Download or read book Essays on Income Shocks and Human Capital written by Sidra Rehman and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Therefore, if developing economies want to improve their growth prospects, they need to invest in education and provide buffers so that income shocks do not hinder the accumulation of human capital.

Download or read book Essays on Public and Private Insurance of Income Shocks written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis explores issues related to public and private insurance of income shocks, and the importance of human capital accumulation. The first chapter argues that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of labor supply is a state-dependent variable which strongly depends on the return to human capital accumulation. Estimating a life cycle model I find that the average i.e.s. is low (0.35), and comparable with micro estimates, even in the presence of human capital. However, the average i.e.s. hides important heterogeneity: for college graduates the i.e.s. more than doubles over the life cycle, whereas it increases by about 58 percent for workers without a college degree. The second chapter argues that heterogeneous returns to human capital accumulation affects the degree to which search effort of unemployed deviates from the socially optimal level, and the reason behind the deviation. I find that (i) the main social costs associated with unemployment insurance are not due to moral hazard problems, but are due to distortionary effects of labor income taxes needed to finance the insurance. (ii) The magnitude of the moral hazard problem and the tax distortion problem differs substantially by age and education. And, (iii) the degree of tax progressiveness and benefit regressiveness has important effects on the deviation of search effort. The third chapter studies the relation between co-movement of income shocks and precautionary asset holdings. If households perceive spousal labor supply as an insurance mechanism, it is evident that this mechanism should work better the lower the co-movement of income shocks. We find that (i) households in which both spouses have the same education level or work in the same industry have a higher correlation of income shocks compared to couples with different education/industry. And, (ii) households who face larger co-movements of income shocks hold larger precautionary buffers.

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 Human Capital and Technology Shocks written by Neville Francis and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Two Essays on Human Capital Accumulation and Economic Growth written by Alexandros T. Mourmouras and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Human Capital written by Yibo Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Chapter: Endogenous Skill Acquisition and Taxation (with James Bullard) This paper studies dynamic Mirrleesian-style taxation in a lifecycle economy. In contrast to the recent Mirrleesian dynamic optimal taxation literature, in which individual skills are subject to shocks but are otherwise fixed over time, agents in our model make a conscious decision about human capital acquisition (as well as when to retire) given their own aptitude for learning. This aptitude is private information. Human capital accumulation is the engine of growth in our model. We find that there will be no human capital accumulation, and hence no growth, in the economy when there is no taxation of any sort. We suggest a taxation scheme which will induce human capital accumulation and hence economic growth in this stylized environment. The key feature of the tax scheme is to provide incentives for human capital accumulation for those that have high aptitude by credibly transferring resources to them later in life, after they have revealed their aptitude. We show that only a moderate transfer is called for to induce growth in our calibrated economy. We also find that the timing of the tax-transfer may or may not matter for the income distribution depending on the exact form in which the taxation is levied (labor or capital income tax), but in general the tax-transfer scheme is highly non-monotonic. Second Chapter: Brain Drain and Brain Drain Reversal Departing from the previous theoretical studies on Brain Drain, which mainly focus on the welfare impact of the migration of skilled workers on the home country and on the foreign country, I build a theoretical model to study a somewhat different twin phenomena "brain drain" and "brain drain reversal". The brain drain and brain drain reversal of interest here is the trend that people from developing countries (most prominently from East Asian countries) who have studied in developed countries such as the U.S. go back to their home country sooner or later for good. I study these two phenomena in a two-period lifecycle economy where home country agents choose not only education location but also work location possibly multiple times in their lifetime. The model captures the crucial factors in agents' location choice decision including work-place premium, education-location premium, market opportunity gap (between home and foreign countries) as well as adaptability of skills. I solve the model analytically and conduct comparative statics analysis followed by calibration exercises based on data from Mainland China (1985-2006). Third Chapter: Human Capital Intensity, Education and Growth (with Jiaren Pang and Haibin Wu) Using the methodology of Rajan and Zingales (1998), we revisit the issue of human capital and economic growth by examining whether industries with higher human capital intensity tend to grow faster in countries with higher human capital stock. Not only are we able to avoid the many problems that have plagued the conventional cross-country growth regressions but the results are no longer mixed. We do not find that education improvement has a differential effect on industries with different human capital intensities. However, we have discovered that in countries with higher education levels and quality, high human capital intensity industries grow faster than low human capital intensity ones.

