Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Military Conflict and Development in Economic History written by Christina Mumme and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book War and Economic Development written by David Joslin and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1975-04-10 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book of essays is a collective treatment of the problem of the impact of war on economic development in Europe. This subject has been neglected despite the fact that the issues it raises are of direct concern to students of military history, the history of science and technology, the history of education, historical demography, as well as to students of political, social and economic history. The contributors to this volume have drawn on work done in all these fields. Taken together, this study provides the foundation for further comparative work on the effect of war and warfare on economic life. The contributors have approached the problem from two sides. The subject of a number of essays is the 'internal history' of armed conflict. These focus on war itself and discuss the mobilization of resources which precedes it and the ways that economic activity and policy are altered by it.

Download or read book Essays in Development Economics written by Kasper Brandt and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This PhD dissertation consists of four self-contained chapters in the field of development economics. The topic of the first three chapters is human capital in East Africa, whereas the topic of the fourth chapter is measurement of sub-national state capacity. The first chapter studies the effect on exam scores from attending private school relative to attending public school in Tanzania. I compare secondary school exam scores for students who went to the same primary school, in the same cohort, and achieved the same primary school exam scores, but one went on to public secondary school and the other to private secondary school. The second chapter studies the effect of private schools at the district level. Based on data from Kenya, we analyse whether an increase in the share of children enrolled in private schools affect average performance in cognitive tests. The third chapter evaluates the impacts on enrolment and learning from a reform eliminating secondary school fees in Tanzania. The fourth and final chapter develops a method for measuring state capacity at a local level in Sub-Saharan Africa. This measure is used to test whether areas with high predicted state capacity have lower risk of armed conflict relative to areas with low predicted state capacity.

Download or read book Essays on Culture Human Capital Development and Economic History written by Argyris Sakalis and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Exposure to Risk and Its Impact on Human Capital written by Michael F. Yankovich and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the impact of contemporaneous American participation in war on military labor and conflict duration. Chapter one uses variation in occupation-specific retention bonuses and mortality risks observed in the U.S. Army during the war on terror to estimate the rate at which volunteers for active military service are willing to trade wealth and risk of death when making reenlistment decisions. Our estimate of the Value of Statistical Life among first-term soldiers is between $0.1M and $0.5M. Bonus policy is an effective tool for meeting near-term military manpower shortages. Increasing the bonus offer by $1,000 leads to an increase in the probability of reenlistment of 1.5 percentage points. Chapter two documents a substantial increase in the post-service one-year mortality rate of recent veterans using estimates constructed by matching Army administrative data to the Social Security Administration's Death Master File. The total mortality of service in the Army between 2001 and 2010 is likely understated by approximately 10% or over 350 deaths. Approximately 91% of the change in post-service mortality is due to the effect of exposure to high rates of mortality while in-service. The relationship between in-service and post-service mortality has likely always existed, but the higher rates of in-service mortality during the war mean that post-service mortality rates are higher. The third chapter provides empirical evidence linking third-party interventions to increases in the duration of intra-state wars. It also reviews several theoretical constructs underlying this correlation, and it adapts the model of the Swing Voter's Curse to provide a novel explanation. Namely, when third-parties intervene in civil wars, local nationals are more likely to abstain from making a commitment to either the government or rebel side as the intervening party serves to cloud perceptions of the latent balance of power between the primary intra-state contenders. The chapter concludes with an analysis of implications for interventionist policies with regard to the war in Afghanistan.

Download or read book Essays in Economics Using Military induced Variation to Study Human Capital Development Excess Sensitivity to Income and Labor Market Decisions written by Carl Jonathan Wojtaszek and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays that leverage the detailed nature of military data along with natural experiments found within the military environment to investigate questions that pertain to the manning and welfare of our modern military as well as inform areas of public and labor economics. The first chapter investigates the effect of job exit timing on the educational attainment of workers. A successful job transition often hinges on a worker's access to education and re-training. Yet, many obstacles outside the traditional education investment model potentially prevent this sizable non-traditional student population from attending college. I use a two-stage least-squares approach to investigate a previously unexplored dimension - the effect of job exit timing on educational attainment. Using detailed military records and GI Bill benefits data, I find that exiting the military with a seven months wait before a traditional semester start date reduces the likelihood that veterans use their GI Bill benefits by 8 percent and reduces their overall educational attainment by two months as compared to veterans who exit and experience no wait time. The effect of wait time is even larger in the first year of a veteran's transition from the military and is more pronounced among those in the middle third of the AFQT score distribution. The second chapter explores the sensitivity of charitable giving to the realization of large anticipated income changes. How charitable giving responds to these types of shocks has proved difficult to identify. Furthermore, decades of empirical research on the permanent income hypothesis provide no clear answer for the presence of excess sensitivity to income. Using information on soldier's charitable giving through the Combined Federal Campaign and variation in military income generated by bonus size and payment timing, I estimate the sensitivity of charitable giving to income changes. My findings suggest that soldiers are 5 to 10 percent more likely to contribute to charity if they receive a large anticipated income shock during the charity campaign. I also find that the excess sensitivity diminishes with age and previous bonus exposure, suggesting that experience with consumption smoothing plays an important role. The third chapter examines the impact of military casualties and their salience on both the type and number of enlistments that occur in the following months. For over 40 years, the U.S. has relied on an all-volunteer military to defend its national interests. However, until the War on Terror, the sustainability of a volunteer army during war has remained untested. I exploit the timing and geographic variation of war casualties to estimate the impact of national and local war casualties on the enlistment decisions of new recruits. Using detailed data on military enlistments and casualties sustained during the War on Terror, I find a local casualty decrease the number of enlistments at the local entry station by .6 percent while a national level casualty decreases the number of enlistments by only .03 percent. More importantly, I find, conditional on enlisting, that local casualties also reduce enlistments into riskier military jobs and reduce the length of initial contracts more strongly than national casualties - presenting additional manning challenges for the military.

