Essays On Early Life Shocks And Human Capital Production
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Essays On Early Life Shocks And Human Capital Production
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Author : Habtamu Beshir
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2019
Essays On Early Life Shocks And Human Capital Production written by Habtamu Beshir and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019 with categories.
Three Essays Examining Early Life Shocks That Affect Human Capital Production
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Author : Uche Eseosa Ekhator
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2018
Three Essays Examining Early Life Shocks That Affect Human Capital Production written by Uche Eseosa Ekhator and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018 with Economics categories.
This dissertation comprises three essays. The first examines the effect of health insurance on child health and healthcare utilization in Nigeria. It uses the implementation and expansion of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) to introduce an exogenous variation in health insurance eligibility, a natural experiment that fits a difference-in-difference analysis. Findings from this essay suggest that health insurance decreases the prevalence of diarrhea and increases birthweight among children. It also increases the probability that children receive polio and diphtheria vaccines and increases the probability that children from middle-income households receive medical treatment for diarrhea. The second essay examines the effect of the Boko Haram Insurgency (BHI) on height-for-age z-scores, weight-for-age z-scores, weight-for-height z-scores, stunting, and wasting. It compares outcomes in Boko Haram high-active and low-active areas. A difference-in-difference analysis identifies the extensive margin effects while a regression analysis identifies the intensive margin effects. The essay uses data from the Nigerian Health and Demographic Survey and the Global Terrorism Database. The results suggest that the BHI reduces weight-for-age and weight-for-height z-scores and increases the probability of wasting. The evidence suggests that policies targeting healthcare services may mitigate the long-term impacts of the BHI on human capital production. Finally, the third essay examines the effect of neighborhood gangs on youth criminal behavior in the United States. It uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) and examines the effect of neighborhood gangs on youth delinquency and substance use. The essay finds that neighborhood gangs positively affect incidences of substance use by youths after accounting for individual heterogeneity. This finding suggests that policies providing early guidance to youths about the effects of neighborhood gangs should be encouraged. Youths exposed to neighborhood gangs should be sensitized on the dangers of substance use.
Three Essays On Early Life Shocks And Human Capital In A Developing World
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Author : Mochamad Pasha
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2017
Three Essays On Early Life Shocks And Human Capital In A Developing World written by Mochamad Pasha and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017 with Child welfare categories.
Essays In Early Life Conditions Parental Investments And Human Capital
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Author : Valentina Duque
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2015
Essays In Early Life Conditions Parental Investments And Human Capital written by Valentina Duque and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2015 with categories.
I find that high violence in early-life is associated with lower educational attainment in the future (years of schooling and lower school enrollment). The findings also show that in utero and early-childhood exposure to violence has a more pronounced impact on human capital attainment than exposure at other stages of the life course (i.e., school age, adolescence). The timing and the magnitude of the effects are important considering the huge inequality in education in developing countries.
Three Essays On The Economics Of Childhood Development Human Capital Formation And Psycho Social Well Being
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Author : Kira Marie Villa
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014
Three Essays On The Economics Of Childhood Development Human Capital Formation And Psycho Social Well Being written by Kira Marie Villa and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with categories.
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.
Essays On Shocks And Human Capital In African Countries
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Author : Osaretin Olurotimi
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2023
Essays On Shocks And Human Capital In African Countries written by Osaretin Olurotimi and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2023 with categories.
