Download or read book Essays on Public Investments in Children written by Esra Kose and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the impact of childhood exposure to public investments on later life outcomes from the lenses of changes in the political landscape due to women's enfranchisement and increases in early childhood education investments. Chapter 1, joint with Elira Kuka and Na'ama Shenhav, examines the long-term impact of women's political empowerment on children's educational outcomes following the suffrage laws in the early 1900s in the U.S. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in U.S. state and federal suffrage laws, we find that exposure to women's enfranchisement during childhood leads to large increases in educational attainment for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, in particular blacks and Southern whites. We show that the educational gains are plausibly driven by the rise in public expenditures following suffrage. Our findings contribute to the first long-term estimates of a broad-based expansion of women's political power. Chapter 2 analyzes the impact of the Head Start program on academic achievement by exploiting a new source of variation in program funding intensity across local communities and over time during the 1990s. Head Start is the largest federal preschool program that provides education, health, nutrition, and other social services to low-income children age three to five and their families. Since its inception in 1965, Head Start has been a key intervention for reducing educational gaps across socioeconomic groups in school readiness. However, its impact on test scores remains unclear. Using student-level data from Texas, I find that exposure to more generous Head Start funding at age four significantly improves test scores in third grade through fifth grade for low-income children. My results show that Head Start benefited Hispanics with limited language proficiency the most. I provide quantitative evidence that Head Start significantly improves language proficiency among Hispanics, which could partly explain the test score gains in this group. I also show that the gains in test scores can be explained by an increase in both program quality and capacity. These findings contrast to the previous literature, which reports smaller or no detectable impacts on children's test scores over the medium-run and contribute to the extensive literature that evaluates Head Start's effectiveness. Finally, Chapter 3 examines the intergenerational impact of Head Start on infant health. Head Start has served low-income children over 50 years and has been shown to be a success in improving long-term outcomes of children who participated the early phases program. This paper evaluates the effects of maternal access to Head Start on infant health outcomes using Vital Statistics Natality data. Using variation in the year of Head Start's introduction in each county from 1966 to 1970, I find that maternal access to Head Start at ages three to five improves infant health for both whites and blacks, with larger impacts on blacks. It also increases the probability that a new mother is more educated, reduces the number of births, reduces likelihood of smoking and drinking during pregnancy. These findings suggest that the estimates of the returns to early childhood programs may significantly understate the total benefit.

Download or read book Three Essays on Families Children and Human Capital Formation written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second essay, I consider how U.S. families choose to invest in response to the onset of a health condition in a child. Family investments can reinforce, or compensate for the occurrence of a health-limiting condition. The results from this paper shed light on the importance of incorporating the family unit as part of public policies that involve children with serious health conditions.

Download or read book Essays on Child Development written by Samuel Arenberg and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation, consisting of three chapters, considers the role of the childhood circumstances on adulthood measures of economic wellbeing. The first two chapters analyze a large expansion of public health insurance to children from low-income families in the United States. The third and final chapter analyzes the impact of childhood exposure to lead (Pb) in India. In Chapter 1, I examine one of the largest ever expansions of Medicaid, health insurance provided by the state at very low-cost to low-income Americans. In 1990, Congress passed a bill that extended Medicaid eligibility for children living below the poverty line from age 6 to age 18. This expansion, however, applied only to individuals born on or after October 1, 1983. Using a research design that exploits this sudden change in eligibility with respect to date of birth (a regression discontinuity design), I estimate the impact that the policy had on Medicaid enrollment rates. I find that enrollment rose specifically among Black children, and I offer potential explanations for why children of other races do not enroll despite becoming eligible. This finding contributes to a large literature on the puzzlingly low usage of social programs. In Chapter 2, I continue investigating this large expansion of youth Medicaid, but I shift focus to adulthood outcomes for individuals born around the October 1, 1983 cutoff. Namely, I study incarceration. I show that Black children born just after the cutoff are 5 percent less likely to be incarcerated by age 28, driven primarily by a decrease in incarcerations connected to financially motivated offenses. Children of other races, who (as discussed in Chapter 2) experienced almost no gain in Medicaid coverage as a result of the policy, demonstrate no such decline. I find that reduced incarceration in adulthood substantially offsets the initial costs of expanding eligibility. This result provides a clear demonstration for a commonly held view that investments in children and in public health systems can produce substantial social benefits, in addition to private ones. In Chapter 3, I turn attention to a developing-country context, specifically India, where environmental factors play an outsized role in child development. I study a large reduction in ambient exposure to lead, a neurotoxic substance that is particularly harmful to infants and children. Specifically, I analyze the impact that the phase-out of leaded gasoline had on the educational trajectories of children in India. I estimate this effect by leveraging the city-by-city implementation of the phase-out in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I find that lead exposure had significantly suppressed educational attainment in India. This finding adds to the evidence that environmental factors in early life can strongly affect markers wellbeing in later life

