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 Three Essays on Human Capital written by Xiaoyan Chen Youderian and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essay considers how the timing of government education spending influences the intergenerational persistence of income. We build a life-cycle model where human capital is accumulated in early and late childhood. Both families and the government can increase the human capital of young agents by investing in education at each stage of childhood. Ability in each dynasty follows a stochastic process. Different abilities and resultant spending histories generate a stochastic steady state distribution of income. We calibrate our model to match aggregate statistics in terms of education expenditures, income persistence and inequality. We show that increasing government spending in early childhood education is effective in lowering intergenerational earnings elasticity. An increase in government funding of early childhood education equivalent to 0.8 percent of GDP reduces income persistence by 8.4 percent. We find that this relatively large effect is due to the weakening relationship between family income and education investment. Since this link is already weak in late childhood, allocating more public resources to late childhood education does not improve the intergenerational mobility of economic status. Furthermore, focusing more on late childhood may raise intergenerational persistence by amplifying the gap in human capital developed in early childhood. The second essay considers parental time investment in early childhood as an education input and explores the impact of early education policies on labor supply and human capital. I develop a five-period overlapping generations model where human capital formation is a multi-stage process. An agent's human capital is accumulated through early and late childhood. Parents make income and time allocation decisions in response to government expenditures and parental leave policies. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy so that the generated data matches the Gini index and parental participation in education expenditures. The general equilibrium environment shows that subsidizing private education spending and adopting paid parental leave are both effective at increasing human capital. These two policies give parents incentives to increase physical and time investment, respectively. Labor supply decreases due to the introduction of paid parental leave as intended. In addition, low-wage earners are most responsive to parental leave by working less and spending more time with children. The third essay is on the motherhood wage penalty. There is substantial evidence that women with children bear a wage penalty of 5 to 10 percent due to their motherhood status. This wage gap is usually estimated by comparing the wages of working mothers to childless women after controlling for human capital and individual characteristics. This method runs into the problem of selection bias by excluding non-working women. This paper addresses the issue in two ways. First, I develop a simple model of fertility and labor participation decisions to examine the relationships among fertility, employment, and wages. The model implies that mothers face different reservation wages due to variance in preference over child care, while non-mothers face the same reservation wage. Thus, a mother with a relatively high wage may choose not to work because of her strong preference for time with children. In contrast, a childless woman who is not working must face a relatively low wage. For this reason, empirical analysis that focuses only on employed women may result in a biased estimate of the motherhood wage penalty. Second, to test the predictions of the model, I use 2004-2009 data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) and include non-working women in the two-stage Heckman selection model. The empirical results from OLS and the fixed effects model are consistent with the findings in previous studies. However, the child penalty becomes smaller and insignificant after non-working women are included. It implies that the observed wage gap in the labor market appears to overstate the child wage penalty due to the sample selection bias.

Download or read book Three Essays on Investments in Children s Human Capital written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Childhood Development Human Capital Formation and Psycho social Well being written by Kira Marie Villa and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently and emerging literature in economics highlights the importance of early childhood well-being and what are know as "noncognitive" skills to economic success. While growing evidence in links these skills to economic, behavioral and demographic outcomes in the developed countries, there is little such evidence linking these traits to economic outcomes in developing country contexts. Moreover, research in the economics literature generally estimates the effects of a general noncognitive aggregate rather than specific traits. In this dissertation I explore how various dimensions of human capital develop over childhood and how cognition and specific personality and noncognitive traits determine labor market outcomes. Chapter 1 estimates how health, cognition and specific noncognitive abilities are jointly produced over the different stages of childhood in a developing country context. It estimates self- and cross-productivity effects across these different dimensions of child development and examines the role of parental inputs and home environment. The noncognitive abilities examined are risky behaviors, group socialization, positive affect and negative affect. Using a rich panel data set that follows a cohort of Filipino children from birth through adulthood, I estimate this production technology using the dynamic factor model developed in Cuhna and Heckman (2008). Findings show strong path dependency with current levels of child development largely dependent on previous levels causing early disparities in child development to persist throughout childhood into adult- hood. Lagged health, in particular, is an important determinant of current health, cognition and socio-emotional well-being in this developing country context. Cognition and socio-emotional traits similarly exhibit both self- and cross-productivity. Findings imply that child development is cumulative in nature and that early disparities will persist until effective and early remediation is undertaken. Chapter 2 estimates the effect of cognition and five specific personality traits on entrepreneurship and selection into different labor market segments for a sample of young adults in Madagascar. The personality traits examined are know as the Big Five Personality traits: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Examining the effects of specific noncognitive traits will help to better compare results across studies and target policy. I find that both cognition and personality are significant predictors of labor market selection and entrepreneurial activities. Personality matters in determining labor market outcomes of interest and should therefore be considered when discussing and designing human capital targeted policies. If the policy implications of the literature linking personality and outcomes are to be realized, then a better understanding of how these noncognitive traits are developed is needed. However, to date, the literature detailing how the Big Five Personality Traits are formed is much smaller. Chapter 3 explores the environmental and familial determinants of the Big Five Personality Traits. While I cannot directly control for genetics, we use information on maternal extended family to express a degree of genetic predisposition. I find that maternal background, extended family characteristics and other environmental determinants all interact and play a role in determining the five personality traits we examine.

