Download or read book Essays on Earnings and Human Capital in Kenya written by Anthony Wambugu and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Health and Development written by Yao Yao and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies rich lifecycle behavior concerning human capital and health, and its implications for economic growth and development. It examines the impact of social institutions and government policies on individuals' lifetime choices which affect public health outcomes and economy-wide labor productivity. I apply macroeconomic approach and focus on aggregate effects, but both theoretical framework and quantitative analysis are built upon solid micro foundations of household behavior. By exploring the underlying channels, I derive policy implications for economic growth and development. This dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 studies the role of fertility motives in women's HIV risk in Sub-Saharan Africa, Chapter 2 studies the impact of higher education expansion along with economic reform on Chinas labor productivity, and Chapter 3 explores patterns of Chinas regional income disparity. Chapter 1 examines the role of social and cultural norms regarding fertility in women's HIV risk in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fertility, or the ability to bear children, is highly valued in most African societies, and premarital fertility is often encouraged in order to facilitate marriage. This, however, increases women's exposure to HIV risk by increasing unprotected premarital sexual activity. I construct a lifecycle model that relates a woman's decisions concerning sex, fertility and education to HIV risk. The model is calibrated to match Kenyan womens data on fertility, marriage and HIV prevalence. Quantitative results show that fertility motives play a substantial role in women's, especially young women's, HIV risk. If premarital births did not facilitate marriage, the HIV prevalence rate of young women in Kenya would be one-third lower. Policies that subsidize income, education, and HIV treatment are evaluated. Chapter 2 studies the impact of higher education expansion, along with economic reform of the state sector, in the late 1990's in China on its labor productivity. I argue that in an economy such as China, where allocation distortions widely exist, an educational policy affects average labor productivity not only through its effect on human capital stock, but also through its effect on human capital allocation across sectors. Thus, its impact could be very limited if misallocation becomes more severe following the policy. I construct a two- sector general equilibrium model with private enterprises (PE) and state-owned enterprises (SOE), with policy distortions favoring the latter. Households, heterogeneous in ability, make educational choices and occupational choices in a three-period overlapping-generations setting. Counterintuitively, quantitative analysis shows an overall negative effect of higher education expansion on average labor productivity (by 5 percent). Though it did increase China's skilled human capital stock significantly (by nearly 50 percent), the policy had the effect of reallocating relatively more human capital toward the less-productive state sector. It is the economic reform that greatly improves the efficiency of human capital allocation and complements educational policy in enhancing labor productivity (by nearly 50 percent). Chapter 3 explores patterns of China's regional income disparity. I document the stylized fact that the regional labor income disparity varies across industries with different skill in- tensities in China. While high-skill-intensive industries have larger income dispersions across regions than low-skill-intensive ones, this pattern tends to intensify over recent decades. I construct a model that interprets this pattern using the regional productivity variation of high-skilled firms, match-specific ability, firms' screening decision and workers' migration. In particular, firms in rich regions have higher productivity than those in poor regions. Workers are heterogeneous in ability, which is match-specific and unobservable before screening. Since ability and productivity are complements for high-skilled firms, these firms in rich regions pay more screening efforts to select workers with higher ability, and pay a higher wage in equilibrium. Workers live in different regions, and migration incurs a cost. This increases la- bor market tightness in rich regions and amplifies the regional income disparity. The model is quantified to match China's data. Counterfactual analysis shows that the screening process accounts for 45 percent of China's regional income disparity of high-skill-intensive industries, and migration barrier accounts for 10 percent.

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 in Empirical Development Economics written by Owen Whitfield Ozier and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation encompasses three empirical studies in the economics of western Kenya. In Chapter 1, I estimate the impacts of secondary school on human capital, occupational choice, and fertility for young adults in Kenya. Probability of admission to government secondary school rises sharply at a score close to the national mean on a standardized 8th grade examination, permitting me to estimate causal effects of schooling in a regression discontinuity framework. I combine administrative test score data with a recent survey of young adults to estimate these impacts. My results show that secondary schooling increases human capital, as measured by performance on cognitive tests included in the survey. For men, I find a drop in the probability of low-skill self-employment, as well as suggestive evidence of a rise in the probability of formal employment. The opportunity to attend secondary school also reduces teen pregnancy among women. In Chapter 2, I investigate whether a large-scale deworming intervention aimed at primary school pupils in western Kenya had long-term effects on young children in the region, exploiting positive externalities from the program to estimate the impact on younger children who did not receive treatment directly. I find large cognitive effects--equivalent to half a year of schooling--for children who were less than one year old when their communities received mass deworming treatment. I also find modest positive effects on stature. Because mass deworming was administered through schools, I also estimate effects among children who were likely to have older siblings in school to receive the treatment directly; in this subpopulation, effects are twice as large. In Chapter 3, Pamela Jakiela and I measure the economic impacts of social pressures to share income with kin and neighbors in rural Kenyan villages. We conduct a lab experiment in which we randomly vary the observability of investment returns to test whether subjects reduce their income in order to keep it hidden. We find that women adopt an investment strategy that conceals the size of their initial endowment in the experiment, though that strategy reduces their expected earnings. This effect is largest among women with relatives attending the experiment, who invest 22 percent less when income is observable. At the village level, the extent to which experimental subjects engage in income hiding within the experiment is negatively associated with the probability of skilled employment and the value of household assets.