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Formation of Youth in the Middle East written by Wael Mansour and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human capital formation is a fundamental requirement for countries' long term economic development and societal prosperity. This process can be enhanced or disrupted by internal factors such as migration and remittances, or external ones like wars. This thesis is interested in investigating both phenomena. The following questions are addressed: what is the impact of migrant remittances on human capital formation, do these private inflows induce any changes in the behavior of remittance-receivers towards education expenditure, and finally what is the short term micro-economic effect of armed conflicts on education in post war countries. In investigating these issues, focus is made on two perspectives: first youth, an active group in the society whose age matches up higher education levels and labor force entry simultaneously; second gender differentials both in terms of impact and behavior. The research explores new surveys from the Middle East, datasets that have not been analyzed previously from an education angle and that are not generally available to researchers. These datasets come from Jordan and Lebanon, two middle income non-oil producer countries. The thesis is composed of three independent essays. The first examines the impact of migrant remittances on human capital accumulation among youth in Jordan and highlights the various ways in which remittances influence education outcomes. The analysis takes a gender dimension and examines whether the effects and magnitude of such impact is different between males and females. The second essay considers remittances receipt, from both domestic and international sources, and examines their impact on Jordanian households' education spending patterns. Following the literature on intra-household bargaining and gender expenditure preferences, the analysis examines whether such impact is potentially different between male and female headed households. The third essay tackles the impact of the 2006 war on education attendance of youth in Lebanon. The chapter captures households' schooling responses in the aftermath of the war. By looking at the implications of a diversified array of damages sustained; reflecting physical, human, income and employment losses; the chapter examines possible linkages between the nature of the damage incurred and the manner and magnitude in which such damage affects education.

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 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 Military Effectiveness Volume 3 The Second World War written by Allan R. Millett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-09 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-volume study examines the questions raised by the performance of the military institutions of France, Germany, Russia, the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Italy in the period from 1914 to 1945. Leading military historians deal with the different national approaches to war and military power at the tactical, operational, strategic, and political levels. They form the basis for a fundamental re-examination of how military organizations have performed in the first half of the twentieth century. Volume 3 covers World War II. Volumes 1 and 2 address address World War I and the interwar period, respectively. Now in a new edition, with a new introduction by the editors, these classic volumes will remain invaluable for military historians and social scientists in their examination of national security and military issues. They will also be essential reading for future military leaders at Staff and War Colleges.

Download or read book Rethinking the Economics of War written by Cynthia J. Arnson and published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays questions the adequacy of explaining today's internal armed conflicts purely in terms of economic factors and re-establishes the importance of identity and grievances in creating and sustaining such wars. Countries studied include Lebanon, Angola, Colombia and Afghanistan.

Download or read book War How Conflict Shaped Us written by Margaret MacMillan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is peace an aberration? The New York Times bestselling author of Paris 1919 offers a provocative view of war as an essential component of humanity. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Margaret MacMillan has produced another seminal work. . . . She is right that we must, more than ever, think about war. And she has shown us how in this brilliant, elegantly written book.”—H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity. Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control? Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves.

Download or read book Scarcity Conflicts and Cooperation written by Pranab Bardhan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-11-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging review of some of the major issues in development economics focuses on the role of economic and political institutions. Drawing on the latest findings in institutional economics and political economy, Pranab Bardhan, a leader in the field of development economics, offers a relatively nontechnical discussion of current thinking on these issues from the viewpoint of poor countries, synthesizing recent research and reflecting on where we stand today. The institutional framework of an economy defines and constrains the opportunities of individuals, determines the business climate, and shapes the incentives and organizations for collective action on the part of communities; Pranab Bardhan finds the institutional framework to be relatively weak in many poor countries. Institutional failures, weak accountability mechanisms, and missed opportunities for cooperative problem-solving become the themes of the book, with the role of distributive conflicts in the persistence of dysfunctional institutions as a common thread. Special issues taken up include the institutions for securing property rights and resolving coordination failures; the structural basis of power; commitment devices and political accountability; the complex relationship between democracy and poverty (with examples from India, where both have been durable); decentralization and devolution of power; persistence of corruption; ethnic conflicts; and impediments to collective action. Formal models are largely avoided, except in two chapters where Bardhan briefly introduces new models to elucidate currently under-researched areas. Other chapters review existing models, emphasizing the essential ideas rather than the formal details. Thus the book will be valuable not only for economists but also for social scientists and policymakers.

Download or read book Essays in Economic History written by Lawrence H. Officer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-10-05 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the culmination of and a collection of distinguished scholar Lawrence Officer’s principal research over 50 years of scholarly activity. The collection consists primarily of three topics on which the author has spent the major part of his research: purchasing power parity, standard of living, and monetary standards. There is also a unique chapter on economics and economic history in science fiction. This volume is ideal for academics, graduate and undergraduate students, and practitioners.

Download or read book Stability Economics the Economic Foundations of Security in Post Conflict Environments written by Nathan Toronto and published by . This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years after invading Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military realized that it had a problem: How does a military force set the economic conditions for security success? This problem was certainly not novel--the military had confronted it before in such diverse locations as Grenada, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The scale and complexity of the problem, however, were unlike anything military planners had confronted beforehand. This was especially the case in Iraq, where some commentators expected oil production to drive reconstruction.

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.