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 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 Essays on Growth Stabilization and the Business Cycle written by Daehaeng Kim and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays Examining Early Life Shocks that Affect Human Capital Production written by Uche Eseosa Ekhator and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation comprises three essays. The first examines the effect of health insurance on child health and healthcare utilization in Nigeria. It uses the implementation and expansion of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) to introduce an exogenous variation in health insurance eligibility, a natural experiment that fits a difference-in-difference analysis. Findings from this essay suggest that health insurance decreases the prevalence of diarrhea and increases birthweight among children. It also increases the probability that children receive polio and diphtheria vaccines and increases the probability that children from middle-income households receive medical treatment for diarrhea. The second essay examines the effect of the Boko Haram Insurgency (BHI) on height-for-age z-scores, weight-for-age z-scores, weight-for-height z-scores, stunting, and wasting. It compares outcomes in Boko Haram high-active and low-active areas. A difference-in-difference analysis identifies the extensive margin effects while a regression analysis identifies the intensive margin effects. The essay uses data from the Nigerian Health and Demographic Survey and the Global Terrorism Database. The results suggest that the BHI reduces weight-for-age and weight-for-height z-scores and increases the probability of wasting. The evidence suggests that policies targeting healthcare services may mitigate the long-term impacts of the BHI on human capital production. Finally, the third essay examines the effect of neighborhood gangs on youth criminal behavior in the United States. It uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) and examines the effect of neighborhood gangs on youth delinquency and substance use. The essay finds that neighborhood gangs positively affect incidences of substance use by youths after accounting for individual heterogeneity. This finding suggests that policies providing early guidance to youths about the effects of neighborhood gangs should be encouraged. Youths exposed to neighborhood gangs should be sensitized on the dangers of substance use.

Download or read book Essays on the Origin of Human Capital Crime and Income Inequality written by 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 Consequences and Responses to Economic Shocks written by Armand Arief Sim and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters that study the consequences of income or price shocks on important economic dimensions of villages, households, and individuals, and how they respond to these shocks. The first chapter investigates whether local governments respond to local economic shocks. I use heterogeneity in the effects of rice import restriction on rice price shocks across Indonesian villages to investigate public resources provision responses to local price shock. To this end, I combine village agro-climatic conditions for growing rice with provincial rice price over time to construct plausibly exogenous price shocks at the village level. Using a comprehensive longitudinal dataset of 53,000 villages, I find that an increase in rice price is associated with negative income growth in villages less suited for growing rice, and local governments responded to it by increasing public resources -- public health facilities and financial capital assistance -- towards those villages. The effects on public health facilities (financial assistance) are only significant in high (low)-inequality villages. Increased social capital only in low-equality villages can provide a plausible explanation for the heterogeneous result on financial assistance projects. I also show that an increase in public health facilities was associated with a reduction in infant mortality suggesting evidence of good targeting by local governments. The second chapter (co-authored with Patrick Asuming and Hyuncheol Bryant Kim) investigates the long-run effects of a health insurance subsidy in Ghana, where mandates are not enforceable. We randomly provide different levels of subsidy (1/3, 2/3, and full), with follow-up surveys seven months and three years after the intervention. We find that a one-time subsidy promotes insurance enrollment for all treatment groups, but long-run health care service utilization increases only for the partial subsidy groups. Selection explains this pattern: those who were enrolled due to the subsidy, especially the partial subsidy, are more ill and have greater health care utilization. A careful enforcement of mandatory enrollment is necessary to prevent selection. The third chapter (co-authored with Asep Suryahadi and Daniel Suryadarma) measures the effect of child market work on the long-term growth of human capital, focusing on the output of the human capital production: mathematics skills, cognitive skills, pulmonary function, and educational attainment. Our full sample is drawn from a rich longitudinal dataset Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS). We address endogeneity of child market work using provincial legislated minimum wage as the instrument. Our instrumental variable estimation shows that child labor negatively affects mathematics skills and pulmonary function, but not cognitive skills and educational attainment. We find heterogeneities in type of work. Those who work outside of family business have lower educational attainment than those working for family business.

