Three Essays On Early Life Shocks And Human Capital In A Developing World
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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.
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.
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.
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 Formation And Mobility Of Human Capital In Developing Countries
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Author : Maggie Yuanyuan Liu
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2017
Three Essays On The Formation And Mobility Of Human Capital In Developing Countries written by Maggie Yuanyuan Liu and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017 with Economics categories.
Development and economic growth take place through the more efficient allocation of inputs into more productive uses. Human capital is a key input since it is the main asset of the majority of the population, especially of the poor, in developing countries. What factors attribute to existing barriers to physical and social mobility of human capital in developing countries? How has expanded global trade affected the allocation and accumulation of skill in developing economies? In three chapters, I study the education and internal migration in China and India, and provide answer to these questions.
Three Essays On Human Capital
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Author : Yibo Zhang
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2010
Three Essays On Human Capital written by Yibo Zhang and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2010 with Electronic dissertations categories.
First Chapter: Endogenous Skill Acquisition and Taxation (with James Bullard) This paper studies dynamic Mirrleesian-style taxation in a lifecycle economy. In contrast to the recent Mirrleesian dynamic optimal taxation literature, in which individual skills are subject to shocks but are otherwise fixed over time, agents in our model make a conscious decision about human capital acquisition (as well as when to retire) given their own aptitude for learning. This aptitude is private information. Human capital accumulation is the engine of growth in our model. We find that there will be no human capital accumulation, and hence no growth, in the economy when there is no taxation of any sort. We suggest a taxation scheme which will induce human capital accumulation and hence economic growth in this stylized environment. The key feature of the tax scheme is to provide incentives for human capital accumulation for those that have high aptitude by credibly transferring resources to them later in life, after they have revealed their aptitude. We show that only a moderate transfer is called for to induce growth in our calibrated economy. We also find that the timing of the tax-transfer may or may not matter for the income distribution depending on the exact form in which the taxation is levied (labor or capital income tax), but in general the tax-transfer scheme is highly non-monotonic. Second Chapter: Brain Drain and Brain Drain Reversal Departing from the previous theoretical studies on Brain Drain, which mainly focus on the welfare impact of the migration of skilled workers on the home country and on the foreign country, I build a theoretical model to study a somewhat different twin phenomena "brain drain" and "brain drain reversal". The brain drain and brain drain reversal of interest here is the trend that people from developing countries (most prominently from East Asian countries) who have studied in developed countries such as the U.S. go back to their home country sooner or later for good. I study these two phenomena in a two-period lifecycle economy where home country agents choose not only education location but also work location possibly multiple times in their lifetime. The model captures the crucial factors in agents' location choice decision including work-place premium, education-location premium, market opportunity gap (between home and foreign countries) as well as adaptability of skills. I solve the model analytically and conduct comparative statics analysis followed by calibration exercises based on data from Mainland China (1985-2006). Third Chapter: Human Capital Intensity, Education and Growth (with Jiaren Pang and Haibin Wu) Using the methodology of Rajan and Zingales (1998), we revisit the issue of human capital and economic growth by examining whether industries with higher human capital intensity tend to grow faster in countries with higher human capital stock. Not only are we able to avoid the many problems that have plagued the conventional cross-country growth regressions but the results are no longer mixed. We do not find that education improvement has a differential effect on industries with different human capital intensities. However, we have discovered that in countries with higher education levels and quality, high human capital intensity industries grow faster than low human capital intensity ones.
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.
Essays In Development Economics
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Author : Kibrom Tafere Hirfrfot
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2017
Essays In Development Economics written by Kibrom Tafere Hirfrfot 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 consists of three self-contained papers, which are all related to the welfare consequences of risk and uncertainty. Chapter one studies the inter-generational effects of maternal early childhood shocks on the human capital outcomes of children. I exploit the 1983-1985 Ethiopian famine as an exogenous source of variation to study the effects of exposure to severe shocks in utero and/ or during the first three years after birth on the cognitive, non-cognitive and health capabilities of children of mothers who were exposed to shocks in early childhood. Using data that track children from early childhood through adolescence, I estimate the effects of mothers' early childhood shock over their children's life cycle. I find that the famine had a lasting inter-generational effect. Mothers' early childhood famine exposure reduces their children's height-for-age z-score, schooling, locus of control and self-esteem. These effects are persistent from age one through early adolescence. The main inter-generational transmission channel of the shock is children's maternal human capital endowment. Mothers who suffered the famine in early childhood are shorter and have less schooling. I also find a critical maternal shock duration threshold of three months. These findings point to ineffectiveness of remediation once the damage is done to mothers as young girls. The policy implication is that girls under the age of three with high risk of crossing the critical famine duration threshold should be targeted for health and nutritional interventions. In chapter two, coauthored with Christopher B. Barrett, Erin Lentz and Birhanu Ayana, we estimate the causal effects of index insurance coverage on the subjective well-being (SWB) of a poor population in rural southern Ethiopia. Insurance coverage may be welfare enhancing ex ante by reducing exposure to risk. Yet, if the insurance policy lapses without payout, but having paid a premium, the buyer will be financially worse off and may experience buyer's remorse ex post of the resolution of uncertainty. The ex ante and ex post well-being effects of insurance may therefore differ, especially in the absence of indemnity payments. We separately identify (1) the ex ante SWB effects of current insurance coverage that arise from reducing ex ante risk exposure to potential shocks, and (2) the ex post buyer's remorse effects of lapsed insurance policies that did not pay out. By exploiting the randomization of incentives to purchase a newly introduced index-based livestock insurance product and three rounds of household panel data, we establish that current coverage generates statistically significant gains in buyer's SWB. The ex ante gains more than offset the statistically significant buyer's remorse effect of having lost money on insurance that did not pay out. These results suggest that insurance can have significant impact on SWB and illustrate that failure to control for potential buyer's remorse effects can bias downwards estimates of the welfare gains from insurance coverage. Chapter three concerns with the determinants of crop diversification in Ugandan agriculture.
Parental Investments And Children S Human Capital In Low To Middle Income Countries
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Author : Jere R. Behrman
language : en
Publisher: Elements in Development Econom
Release Date : 2022-12
Parental Investments And Children S Human Capital In Low To Middle Income Countries written by Jere R. Behrman and has been published by Elements in Development Econom this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2022-12 with Business & Economics categories.
This Element reviews what we know about parental investments and children's human capital in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs). First, it presents definitions and a simple analytical framework; then discusses determinants of children's human capital in the form of cognitive skills, socioemotional skills and physical and mental health; then reviews estimates of impacts of these forms of human capital; next considers the implications of such estimates for inequality and poverty; and concludes with a summary suggesting some positive impacts of parental investments on children's human capital in LMICs and a discussion of gaps in the literature pertaining to both data and methodology. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.