The broad goal of this dissertation is to quantify the effect of shocks, policies, and programs on human capital, firms, and communities, especially in Africa. This is motivated by the need to provide empirical estimates of the impact of humanitarian crises and policy to undergird effective development policy and praxis. In my dissertation, I show how conflict and climate shocks affect children's human capital in Uganda and how foreign direct investment impacts domestic firms in Cote D'Ivoire. My dissertation papers share three themes. First, I provide improved (or initial) micro-level estimates of the impact of some shocks on economic agents in two African countries. Second, all three of my dissertation chapters attempt to answer questions about developing countries in Africa by unearthing and exploring new data sources. Third, the findings from my research have clear implications for contemporaneous education, industrial and climate policy in developing economies that grapple with similar challenges. My research on human capital is motivated by human capital's centrality to livelihoods and national economic growth and the crisis of learning poverty many African countries face. Learning poverty is the inability of children who have completed particular schooling levels to demonstrate cognitive outcomes related to that level. For instance, data from the World Bank showed that up to 83% of children in Uganda of primary completion age were below the minimum proficiency level, while over 95% of children in Chad and Niger were unable to read. This crisis deserves attention to understand the drivers and causes, potentially highlighting solutions. In this dissertation, I look at the role of exogenous factors such as conflict and climate and weather shocks in affecting human capital. For example, in Chapter 1, I examine the effect of historical exposure to an East African insurgency group-The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA)-and contemporaneous exposure to armed conflict on children's learning outcomes. Although there has been a decline in the number of civil wars in Africa since the 1990s, there has been a rise in itinerant and cross-border terrorist groups like Boko-Haram and Al-Shabaab. The LRA has been noted as one of the terrorist groups that have elicited the most humanitarian damage in East Africa. Empirically, I combine data from UWEZO's citizen-led household survey of learning outcomes in Uganda with geo-located conflict data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). Using a model with fixed effects estimation approach, I find that exposure to the LRA reduced children's learning outcomes in Math and English but did not affect their schooling. The cohort exposed to LRA did not have worse dropout rates or nonenrolment than their peers who were not exposed to LRA conflict. My contributions to the literature on conflict and educational outcomes include the first specific estimates of how exposure to a conflict in childhood impacts learning and schooling differently in an East African context. Also, I provide results on the impact of conflict on out-of-school children, who are overlooked in studies that only consider schooling outcomes. Exposure to LRA is worse for out-of-school children in English. Asides from measuring the medium-term effect of exposure to terrorism. I also measure the impact of contemporaneous conflict, i.e., the conflict that happened in the year children were surveyed and which is more likely to comprise riots and protests than violence against civilians. I use variation in the timing of first exposure to conflict by comparing children exposed in one year to those not yet treated by conflict. The effects of these contemporary conflicts are relatively muted in size and statistical significance compared to the effect of LRA. The results of this work imply a need to measure to impact of the same shock on schooling and learning differently and beyond the short term, as learning could be impacted even after schooling has recovered. Although I provide evidence that schooling quality via teacher absenteeism is affected by conflict in this context, future related work could explore the first-order effects of LRA on parental outcomes to elucidate the mechanisms through exposure to terrorism that affected children's learning in Uganda. Along similar lines, Chapter 3 uses remote sensing data to examine how abnormal rainfall and temperature patterns in early childhood affect human capital outcomes, including children's educational outcomes. I also document how unusually high test date temperatures impact test performance. Analytically, I combine learning outcome data from the UWEZO learning assessments in East Africa with the CHIRTS and CHIRPS temperature and rainfall data from the Climate Hazards Centre at UC Santa Barbara. I find that high test date temperature harms only the learning outcomes of girls and children under 10, while rainfall shocks in-utero have adverse effects. However, positive rainfall shocks at ages 1-4 positively impact learning outcomes. The paper also provides suggestive evidence that possessing some adaption technology like electricity may make children more likely to experience thermal stress when the technology is not in use. Thus, this paper provides an essential accounting of the effects of climate change on African children and highlights the need for additional demographic considerations in testing environments. Another theme that my research examines is the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in improving the performance of domestically connected local firms. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), African countries only received about 4% and 5% of global Foreign Direct Investment in 2020 and 2021, respectively. However, despite its meager share of global FDI, African governments have high hopes for the role that FDI can play in their local economies, evidenced by the growth in the number of investment promotion agencies, incentives, and bilateral and multilateral treaties. Therefore, in Chapter 2, coauthored with Jeremy Foltz and Nohoum Traore, using new, high-quality panel data on firms in Ivory Coast, we revisit an open question on the impact of FDI on productivity and other relevant outcomes among domestic firms in Africa. Africa has not yet experienced the kind of industrial revolution that has supercharged the economies of, for example, South Asian countries. Accordingly, various African countries have initiated policy initiatives such as tax holidays for foreign firms to encourage industrialization. However, our research shows that horizontal FDI reduces domestic firm productivity in Ivory Coast, especially for domestic firms operating in the Service, Commerce, and Manufacturing sectors.In contrast, downstream FDI reduces the likelihood that firms export and the intensity of exports only for firms located in Abidjan, the defacto economic capital. The results of this work are essential for similar African countries as they develop their investment and tax policies. A natural extension of this work is research that accounts more fully for the general equilibrium effects of FDI on the whole economy, including government revenue and community welfare.
