Download or read book Three Essays on Economic Growth and Human Welfare written by Prodyumna Goutam and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is increasing recognition of the influence of macroeconomic factors on individual welfare. This represents a shift in the traditional focus of policy analysis, which has largely focused on evaluating the impact of micro level interventions. This dissertation examines this link through three papers. The first paper examines the impact of export growth in Bangladesh on the health of children. Using information on the production network of industries in the country, coupled with district-level employment characteristics, the analysis constructs a gender disaggregated, district-level measure of export exposure. Using variation in this measure across districts and over time, the study analyzes the impact of female-specific export exposure on the incidence of childhood health ailments like diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, and fever. The results indicate that export exposure causes a reduction in the incidence of childhood illness. In addition, export exposure leads to an increase in autonomous decision-making as it relates to healthcare decisions, presenting a possible mechanism underlying the observed health results. Informal employment accounts for the majority of employment in many developing countries, yet its relevance to growth, and its links to the formal sector, remain poorly understood. The second paper of the dissertation examines the link between export growth and informality, also in Bangladesh. In particular, it examines the impact of export-induced demand on four types employment: formal, casual, unpaid, and self. The results suggest that trade triggers an immediate increase in both formal and casual employment, as well as a longer-run increase in self employment. Thus, response to growth opportunities such as trade is not limited to formal employment, and a more nuanced understanding of informality in the growth process is needed. A large literature in economics and epidemiology points to the importance of economic conditions in childhood on health later in life. The final paper of the dissertation analyzes the impact of macroeconomic conditions prevailing around the time of birth (measured using the growth rate of state-wise per capita income) on health in adulthood using the Health and Retirement Study. Health is measured using a variety of biomarker indicators of cardiovascular, metabolic, and inflammation risk. Overall, the analysis finds no impact of economic conditions at birth on health in adulthood.

Download or read book Three Essays in Economic Development written by Evan Wigton-Jones and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1 explores the long-run effects of inequality within Brazil. I exploit variation in the climate to instrument for the local distribution of land in 1920 in a two-stage least squares instrumental variables framework. My instrument is an index quantifying the suitability of the climate for plantation versus smallholder agriculture. IV estimates show that higher levels of historical land inequality are associated with lower local public welfare spending, both historically (in 1923) and in recent times (from 1995-2005). Historical inequality is also associated with lower levels of development, as measured by the local Human Development Index. In Chapter 2 I show that the construction of Afghanistan's largest modern infrastructure project, a two thousand mile highway known as the A1 or Ring Road, led to a surge in opium production within the country over the past decade. I first exploit spatial and temporal variation in district-level poppy cultivation and proximity to the road to show that districts with better access to the highway witnessed a significant increase in cultivation. I then utilize three rounds of the large-scale National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Survey to show that improved access to the highway led Afghan farmers to substitute away from legal crops towards illicit opium production. In Chapter 3 I analyze local economic growth within Brazil over the 1920 to 1996 time period. I first find that local per capita economic growth displays unconditional divergence, in that localities which were relatively richer in 1920 grew faster over 20th century. Disaggregating local GDP into its agriculture, industry, and services components reveals long-run divergence to be present in all three sectors of the economy. After conditioning growth on a comprehensive set of controls, including those for geography, inequality, and human capital, I find no evidence that localities have converged in their long-run growth rates.

Download or read book Economics and Human Welfare written by Michael J. Boskin and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic Theory, Econometrics, and Mathematical Economics: Economics and Human Welfare: Essays in Honor of Tibor Scitovsky focuses on the principles, influence, and contributions of Tibor Scitovsky on economics. The selection first elaborates on welfare economics and microeconomic theory, property rights doctrine and demand revelation under incomplete information, and experiments in the pricing of theater tickets. Discussions focus on the effect on audience composition, volume, and revenues, failure of bargaining under privacy, growing disenchantment with economic growth, and bargaining as a game of incomplete information. The text then takes a look at economics and the transformation of the idea of progress and changes in the size distribution of income. The text ponders on welfare criteria, distribution, and cost- benefit analysis; position of ethics in the theory of production; and rationing and price as methods of restricting demand for specific products. Topics include excise taxation with revenue distributed like rations; private and social returns to morality; effect of changes in the cost of organization and communication; and logical and historical foundation of the theory of the welfare state. The selection is highly recommended for economists and researchers interested in pursuing studies on the relationship of economics and human welfare.

Download or read book Three Essays on Endogenous Growth and the Environment written by Elamin H. Elbasha and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Growth and the World Economy written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Health and Economic Growth written by Guillem López i Casasnovas and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading international researchers offer theoretical and empirical microeconomic and macroeconomic perspectives on the ways a population's health status affects a country's economic growth.

Download or read book Three Essays on Growth and Political Economy written by Yaakov Khazanov and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Human Capital Child Care and Growth and on Mobility written by Rizwana Alamgir-Arif and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contributes to the fields of Public Economics and Development Economics by studying human capital formation under three scenarios. Each scenario is represented in an individual paper between Chapters 2 to 4 of this thesis. Chapter 2 examines the effect of child care financing, through human capital formation, on growth and welfare. There is an extensive literature on the benefits of child care affordability on labour market participation. The overall inference that can be drawn is that the availability and affordability of appropriate child care may enhance parental time spent outside the home in furthering their economic opportunities. In another front, the endogenous growth literature exemplifies the merits of subsidizing human capital in generating growth. Again, other contributions demonstrate the negative implications of taxes on the returns from human capital on long run growth and welfare. This paper assesses the long run welfare implications of child care subsidies financed by proportional income taxes when human capital serves as the engine of growth. More specifically, using an overlapping-generations framework (OLG) with endogenous labour choice, we study the implications of a distortionary wage income tax on growth and welfare. When the revenues from proportional income taxes are channelled towards improving economic opportunities for both work and schooling investments in the form of child care subsidies, long run physical and human capital stock may increase. A higher level of growth may ensue leading to higher welfare. Chapter 3 answers the question of how child care subsidization works in the interest of skill formation, and specifically, whether child care subsidization policies can work to the effect of human capital subsidies. Ample studies have highlighted the significance of early childhood learning through child care in determining the child's longer-term outcomes. The general conclusion has been that the quality of life for a child, higher earnings during later life, as well as the contributions the child makes to society as an adult can be traced back to exposures during the first few years of life. Early childhood education obtained through child care has been found to play a pivotal role in the human capital base amongst children that can benefit them in the long run. Based on this premise, the paper develops a simple Overlapping Generations Model (OLG) to find out the implications of early learning on future investments in human capital. It is shown that higher costs of child care will reduce skill investments of parents. Also, for some positive child care cost, higher human capital obtained through early childhood education can induce further skill investments amongst individuals with a higher willingness to substitute consumption intertemporally. Finally, intervention that can internalize the intra-generational human capital externalities arising from parental time spent outside the home - for which care/early learning is required to be purchased for the child - can unambiguously lead to higher skill investments by all individuals. Chapter 3 therefore proposes policy intervention, such as child care subsidization, as the effect of such will be akin to a human capital subsidy. The objective of Chapter 4 is to understand the implications of inter-regional mobility on higher educational investments of individuals and to study in detail the impact of mobility on government spending for education under two particular scenarios --one in which human capital externalities are non-localized and spill over to other regions (e.g. in the form of R & D), and another in which the externalities are localized and remain within the region. It is shown that mobility enhances private investments in education, and all else equal, welfare should be higher with increased migration. The impacts on government educational expenditures are studied and some policy implications are drawn. In general, with non-localized externalities, all public expenditures decline under full-migration. Finally under localized externalities, the paper finds that governments will increase their financing of education to increasingly mobile individuals only when agglomeration benefits outweigh congestion costs from increases in regional population.

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 Stubborn Attachments written by Tyler Cowen and published by Stripe Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a bestselling author and economist, a contemporary moral case for economic growth—and a dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities. Growth is good. Through history, economic growth, in particular, has alleviated human misery, improved human happiness and opportunity, and lengthened human lives. Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. If we want to continue on our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us. So, how do we proceed? Tyler Cowen, in a culmination of 20 years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. In this new book, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, Cowen argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society. Stubborn Attachments, at its heart, makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth and delivers a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities. As a means of practicing the altruism that Stubborn Attachments argues for, Tyler Cowen is donating all earnings from this book to a man he met in Ethiopia earlier this year with aspirations to open his own travel business.

Download or read book Nations and Households in Economic Growth written by Paul A. David and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz is a collection of papers that reflect the broad sweep of Moses Abramovitz’s interests within the disciplines of economics and economic history. This work is organized into two parts encompassing 14 chapters. The first part discusses the individual and social welfare significance of quantitative indices of economic growth. This part also deals with the mechanisms of economic-demographic interdependence and their bearing particularly upon “long swings in the rate of growth. The second part highlights the changing role of international relations in processes generating national economic development and domestic economic instability. This book will be of value to economists, historians, and researchers.