Download or read book Essays on Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Public Health Programs on Child s Well being written by Elan Satriawan and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Investment in Children s Health written by Tsui-Fang Lin and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Investment in Children s Health written by Tsui-Fang Lin and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Succeeding Generations written by Robert Haveman and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1994-06-09 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawn from an extensive two-decade longitudinal survey of American families, Succeeding Generations traces a representative group of America's children from their early years through young adulthood. It evaluates the many background factors that are most influential in determining how much education children will obtain, whether or not they will become teen parents, and how economically active they will be when they reach their twenties. Succeeding Generations demonstrates how our children's future has been placed at risk by social and economic conditions such as fractured families, a troubled economy, rising poverty rates, and neighborhood erosion. The authors also pinpoint some significant causes of children's later success, emphasizing the importance of parents' education and, despite the apparent loss of time spent with children, the generally positive influence of maternal employment. Haveman and Wolfe supplement their research with a comprehensive review of the many debates among economists, sociologists, developmental psychologists, and other experts on how best to improve the lot of America's children. "A state-of-the-art investigation of the determinants of children's success in the United States....Clearly written, highly readable, and compelling."—Contemporary Sociology "Haveman and Wolfe are professors of economics who bring sophisticated statistical and econometric techniques to the analysis of the economic and educational success of children as they progress into young adulthood."—Choice "This study is one of the most comprehensive of its kind, in part because the researchers collected detailed information about a wide range of children each year for more than two decades." —Wisconsin State Journal "The research at the core of this book addresses critically important questions in social science...an important contribution to the literature." —Robert Plotnick, University of Washington

Download or read book Securing Our Future written by Ruby Takanishi and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The persistence of the Great Recession provides us with the opportunity to engage in a long overdue conversation about public investments in America's children. Less than ten percent of the Fiscal Year 2010 federal budget of $3.603 trillion is allocated to children and youth. This percentage is likely to decline in the next decade if current laws and policies remain unchanged. While state and local governments spend more on children than the federal government, especially for public education, these investments vary greatly from state to state. The fiscal fragility of governments at all levels, combined with growing disparities in family resources, points directly to the vulnerability of large numbers of America's children. At the same time, the Baby Boomer population, born between 1946 and 1964, is a very large group with increasing needs for health care and retirement benefits. This older generation will depend on the health, productivity, and well-being of the children and youth growing up today. It makes good sense to invest in our children, but how much should that be? How should a society like ours--a leading democracy with strong values of individualism and entrepreneurial effectiveness--make the tough choices about allocating public resources to each generation of Americans? How do we respect a wide range of diversity in our communities, yet share a common sense of purpose as a nation? The annual essay, "Tough Choices: Creating a New Social Contract for America" (Ruby Takanishi and Lisa Chen) included herein recommends specific policies that should be considered in the courageous conversations that must take place immediately, so that corrective actions can follow shortly thereafter. (Lists 24 resources.).

Download or read book Essays on Maternal Investment and Child Human Capital Accumulation written by Arianna Lucia Zanolini and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores the role of early maternal investments on children's human capital accumulation through three co-authored essays.

Download or read book Securing the Future written by Sheldon Danziger and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2000-06-29 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than ever, the economic health of a country depends upon the skills, knowledge, and capacities of its people. How does a person acquire these human assets and how can we promote their development? Securing the Future assembles an interdisciplinary team of scholars to investigate the full range of factors—pediatric, psychological, social, and economic—that bear on a child's development into a well-adjusted, economically productive member of society. A central purpose of the volume is to identify sound interventions that will boost human assets, particularly among the disadvantaged. The book provides a comprehensive evaluation of current initiatives and offers a wealth of new suggestions for effective public and private investments in child development. While children from affluent, highly educated families have good quality child care and an expensive education provided for them, children from poor families make do with informal child care and a public school system that does not always meet their needs. How might we best redress this growing imbalance? The contributors to this volume recommend policies that treat academic attainment together with psychological development and social adjustment. Mentoring programs, for example, promote better school performance by first fostering a young person's motivation to learn. Investments made early in life, such as preschool education, are shown to have the greatest impact on later learning for the least cost. In their focus upon children, however, the authors do not neglect the important links between generations. Poverty and inequality harm the development of parents and children alike. Interventions that empower parents to fight for better services and better schools are also of great benefit to their children. Securing the Future shows how investments in child development are both a means to an end and an end in themselves. They benefit the child directly and they also help that child contribute to the well-being of society. This book points us toward more effective strategies for promoting the economic success and the social cohesion of future generations. A Volume in the Ford Foundation Series on Asset Building