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital and Wage Formation written by Malin Bergman and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Growth Human Capital and Income Distribution written by Valerie Cerra and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Economic Growth and Development written by Robert Delano Sinclair and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Issues in Resource Management and Development in Kenya written by Robert A. Obudho and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Human Capital and Economic Development written by Humna Ahsan and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Role of Human Capital in the Agriculture of Sub saharan Africa written by Emanuele Zucchini (t.d.-) and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics of Human Capital Accumulation written by Iuliia Dudareva and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first chapter, I study how pre-college parental investment affects sorting of students into colleges. I estimate the efficiency of the decentralized allocation and explore the implications of pre-college investment for intergenerational mobility. I embed a student-to-college assignment model into a two-period overlapping generations model with endogenous human capital investment. I calibrate the model to NLSY97 cohort and find that the race to the top induces overinvestment in pre-college human capital and associated output losses relative to the first best. The effect is more pronounced for high-income families which promotes income persistence at the top of the college distribution. In the second chapter, we explore one aspect of U.S. education that has not garnered a lot of attention until fairly recently that is occupational choice. We add an education sector to an otherwise standard Hsieh et al. (2019)-style model to explore the extent to which changes in career opportunities in other occupations affect the selection of workers into teaching careers. In our model, changes in the allocation of teaching talent have implications for the evolution of class size as well as quality of instruction and hence the accumulation of human capital during the workers' formative years. This gives rise to a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency, which we quantify by way of a structural model.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Human Capital written by Hye Mi You and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Development Economics written by Joan Hamory Hicks and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to the World Bank's World Development Report 2007, there are 1.3 billion young adults aged 12-24 living in less-developed countries today. Individuals in this age group are going through a period of tremendous flux in their lives as they embark on marriage, job searches or higher education, and their experiences during this time will shape the next generation of decision makers. Research focusing on the choices of these individuals, as well as the circumstances under which they are made, is urgently needed. The present collection of essays seeks to advance such research by utilizing a recent longitudinal survey to examine the decisions of young adults in rural Kenya as they relate to education, migration and behavior in the wake of violent civil conflict. Chapter 1 explores the extent to which individual academic and cognitive ability is factored into household decisions concerning education. Panel information on schooling for nearly 1,900 rural Kenyan youth over the period 1998-2008 is combined with satellite precipitation data in order to examine the effects of agricultural income variability on school attendance. A unique early-age academic test score proxies for child ability. Regression analysis indicates that during times of plenty, there is an 11 percent increase in attendance of high ability relative to low ability individuals, suggesting households recognize and value ability when making schooling decisions. This finding is framed using a model of human capital accumulation in which schooling decisions are a function of individual ability. Surprisingly, although youth on the whole are less likely to attend school during negative income shocks, there are no differential attendance changes across individuals of different ability levels. Instead, credit constraints and income shocks may work together in this setting to limit desirable human capital investments. Such consumption smoothing behavior could imply negative long-term effects on household welfare. Chapter 2 studies selective migration among 1,500 Kenyan youth originally living in rural areas. In particular, this essay examines whether migration rates are related to individual "ability", broadly defined to include cognitive aptitude as well as health, and then uses these estimates to determine how much of the urban-rural wage gap in Kenya is due to selection versus actual productivity differences. Whereas previous empirical work has focused on schooling attainment as a proxy for cognitive ability, the present research employs an arguably preferable measure, a pre-migration primary school academic test score. Pre-migration randomized assignment to a deworming treatment program provides variation in health status. Results suggest a positive relationship between both measures of human capital (cognitive ability and deworming) and subsequent migration, though only the former is robust at standard statistical significance levels. Specifically, an increase of two standard deviations in academic test score increases the likelihood of rural-urban migration by 17%. In an interesting contrast with the existing literature, schooling attainment is not significantly associated with urban migration once cognitive ability is accounted for. Accounting for migration selection due to both cognitive ability and schooling attainment does not explain more than a small fraction of the sizeable urban-rural wage gap in Kenya, suggesting that productivity differences across sectors remain large. Finally, Chapter 3 examines the socioeconomic impacts of two months of protests and violent, primarily ethnic-based clashes that erupted across central and western Kenya in late 2007 following the controversial conclusion of a heavily-contested presidential election. Although not an epicenter of the conflict, Busia District experienced sporadic unrest, an influx of refugees from other parts of Kenya, inflation, supply shortages, and local market closures. Unique and timely survey data collected from young adults living primarily in this district of rural western Kenya in the months surrounding the election permits the use of both differences-in-differences and propensity score matching methodologies to estimate the short- to medium-run impacts of this conflict, and both approaches yield broadly similar findings. Despite little support for lasting effects on labor, migration and nutritional outcomes within weeks of cessation of the violence, there do appear to be persistent consequences for social cohesion and informal financial activities. While there is little indication of change in survey respondents' self-reported attitudes regarding trust of others, analysis confirms large declines in attendance at religious services, participation in community and bible groups, and utilization of non-family members as points of contact for future survey enumeration efforts. These findings highlight a disconnect between reported attitudes and observable behavior. Furthermore, respondents are between 29 and 53 percent less likely to engage in informal lending and transfers post-conflict. Given the key role played by social networks in informal financial markets in less-developed countries, these results indicate that even brief civil unrest may have lasting negative consequences.

