Essays On Human Capital Health And Development
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Essays On Human Capital Health And Development
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Author : Yao Yao
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2016
Essays On Human Capital Health And Development written by Yao Yao and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016 with Electronic dissertations categories.
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.
Addressing Barriers To Human Capital Accumulation Essays In Development And Health Economics
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Author : Sophie Ochmann
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2023
Addressing Barriers To Human Capital Accumulation Essays In Development And Health Economics written by Sophie Ochmann 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.
While health and education, jointly referred to as human capital, are important ends in themselves, they are also important drivers of poverty alleviation and economic growth. Understanding and overcoming the barriers that constrain human capital accumulation is hence crucial for economic development. This dissertation examines three barriers to human capital accumulation in three essays. Essay one studies whether providing school-based management committees with a grant and training can improve primary educational attainment in Sokoto, Nigeria. We thereby contribute evidence from an unders...
Essays On Health Human Capital And Economic Development
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Author : Minki Kim
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2023
Essays On Health Human Capital And Economic Development written by Minki Kim 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.
This dissertation consists of three chapters. In Chapter 1, I study the macroeconomic consequences of eradicating malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. To do so, I combine a general-equilibrium overlapping generations model with reduced-form empirical evidence. I find eliminating malaria in a representative sub-Saharan Africa through vaccination would increase the GDP per capita by 30% in the long run, which is nearly ten times larger than previously estimated. I also find that the gains stem from larger investments in human capital, amplified over multiple generations. In Chapter 2, in work joint with Titan Alon, Natalie Cox, and Arlene Wong, we study the welfare and productivity consequences of rising student debts in the United States. We first empirically estimate how student debts affect workers' early career outcomes using NLSY panel data. Then we construct a quantitative life-cycle model calibrated to match the empirical evidence and evaluate the federal student loan policies. We find that student debt forgiveness or repayment elongation policies improve welfare and labor productivity. The model suggests that a big chunk of the productivity gain comes from a small fraction of the workforce, who switch occupations in response to the policies. In Chapter 3, in work joint with Titan Alon, David Lagakos, and Mitchell VanVuren, we provide a quantitative macroeconomic framework to study why emerging markets fared worse relative to advanced economies and low-income countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. We adopt a workhorse incomplete-markets macro model to include epidemiological dynamics alongside key economic and demographic characteristics that distinguish countries of different income levels. We conclude that emerging markets fared especially poorly due to their high employment share in occupations requiring social interactions and their low level of public transfers. In contrast, low-income countries fared relatively better due mainly to their younger population and larger agricultural sector.
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 Human Capital Development
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Author : Debbie Blair
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2020
Essays In Human Capital Development written by Debbie Blair and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020 with categories.
Essays In Human Capital Development
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Author : Randeep Kaur
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2017
Essays In Human Capital Development written by Randeep Kaur and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017 with categories.
This dissertation studies decisions pertaining to human capital investment, specifically education and health. Specifically, I examine human capital decisions through two key research questions. One, what is the effect of household structures on decisions pertaining to human capital development of infants? Two, what is the effect of education policies on education choices? Chapter 1 of the dissertation examines the former by assessing the role of grandparents in household decisions, and Chapters 2 and 3 study the latter question using education policies in India and United States, respectively. Chapter 1 studies the role of grandparents in healthcare decisions made for infants. Using a unique research design, I show that a change to household structure caused by the death of the last living grandparent can be used to identify the effect of grandparents on household decisions, if one exploits the variation in the timing of these decisions relative to the death. This chapter highlights the importance of grandparents in household decisions, especially in context of technology diffusion and human capital development. It also makes an important contribution to the literature by offering a novel empirical strategy that could be used to study the effect of family members on a variety of outcomes in an extended household setting. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 investigate how education policies affect educational outcomes of disadvantaged populations. In Chapter 2, I examine the effects of the world's largest free lunch program, the Mid Day Meal Scheme of India. Using an instrumental variable strategy, I explicitly incorporate the differential implementation levels of the policy across states. The findings of this paper show that India's free lunch program increased primary school enrollment in India, especially for girls and other disadvantaged populations. In Chapter 3, I study the effect of education policies on choices of students in higher education. In particular, I explore the impact of a policy change that allowed undocumented immigrants to be eligible for in-state tuition in Texas. Employing a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that the reduced college costs resulting from the in-state tuition policy decreased the gap in educational outcomes of undocumented immigrants and their US-born peers. The results of this chapter suggest that the in-state tuition policy increased the probability of graduating and graduating with advanced degrees from community colleges for undocumented immigrants.