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 An Essay on the government of Children under three general heads viz Health Manners and Education written by James NELSON (Apothecary) and published by . This book was released on 1763 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book An Essay on the Government of Children Under Three General Heads Viz Health Manners and Education written by James Nelson and published by . This book was released on 1753 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Children s Health and Education Policies written by Kathleen Ngar-Gee Wong and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of three independent research papers, which broadly focuses on the introduction and outcomes of policies concerning children's health and education. Although the chapters are related in theme, the objective, scope and empirical strategy of each paper differs. The first chapter, "How Did SCHIP Affect the Insurance Coverage of Immigrants Children?" (with Thomas Buchmueller and Anthony Lo Sasso), focuses on the passage of the State Children's Health Insurance Program in the late 1990s, which expanded public insurance eligibility and coverage for children in "working poor families". Despite this success, over 6 million children are eligible for public insurance, but remain uninsured. The study focuses on children born to immigrant parents because of their low rates of insurance coverage and unique enrollment barriers. The results indicate SCHIP was successful in increasing overall insurance take-up and in reducing disparities in access to health insurance coverage. The second chapter, "Looking Beyond Test Score Gains" determines whether the introduction of school accountability programs (prior to the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001) affected individuals' educational attainment and labor market outcomes. The effects are evaluated along two dimensions: differences in the length of program exposure and variation in program quality. The results indicate school accountability had mixed success in increasing outcomes across gender and racial/ethnic groups. They also suggest the heterogeneous treatment effects are consistent with some of the unintended consequences documented in the school accountability literature. The third chapter, "The Role of Education on Health Behaviors, Investments and Outcomes", uses a new combination of instrumental variables to predict individuals' schooling and determine whether there is a causal effect of education on young adults' health behaviors. The instruments rely on changes to state policies, dating back to the 1970s, that dictate when children are permitted to start and stop attending school. The results indicate education not only decreases the likelihood of smoking, heavy drinking and obesity, but affects the frequency of these behaviors and degree of obesity. Education also promotes behaviors that are akin to health investments, such as increasing sunscreen use and the receipt of preventive services.

Download or read book Three Essays On Children s Health Care Use And Health written by Maki Ueyama and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early years of children's lives are crucial to their future health and development. Disparities in health and skills that emerge during children's first few years increase with age. Many factors affect children's health. At an individual level, mother's education is an influential factor. At a societal level, public policies affect children's surrounding environment that influences their health. Therefore it is critical that public policies and other determinants of children's health be studied carefully. As a nation, U.S. has made significant improvements in children's health over the past century. However, there is a significant increase in the number of children in the U.S. today that suffer from conditions and diseases that have emerged in recent years, including asthma and obesity. These conditions are impediments to children's healthy development and have long lasting effects. Investment in children's health yields long term payoffs at the individual as well as societal levels. Healthy children have more opportunities to succeed in schools and more likely to become healthy, productive adults. Benefits extend to society as a whole including reduced dependency and disability, a healthier future workforce, and consequently a stronger economy. Due to these reasons, it is important to understand how health care use and health among children in the U.S. have been affected by some of their key determinants in recent decades. This dissertation is divided into three chapters. The first chapter examines the feasibility of using compulsory schooling policies as instruments for mother's schooling to examine the causal effect of mother's schooling on children's health care use and health. The second chapter examines the causal effect of insurance coverage on children's health care use and health using evidence from the Medicaid and SCHIP expansions. The third chapter examines the causal effect of welfare reform on children's health care use and health. Findings from this dissertation provide informative insights on key factors that shape children's health and wellbeing and highlight important methodological issues involving such empirical research.

Download or read book Post Keynesian Essays from Down Under Volume II Essays on Policy and Applied Economics written by G. Harcourt and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Halevi, G. C. Harcourt, Peter Kriesler and J. W. Nevile bring together a collection of their most influential papers on post-Keynesian thought. Their work stresses the importance of the underlying institutional framework, of the economy as a historical process and, therefore, of path determinacy. In addition, their essays suggest the ultimate goal of economics is as a tool to inform policy and make the world a better place, with better being defined by an overriding concern with social justice. Volume II assess application and policies.

Download or read book Essays on Labor and Public Economics written by Adam Isen and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: