Essays on Human Capital Development, Wage Dynamics and Religious Paticipation PDF Download

Author: Torsten Santavirta
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789526042817
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Xiaoyan Chen Youderian
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
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.

Author: Cody Taylor Orr
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 145

View

Book Description
This dissertation contains three chapters that study individuals' willingness to work, factors that influence their human capital development, and the interaction between their human capital investment decisions and labor supply.Chapter one examines how college students choose their credit hour enrollment, labor supply, and borrowing, paying particular attention to the role of wages, financial resources and beliefs. To formalize these relationships, I construct a dynamic structural model where students choose their credit hours, work hours, and borrowing to maximize lifetime utility. I collect data from two sources to estimate the model: (1) a unique survey of Michigan State undergraduates eliciting their employment history, family financial support, beliefs about the returns to studying and beliefs about earning a high GPA, and (2) administrative data from the University. Estimates of the model suggest that students' credit hour decision is inelastic with respect to changes in financial aid, tuition, beliefs, or wages. Students' labor supply and borrowing decisions are responsive to changes in wages, and for a subset of students, changes in beliefs. I also conduct two counterfactual simulations, increasing the minimum wage and making college tuition free, and evaluate how these policy changes affect student decisions and outcomes.The second chapter studies the relationship between the gender composition of a student's peers and two of their non-cognitive factors: sense of belonging and self-worth. Using data from Add Health and exploiting idiosyncratic variation in the share of female peers across grades within schools, I find positive but small effects of a higher share of female peers for male students. I do not find statistically significant effects for female students, but I can rule out large positive effects.The third chapter, jointly written with Todd Elder and Steven J. Haider, estimates how the wage elasticity of labor supply has changed for single and married men and women over the last two decades. The wage elasticity of labor supply is arguably one of the most fundamental parameters in economics, but despite the central role of this parameter, few studies have examined how it has evolved past the early 2000s. We find robust evidence that the labor supply elasticities for all four demographic groups have increased modestly. For women, this finding is a substantial departure from earlier evidence. We also contribute to the literature on the robustness of discrete choice labor supply models by estimating elasticities under a variety of assumptions and specifications. Our estimated trends are remarkably similar across specifications.

Author: Isabel Cairó
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description

Author: Dohyoung Kwon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Capital gains tax
Languages : en
Pages : 113

View

Book Description
I develop a growth model of human capital accumulation, and show analytically how those factors affect the dynamics of earnings inequality. The calibrated model accounts for 31 percent of the observed differences in earnings inequality between European countries and the US for 2003-07. Differences in returns to education investments and intergenerational earnings persistence are quantitatively important, suggesting the potential role of educational policy in ameliorating rising earnings inequality. Chapter 3, written jointly with Martin Gervais, analyzes the role of endogenous human capital accumulation in shaping optimal fiscal policy within a life-cycle growth model. We show that when investment in human capital is not verifiable---making the tax code incomplete---a non-zero capital income tax becomes optimal in order to alleviate the distortionary effects of the labor income tax on investment in human capital. This is true even if the government has access to a full set of age-dependent labor and capital income taxes. The main result is in sharp contrast to the finding in Jones et al. (1997) that all interest taxes are zero in infinitely-lived agent models with endogenous human capital formation.

Author: Malin Bergman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789172586215
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 100

View

Book Description

Author: Florian Hoffmann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780494778210
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Claudia Trentini
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economic development
Languages : en
Pages : 139

View

Book Description

Author: Alejandro Nakab
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

View

Book Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 jointly offer an explanation for why workers in richer countries have faster rates of wage growth over their lifetimes than workers in poorer countries. We propose that workers in richer economies receive more firm-provided training. In Chapter 1, we document two main facts: the share of workers who receive firm-provided training increases with development, and that this is a key determinant of worker human capital investments. In Chapter 2 we build a general equilibrium search model with firm-training investments and frictional labor markets. Our model suggests firm-training accounts for a large share of the cross-country wage growth differences. We find that self-employment is a key factor explaining the lack of training in the poorest economies, whereas labor market frictions are key to explaining training differences within firms as countries develop. Finally, our model predicts considerable inefficiencies in human capital investments and sizeable aggregate gains from training subsidies to firms, which may be particularly desirable in poor countries where economic environments disincentivize training. Chapter 3 studies how exporting shapes experience-wage profiles. Using detailed Brazilian employer-employee and customs data, we document that workers' experience-wage profiles are steeper in exporters than in non-exporters. Aside from self-selection of firms with higher returns to experience into exporting, we show that workers' experience-wage profiles are steeper when firms export to industrialized destinations. We propose that this result is likely driven by faster human capital accumulation of workers in firms that export to advanced economies. To support our preferred hypothesis, we use the World Bank Enterprise Surveys and document that exporters are more likely to train workers than non-exporters, especially when they adopt foreign technology.

Author: Ms.Era Dabla-Norris
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1513547437
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 39

View

Book Description
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.