Download or read book Three Essays on Economic Growth written by Gerald M. McIntyre and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Economic Growth and Development written by Rodrigo Priale and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Endogenous Growth of a Regional Economy Under the Impacts of Demographic Changes written by Tae-Jeong Kim and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of an ageing population on the economy is one of the key issues in most developed countries. It is a generally accepted notion that an ageing population could cause negative effects, including a decrease of per-capita output and economic welfare, on the economy mainly due to the decline of the labor force and aggregate saving rate. The first chapter adopts the two-sector overlapping generation (OLG) model to capture the impact of population ageing on the regional economy and compares the effectiveness of government policy in an endogenous growth perspective. Comparing the computational results of a one-sector OLG model where agent0́9s productivity is given exogenously, the simulation result confirms that endogenously determined investment in human capital significantly offsets the negative effects of the ageing population on the regional economy. The chapter also attempts to check if there is room for the government to weaken and prevent the negative effects of the ageing population. For this, this chapter examines the effects of two kinds of government transfer systems on the regional economy: money transfer and educational transfer systems. The money transfer, which is redistributed to agents by the government, could be used for an individual0́9s consumption, saving and educational investment. Educational transfer is given directly to the individual proportional to his or her opportunity cost stemming from education investment. The result shows that the educational transfer system is superior to money transfer system in the long-run in terms of growth of per-capita income, aggregate welfare and stabilizing the factor prices. However, the results imply that there exists a trade-off relationship in implementing an educational transfer system between economic growth and equity of income and wealth. The second chapter seeks to examine the effects of the ageing population in Illinois with inclusion of the household0́9s ex-ante intra-generational heterogeneity across race and migration status. For this, this chapter empirically shows that there are significant gaps in returns to education between race and migration status in Illinois; and there exists significant relationships between a resident0́9s demographics and the probability of in- and out- migration around Illinois. These empirical results, including heterogeneous properties across race and migration status and demographic- related migration tendency, are calibrated into the two-sector OLG model. Using this two-sector OLG model incorporated with the intra-generational heterogeneity over race and migration status, this chapter projects the economic growth of Illinois will decelerate substantially until the mid 2020s due to population ageing. After that time, the growth of Illinois will partially recover. The major economic problems of the ageing era stem from the deficiency of the labor force. Also the Black0́9s unemployment rate tends to be substantially high in Illinois. Taking the two labor market- related problems of ageing population and high Black0́9s unemployment into consideration, the government could implement a labor policy measure aiming at increasing the employment rate of the Black to the level of the other races through the absorption of the unemployed Blacks by offering industry subsidies or incentives. However, the result shows that an indirect educational policy, targeting the upgrading of the transmission channel of human capital stock from the old generation to the young generation of the Black, is more preferable than the direct employment policy in terms of long-run effects on per-capita income and social welfare. Also, this chapter shows that the effects of the government0́9s immigration policy, which aims at replacing low-productive international immigrants with native, relatively high-productive unemployed individuals who have been unemployed, are very limited in terms of per-capita income, welfare and aggregate productivity. On the contrary, tax and transfer policy inducing international immigrants to invest more in their education works relatively better. Furthermore, under this policy scheme, the native0́9s human capital stock also improves significantly because of positive spillover effects even though the transfer system0́9s direct beneficiary is the international immigrant group. The third chapter attempts to project the economic paths for the individual Midwest states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, as well as the Rest of the US) in the future when the population ageing becomes more pronounced. To accomplish this task, a dynamic general equilibrium model is developed so that it could incorporate the inter-regional transactions and endogenous growth mechanisms within the framework of an OLG model. Key parameter values associated with the regional interconnections were assigned by using multi-regional Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) of the Midwest states. Two different steady-state results were presented with the two different age-cohort population structures corresponding to year 2007 and 2030. These steady-state results imply that there should be considerable negative impacts on the regional economies in the sense of declining per-capita output. The rate of declining of per-capita output are projected to be heterogeneous across the regions due to the different developments of age-cohort population structures and consequently different levels of endogenously determined educational investment of workers. Furthermore, the regions could be grouped separately according to the levels of average human capital stock of workers: high-skilled and low-skilled regions, being roughly consistent with actual labor productivity statistics. It is intuitive that the supply-demand interactions between the regions should be affected by developments of demographics in each region. This intuition is consistent with the simulation results in the sense that the result revealed the development of output price in a certain region reflects the dynamics of demographics of every region. Meanwhile, according to the dynamic simulation, the negative impacts of population ageing will not be so severe unlike what was presented in the steady-state results. This mitigation of negative effects could be attributed mainly to the growth of human capital stock of workers. The dynamic simulation results reveal that the per-capita output of every region is projected to grow positively in the near future when the population ageing will be pronouncing. However, the growth rate of the per-capita output is projected to be heterogeneous across the regions: the regions with high-skilled workers hold the potential threat that population ageing could give more negative impacts on the economy due to the relatively sluggish growth of human capital stock. Also, the dynamic simulation results show that certain regions in Midwest will experience their terms-of-trade deteriorate in the near future, implying that careful attention should be given to their future trade conditions.

Download or read book The Allocation of Economic Resources written by Moses Abramovitz and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Role of Financial Markets and Pension Systems in Economic Growth written by Jeannine N. Bailliu and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 242 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.