Download or read book Essays on Agricultural Productivity Youth Employment and Human Capital Investment in Sub saharan Africa written by Josephat Koima and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation focuses on the intersection of agricultural productivity, youth employment, and investments in human capital development in Sub–Saharan Africa (SSA). Agriculture is a dominant employer and source of income in SSA, and plays an important role in youth employment and educational attainments.In Chapter 1, we study the role of structural transformation in the labor reallocation between the farm and the non–farm sector and the consequential impact on worker demographics. Specifically, we investigate whether agricultural productivity differentially reallocates labor by age and gender. We develop a theoretical model where increased land productivity leads to younger individuals sorting into the non–farm sector while older individuals sort into agriculture. We then use data from Zambia in our empirical analysis. Our main results show some evidence of productivity affecting labor reallocation within recent productivity lags (last 2 years) but not when longer productivity lags (4 or 6) are considered. Specifically, consistent with our model prediction, a 10% increase in a 2–year lagged moving average of productivity decreases the probability of farming by 0.3 percentage points among youth (15–24) and older youth (25–34). We also show that youth (15–24) also exit farming following increased productivity. Increased productivity tends to reduce the intensity of farming across all age groups but the reduction is relatively larger among the youth. In addition, young men are more likely to exit business activity as productivity increases relative to young women – across all productivity lags. In the short term (2–lags), while youth exit farming, there is no differential outcome between genders. However, among older youth, males are more likely to exit farming compared to women. Finally, males mainly drive the reduction in intensity of farming. Overall, while we find some evidence in favor of our hypotheses, the evidence is generally limited to the short term and the marginal effects are quantitatively small.Chapter 2 investigates the impact of agricultural productivity on human capital investments in Tanzania. Agriculture remains a major source of employment and income in Tanzania. Therefore, any agricultural productivity shocks are likely to affect educational investment decisions. Our results provide evidence that increased agricultural productivity boosts spending on uniform, contributions and total academic expenses. We find positive but statistically non–significant effects of productivity on study times. In addition, we find no evidence of heterogeneous effects by student gender. We show evidence that productivity effects are smaller in female–headed households. Finally, we find some evidence that post–primary students experience larger impacts compared to primary school students.In Chapter 3, I investigate the impact of primary school electrification on academic outcomes in Kenya. Between 2014 and 2016, the number of primary schools with electricity rose from 56% to 94%. Schools near the grid network were connected to grid electricity while those further received solar photovoltaics. Using this rapid electrification expansion as a source of identifying variation in a panel fixed effects model, the paper estimates the impact on school test scores, enrollment, and completion. The paper also attempts to quantify the effects of lighting on education performance by relying on the off–grid (solar) electricity coefficients. Using a universe of 8th grade students in public schools in Kenya, the paper finds no evidence that electricity affects test scores or enrollment in the short run. However, off–grid electrification increases completion by 1%. Using off–grid estimates, the paper concludes that lighting has a small positive impact on completion but not on test scores or enrollment.

Download or read book Human Capital and Economic Growth written by Andreas Savvides and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth investigation of the link between human capital and economic growth. The authors take an innovative approach, examining the determinants of economic growth through a historical overview of the concept of human capital. The text fosters a deep understanding of the connection between human capital and economic growth through the exploration of different theoretical approaches, a review of the literature, and the application of nonlinear estimation techniques to a comprehensive data set. The authors discuss nonparametric econometric techniques and their application to estimating nonlinearities—which has emerged as one of the most salient features of empirical work in modeling the human capital-growth relationship, and the process of economic growth in general. By delving into the topic from theoretical and empirical standpoints, this book offers an insightful new view that will be extremely useful for scholars, students, and policy makers.

Download or read book Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality written by Ms.Era Dabla-Norris and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.