Essays On Human Capital Development
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Author : John F. Creamer
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2017
Essays On Human Capital Development written by John F. Creamer and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017 with categories.
Essays On Human Capital And Economic Development
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Author : Humna Ahsan
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2015
Essays On Human Capital And Economic Development written by Humna Ahsan 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.
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 Human Capital Investments In Developing Countries
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Author : Emilie T. Bagby
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2011
Essays On Human Capital Investments In Developing Countries written by Emilie T. Bagby and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011 with categories.
This dissertation encompasses three chapters that explore determinants of parental investments in their children0́9s health and education in developing countries. Below are the individual abstracts for each chapter. Chapter 1: Child Ability, Parental Investments and Child Nutrition in Ecuador This paper investigates the role of family composition and child cognitive ability in explaining how resource-constrained households make nutritional investment decisions in their children. Parents have private information about their children0́9s abilities and health that is typically not available to researchers. I use a unique panel household dataset from Ecuador0́9s Bono de Desarrollo Humano that contains a measure of child cognitive ability and allows me to estimate its affect on resource allocation. I address reverse causality due to the effects of investments on ability and I use within household fixed effects to look at children to look at the intra-household investment decision. Findings point to the existence of sibling rivalry due to resource constraints; children with more siblings, and children in poor households, are less likely to eat high-quality food. Children with higher abilities are less likely to share a nutritional supplement with another family member, suggesting that parents must decide how to invest their limited resources, and child ability informs that decision. Within households of more than one child, children with higher abilities are more likely to eat higher quality foods than their siblings, even after controlling for child body size. Chapter 2: Child Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children0́9s cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households0́9 decisions to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment. We explicitly incorporate direct measures of the ability of each child0́9s siblings (both absolute and relative measures) to show how sibling rivalry exerts an impact on the parent0́9s decision of whether and how much to invest in their child0́9s education. We find children with one standard deviation higher own ability are 16 percent more likely to be currently enrolled, while having a higher ability sibling lowers current enrollment by 16 percent and having two higher ability siblings lowers enrollment by 30 percent. Results are robust to addressing the potential reverse causality of schooling influencing child ability measures and using alternative cognitive tests to measure ability. Chapter 3: Risk and Protective Factors for School Dropout in Mexico and Chile Fourteen percent of Chilean youth and 30 percent of Mexican youth have dropped out prior to completing secondary school. Of these youth, 90 to 97 percent are considered 0́−at risk,0́+ meaning that they engage in or are at risk of engaging in risky behaviors that are detrimental to their own development and to the well-being of their societies. This paper uses youth surveys from Chile and Mexico to demonstrate that early school dropout is strongly correlated with a range of risky behaviors as well as typically unobservable risk and protective factors. We test which of a large set of potential factors are correlated with dropping out of school early and other risky behaviors. These factors range from relationships with parents and institutions to household behaviors (abuse, discipline techniques) to social exclusion. We use stepwise regressions to sort out which variables best explain the observed variance in risky behaviors. We also use a non-parametric methodology to characterize different sub-groups of youth according to the amount of risk in their lives. We find that while higher socioeconomic status emerges as key explanatory factors for school dropout and six additional risky behaviors for boys and girls in both countries, it is not the only one. A good relationship with parents and peers, strong connection with local governmental institutions and schools, urban residence, younger age, and spirituality also emerge as being strongly correlated with school dropout and different risky behaviors. Similarly, young people that leave school early also engage in other risky behaviors. The variety of factors associated with leaving school early suggests that while poverty is important, it is not the only risk factor. This points to a wider range of policy entry points than currently used, including targeting parents and the relationship with schools.