Download or read book Essays on Family Choices in Developing Economies written by Gina Andrade Baena and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Important gaps in knowledge remain when investigating the links between family characteristics and human capital investments along the life-cycle. Human capital formation (i.e. skills development) is problematic amongst low-income populations given the risk factors they are exposed to, such as poverty, malnutrition, non-stimulating home environments, and/or mistaken beliefs about returns to investments. Throughout three empirical chapters, this dissertation sheds light on the role of family characteristics and factors influencing two key human capital investments among deprived population in two developing economies: the choice of childcare and time allocation. Chapter 2 examines childcare choices exploiting the experimental design of a scalable early childhood intervention in Colombia. Chapter 3 investigates the role of children"s time use to produce one cognitive skill and two psychosocial skills; and the trade-offs of child work among alternative activities. Chapter 4 examines the relationship of birth order with time use and parental educational aspirations. The investigations in chapters 3 and 4 employ longitudinal data from Young Lives and focus on Peru. Furthermore, the analyses centres in three less documented life-stages within the human capital literature, childhood (ages 6-9), early adolescence (ages 10-14) and transition to adolescence (age 15). Findings in chapter 2 indicate that the stimulation treatment led to an increase up to 4.6 percentages points in informal childcare relative to maternal care. I also find evidence of increases in maternal play time investments. Chapter 3 results show that time inputs effects are marginal for both types of skills, although daily time in educational activities is crucial for verbal development, specifically time spent studying and at school. Finally, in chapter 4, I find that being the second born sibling in two-child families has a significant and negative effect on child work; nonetheless, parents are equally likely to aspire for the highest level of education for both children.

Download or read book Three Essays on Human Capital and the Family written by Jim A. (James Alan) Sentance and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Race and Human Capital written by Daniel M. Kreisman and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The following presents three essays on racial disparities in human capital investments and returns to skill over the life-cycle. The first chapter, “The Source of Black-White Inequality in Early Language Acquisition: Evidence from Early Head Start, ” addresses the source and timing of divergence in the accumulation of early childhood skills between black and white children. The second chapter, “The Effects of the Jeanes and Rosenwald Funds on Black Education by 1930: Comparing Returns on Investments in Teachers and Schools,” estimates the combined and comparative effects of two large philanthropies targeting rural black schools in the segregated South. The third chapter, “Blurring the Color Line: Wages and Employment for Black Males of Different Skin Tones,” co-authored with Marcos Rangel, tests for wage differentials within race, across skin color, utilizing a measure of skin tone placed in a prominent social survey. Taken together, these essays evaluate the role race plays in inequality above and beyond what can be explained away by racial disparities in wealth, family circumstances, prior education and other comparable measures. Each essay is written from a human capital perspective, drawing on literature in economics, public policy and education, seeking to broaden our understanding of the incongruous relationship between race and inequality in America.