Three Essays On Human Capital
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Author : Xiaoyan Chen Youderian
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2012
Three Essays On Human Capital written by Xiaoyan Chen Youderian and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012 with categories.
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.
Empirical Essays In Health And Human Capital
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Author : Gary Brant Morefield
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2011
Empirical Essays In Health And Human Capital written by Gary Brant Morefield and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011 with Families categories.
"This dissertation studies two dynamic processes, the production of human capital and evolution of health. The first essay uses data on parents and their children in the longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics and PSID-Child Development Supplement to estimate the effect negative changes in parental health on the children's development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The analysis suggests that the onset of a parental health event, on average, does not affect children's cognitive measures and has small negative effects on the level of children's noncognitive skills. However, small average effects mask heterogeneous effects across: the sex of the parent, sex of the child, and the type of health condition. Parental health events are found to significantly impair noncognitive skill development when a father is afflicted with a health event, affect sons more negatively than daughters, and are worse for certain--vascular or cancerous--conditions. Further exploration shows that effects of parental health events on skill development are related to changes in the hypothesized mechanism, changes in skill investments. Specifically, when parental health events are estimated to create the poorest behavior outcomes, large reductions in one measure of skill investment, time that parents participate in activities with children, is also commonly found. The second essay (joint with David Ribar and Christopher Ruhm) uses longitudinal data from the 1984 through 2007 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine how occupational status is related to the health transitions of 30 to 59 year-old U.S. males. A recent history of blue-collar employment predicts a substantial increase in the probability of transitioning from very good into bad self-assessed health, relative to white-collar employment, but with no evidence of occupational differences in movements from bad to very good health. These findings are robust to a series of sensitivity analyses. The results suggest that blue-collar workers "wear out" faster with age because they are more likely, than their white-collar counterparts, to experience negative health shocks. This partly reflects differences in the physical demands of blue-collar and white-collar jobs. The third essay (joint with Jeremy Bray) uses the framework of Bray (2005) to develop a theoretical and accompanying empirical model examining how the productivities of the human capital inputs work and school are affected if individuals work while enrolled in school. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we model the dynamic processes of work and school input decisions jointly with the effects of these decisions on future wages to discern whether work and school are contemporaneous complements or substitutes in the production of human capital. Endogeneity is corrected through the use of the Discrete Factor Method. The model shows that, on average, work and school are indeed complementary in the production of human capital. However, examination of in-school work at differing schooling levels or across different student occupations shows that certain types of work and school are complementary when simultaneously undertaken while others are substitutes in the production of human capital."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.
Essays In The Economics Of Child Health And Skill Formation
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Author : Giacomo Mason
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2019
Essays In The Economics Of Child Health And Skill Formation written by Giacomo Mason and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019 with categories.
Recent research on human capital development during childhood has focused on three im- portant avenues, among others: measurement, modelling, and interventions. In this thesis, in touch on each of these in turn. The chapter titled "The effect of cash and information on child development" examines the child development effects of a "cash plus" intervention in Nigeria, which starts from the pregnancy period. It underlines the interplay between resources and information in achieving growth and cognition improvements. Chapter "Inequality in socioe- motional skills" highlights issues of measurement. It finds that there is no perfect invariance in the measurement of socioemotional skills in two cohorts of British five year olds born 30 years apart, and shows that socioeconomic determinants of such skills have changed over this period. Finally, the chapter titled "The role of diet quality and physical activity in the pro- duction of adolescent human capital" models the human capital production process in early adolescence, exploiting novel sources of exogenous variation to disentangle the health effects of diet and exercise. Significant complementarities between physical and mental health, and between mental health and diet, emerge from the analysis.
Drought Of Opportunities
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Author : Manisha Shah
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2013
Drought Of Opportunities written by Manisha Shah and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013 with Economics categories.
Higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production especially in the developing world. We show that human capital investment is procyclical in early life (in utero to age 3), but then becomes countercyclical. We argue this countercyclical effect is caused by families investing more time in schooling when outside options are worse. We show that children and mothers report a lower likelihood of work in drought years, and children are more likely to attend school. In addition, we find long term impacts of these shocks: adults who experienced more rainfall during school years have lower overall total years of schooling and lower wages. These results suggest that the opportunity cost of schooling, even for fairly young children, is an important factor in determining overall human capital investment.