Download or read book Equity Human Capital and Development written by Ali Khan and published by JAI Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monograph essays examining the effects of human capital development on income distribution and economic and social development - discusses poverty measurement, the likely implications of economic growth, effects of guaranteed income on education and educational level, impact of inflation on welfare, etc., develops an economic model incorporating growth and education, and includes case studies. Graphs and references.

Download or read book Essays on Inequality and Human Capital written by Dohyoung Kwon and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I develop a growth model of human capital accumulation, and show analytically how those factors affect the dynamics of earnings inequality. The calibrated model accounts for 31 percent of the observed differences in earnings inequality between European countries and the US for 2003-07. Differences in returns to education investments and intergenerational earnings persistence are quantitatively important, suggesting the potential role of educational policy in ameliorating rising earnings inequality. Chapter 3, written jointly with Martin Gervais, analyzes the role of endogenous human capital accumulation in shaping optimal fiscal policy within a life-cycle growth model. We show that when investment in human capital is not verifiable---making the tax code incomplete---a non-zero capital income tax becomes optimal in order to alleviate the distortionary effects of the labor income tax on investment in human capital. This is true even if the government has access to a full set of age-dependent labor and capital income taxes. The main result is in sharp contrast to the finding in Jones et al. (1997) that all interest taxes are zero in infinitely-lived agent models with endogenous human capital formation.

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital and Finance written by Miguel Palacios and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Human Capital written by Wei-Cheng Chen (Economist) and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1. "Growth in a Patrilocal Economy: Female Schooling, Household Savings, and China's One-Child Policy," joint with Ting-Wei Lai. In this chapter, we answer the following question: What are the economic consequences of China's One-Child policy? We develop a model of parental education decision to analyze how a population control policy affects saving and schooling in a patrilocal society, where sons are responsible to support parents, but daughters are not. Parent's investment on education depends on the degree of parental altruism and the need for old-age security. A tighter population control policy increases parental altruism and the rate of return on schooling, and shortens gender gap in education. There is also a dynamic incentive for daughter's education, since lower fertility promotes female labor market participation, and increases the value of female education. We then calibrate our model to the Chinese economy and show the extent to which the "One-Child" policy explains the rapid growth of household saving and female schooling. Chapter 2. "Limiting Applications in College Admissions and Evidence from Conflicting Examinations," joint with Yi-Cheng Kao. One of the most distinctive trends in global education over the past few decades is the rapid expansion of higher education. Moreover, since 2000, East Asia has had the fastest growth and the largest share of student enrollment in higher education. However, one might suspect that the overall quality of education has not improved as well. In this paper, my coauthor and I explore the micro-aspect of education as a joint product between a school and a student in order to understand how the quality of education evolves. In particular, for many Asian countries, entrance examination is the primary screening device for college admissions. We present a college admissions problem in which schools may gain from limiting students' application portfolios, and derive conditions under which a lower ranked school can attract better students by applying such strategy We argue that top schools in Taiwan have strategically used the date of entrance examination to limiting students' application, and nd supporting empirical evidence. The empirical results suggest that departments with prestige close to the top could improve their students' quality by setting the same examination dates as the best school. These findings are consistent with the predictions of our theory. Chapter 3. "Calming the Crazed or Fueling the Flames: A Noisy Screening Model of Lending Standards and Credit Cycle." This chapter discusses the difficulty of funding ideas. Why is credit pro-cyclical? More importantly, why does a credit boom-bust cycle happen? These empirical facts seem to contradict the theory of intertemporal consumption smoothing, and suggest that financial intermediaries play an important role. In this paper, I present a statistical model of bank lending standards, and analyze the conditions under which a credit boom-bust emerges. In this model, a bank needs to screen borrowers who hold private information. For each loan application, the bank receives a noisy signal about the quality of the project. A bank's funding policy is a decision rule conditional on the signal received. Because borrowers face application costs, their decision to participate is affected by the bank's funding policy. I show that the bank's optimal funding policy can be summarized by a lending standard, defined as the significance level of the bank's screening test while reviewing loan applications, which is to say, the probability a bad project will be funded. While bank lending standard is countercyclical, whether it stabilizes or amplifies shocks on fundamentals depends on borrowers' participation decisions. In particular, credit booms happen when banks lower lending standards to attract low-quality borrowers, and busts happen when banks tighten standards to exclude them. I also show that credit booms are likely to be triggered by TFP gains or cheaper capital, consistent with empirical findings.