Download or read book Three Essays on Social Interactions and Intergenerational Mobility written by Alejandro Gaviria Trujillo and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Early Childhood Development in Chile written by Alejandra Abufhele Milad and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early childhood development literature has emphasized the role that parental investment and early life conditions play on human capital formation. Still, there is little evidence on the mechanisms driving such dependence. This dissertation examines potential mechanisms explaining the relationship between parental investments, early life conditions and children's outcomes. The first chapter exploits a plausibly exogenous variation on the timing at which a maternity leave extension reform was implemented to estimate the causal effect of additional weeks of maternity leave on breastfeeding duration in Chile. By using data from the Chilean Longitudinal Survey of Early Childhood (ELPI), I find that additional weeks of maternity leave increases significantly breastfeeding duration; however, the effects show substantial heterogeneity by socioeconomic status in favor of low-educated mothers, suggesting that the reform has equalizing effects. The second chapter examines how parental investments respond to differences in the initial endowment between siblings within families, and how parental preference tradeoffs vary between families with different maternal education. Using ELPI twins data, I find that preferences are not at the extreme of pure compensatory investments to offset endowment inequalities among siblings nor at the extreme of pure reinforcement favoring the better-endowed child with no concern about inequality, but that parental investment preferences are neutral, so that they do not change the inequality on endowment differentials, a result that is consistent across families with low- and high-educated mothers. The third chapter provides empirical evidence on the effects of birth weight on cognitive and non-cognitive development. Results from singletons births show a positive association. The first-difference models for identical twins, show that birth weight does not have a significant effect on the developmental test scores. However, twins estimates stratified by age of the children show that birth weight effects are positive and significant but only for children between 3 and 7 years old. Overall, I conclude that endowments at birth, parental investments and policy interventions are all key determinants to unravel children's outcomes, and exploring the role that age and socioeconomic heterogeneity play in the production of these outcomes seems to be key for a thorough understanding of early childhood inequalities.

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Investment written by Sarena Goodman and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains a collection of essays on human capital formation and social service provision in the United States. The chapters evaluate three policies targeted to populations for whom the development and retention of skills is particularly critical--young adults, children, and the near-homeless. The first and second chapters focus on uncovering methods that could enhance the performance of the U.S. educational system: the first chapter examines a policy that better aligns educational expectations and potential among secondary school students; the second chapter evaluates a policy that incentivizes teachers to improve achievement among students in high-poverty primary and secondary schools. The third chapter examines an intervention designed to assist high-need families on the brink of homelessness. The chapters are also linked methodologically: in each, I exploit the exact timing of policy events (i.e., testing mandates, the opportunity for teachers to earn bonuses, the availability of homelessness prevention services) to identify their causal effects.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Empirical Relationships Between Health Schooling and Wages in Rural Guatemala written by Michael Maravilla Alba and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Families Children and Human Capital Formation written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Aid to Families with Dependent Children AFDC written by Ann Dentinger and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Impact of Education and Family Policies on the Formation of Human Capital written by Mathias Hübener and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Economic Approach written by Gary S. Becker and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-08-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As an economist and a public intellectual, Gary Becker was a giant. He won a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work in human capital, the John Bates Clark Medal as the best American economist under 40, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to public life and welfare. He is regarded by many as the greatest microeconomist in the field's history. After a 44-year career at the University of Chicago, Becker left a slew of manuscripts, projects, and speeches that were half-formed or never published. These papers offer glimpses both of his famed process and of the personality-direct, critical, curious-that make him a beloved figure in economics and far beyond. An Economic Approach collects and annotates these extant unpublished works as a capstone to the Becker oeuvre-not because the works are perfect, but because they offer an illuminating and deeply instructive glimpse into the mind and process of an economist who was always on. Longtime collaborator Richard Posner once described Becker a marathon runner of economic thought-forever chasing a big finish line, never stopping at artificial milestones along the way. An Economic Approach carries the flame of a great mind that was never motivated by publications, but whose spirit of inquiry will be forever relevant"--

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 Three Essays in Development Economics written by Céline Ferré and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: