have high hopes for the role that FDI can play in their local economies, evidenced by the growth in the number of investment promotion agencies, incentives, and bilateral and multilateral treaties. Therefore, in Chapter 2, coauthored with Jeremy Foltz and Nohoum Traore, using new, high-quality panel data on firms in Ivory Coast, we revisit an open question on the impact of FDI on productivity and other relevant outcomes among domestic firms in Africa. Africa has not yet experienced the kind of industrial revolution that has supercharged the economies of, for example, South Asian countries. Accordingly, various African countries have initiated policy initiatives such as tax holidays for foreign firms to encourage industrialization. However, our research shows that horizontal FDI reduces domestic firm productivity in Ivory Coast, especially for domestic firms operating in the Service, Commerce, and Manufacturing sectors.In contrast, downstream FDI reduces the likelihood that firms export and the intensity of exports only for firms located in Abidjan, the defacto economic capital. The results of this work are essential for similar African countries as they develop their investment and tax policies. A natural extension of this work is research that accounts more fully for the general equilibrium effects of FDI on the whole economy, including government revenue and community welfare.

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 Human Capital and Economic Development written by Sisay Asefa and published by W. E. Upjohn Institute. This book was released on 1994 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Growth Poverty and Human Capital Inequality written by Nor Yasmin Mhd Bani and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is a collection of three empirical essays on growth, poverty and human capital inequality in a global panel. The objective of the first essay entitled: "Volatility and Growth: The Role of Education" is to examine whether the significance of volatility-growth relationship varies according to the average years of education. Unlike the focus of the previous literature on establishing the link between volatility and growth, we attempt to establish the channel through which volatility affects growth. The main contribution of our work is that while the level of volatility negatively affects growth, the effect is mediated via education. This is true even for countries with low as well as moderately high levels of volatility. The result of the interaction term, which is the key interest in this chapter, is robust to changes in definitions of variables and specification. This finding is consistent with Canton's (2000) theoretical work. The second essay, "Does Education Reduce Poverty in Developing Countries?" investigates the direct effects of education on poverty in developing countries using dynamic panel estimation techniques. The results suggest that higher education, developed financial system along with growth lead to significant poverty reduction. On the other hand, unequal income distribution is associated with increases in poverty. The results are robust to alternative model specification and estimation techniques. The policy implication is that poverty reduction is more effective if we focus on developing the education system instead of relying on growth and other channels, for example foreign aid or health. The third essay deviates from the usual study of inequality and globalization. It analyzes the relationship between seven measures of globalization and education inequality using a panel of 112 countries covering the period 1970-2009. We use the KOF index of Globalization and its three different dimensions (economic, social, and political) as our main proxy for globalization. In addition, we also employ openness, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and freedom to trade internationally (EF Index) in our study. We find that globalization has a robust negative effect on human capital inequality, even when we control for other factors. Results suggest that education inequality increases with globalization in middle and high-income countries but the effect is the opposite in low-income countries. This is the key contribution of our study where we find a variation of impact within the developing countries in contrast to the standard Hecksher-Ohlin Trade Theory. The result also holds when we restricted the sample to specific countries and add several other covariates. In contrast, the alternative measures of globalization have no such robust effects.

Download or read book Education and Development written by Aklilu Habte and published by . This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three essays in this publication consider the relationship between human capital investment and economic development, particularly in the context of developing countries. The first article (by Aklilu Habte) reviews the experiences of the World Bank in lending for education, curriculum development, and vocational training. The role of education in cultural as well as economic development is considered. The second article (by George Psacharopoulos) focuses on the productivity of educational investments, examining both the monetary and nonmonetary benefits that flow to individuals and society from such investments and supporting the proposition that returns from educational investments are at least as high as the economic returns from other types of physical capital investment. The final article (by Stephen P. Heyneman) examines the productivity of education in the context of developing countries. Discussed are the minimum cognitive skills required for a farmer to operate efficiently at increasingly difficult levels of technology, and the facilities available in a typical school to deliver those skills. It is suggested that the pressure from increasing enrollments may be widening the gap in school quality between developing and industrialized nations. Despite different perspectives, each article maintains that skepticism about education, while common in developed nations, is not applicable in developing countries. A six-page bibliography concludes the publication. (LP)

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 Globalization and the Developing World written by Keith B. Griffin and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2. International trade issues