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THREE ESSAYS CONSIDERING HUMAN CAPITAL COMPOSITION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

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Title: Three essays on human capital: Development and impact

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Three essays on human capital

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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.

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2014 Theses Doctoral

Three Essays on Human Capital

Son, Hye Lim

Human capital investment is of prime interest for many countries at varying stages of development. Knowing both the determinants and the impact of schooling is central for well- designed policy. This dissertation addresses both respects by examining the determinants of secondary school enrollment in Indonesia, and the impact of higher education in South Korea. In Chapter 1, I begin from the observation that many countries spend substantial resources inducing individuals to attend school. Despite this, high dropout rates are common, particularly when students transition between education levels. To explain this pattern, previous research has focused on supply side factors, such as decreased number of school slots or longer commute times. In contrast, this paper explores a demand side reason for high dropout rates between schooling levels: a nonlinear increase in wage returns from completing the final grade of an education level - a sheepskin effect. I investigate whether schooling decisions in Indonesia are consistent with perceived sheepskin effects. Using four types of income shocks that range from idiosyncratic to systemic (unemployment, crop loss, drought, and financial crises), I test if negative shocks affect enrollment differentially across different grade levels. As in the previous literature, negative shocks reduce children's enrollment probabilities on average. However, consistent with perceived sheepskin effects, this impact is strongly mitigated for students who enter the final grades of junior or senior high school. Moreover, even poor households exhibit this behavior indicating that even the poor are able to continue investments in education when they perceive returns to be sufficiently high. The remainder of the dissertation begins from the observation that in low income countries, most gains in education attainment have come from expansions at the primary or secondary level. In contrast, middle and higher income countries have seen rapid increases in higher education enrollments. The pace of growth varies considerably, with historically low attainment countries such as South Korea, Belgium and France experienced more than a 40% point increase in the percentage of population with some tertiary education. Despite the salience of these trends, there is limited credible empirical evidence on their impact due to the difficulty in finding a credible exogenous variation. To address this question, chapters 2 and 3 utilize an unusual policy change in South Korea; the 1980 education reform, which mandated an increase in the freshman enrollment quota by 30 percent nationwide. Chapter 2 (joint work with Wooram Park) estimates the impact of higher education on labor market outcomes and saving behavior of the household. We use the discrete change in the opportunity to obtain higher education across adjacent cohorts to implement a regression discontinuity design. We find that college education has a substantial positive effect on labor income, employment probability as well as on household savings. We also find that college education reduces the probability of job loss during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Chapter 3 (joint work with Jisun Baek and Wooram Park) estimates the causal effect of higher education on health related outcomes. Also using a regression discontinuity design, we confirm that the cohorts that are more likely to be affected by the policy have a higher fraction of individuals with college education. However, we do not find evidence of positive health returns to higher education. In particular, we find that the cohorts with higher proportion of college graduates are not less likely to experience disease or report poor health status. Moreover, we find that higher education has limited effects on health behaviors such as smoking and drinking.

Geographic Areas

• Korea (South)
• Economic development--Effect of education on
• Human capital
• Education, Higher--Aims and objectives
• Labor economics

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January 2020

• University of Oxford (United Kingdom)

Human capital is the term used to describe the skills, experience, attitudes, aptitudes of an individual. It encompasses a wide array of skills that are contribute to the macroeconomic performance of an economy and the successful functioning of an individual. It is important for productivity, per capita incomes and sustaining growth. Insights from other disciplines such as psychology, child development and education can inform economic models. These disciplines have a long history of research on human capital, albeit using different labels. Overall, this thesis incorporates both constructs and methods from other disciplines, to help examine important research questions through an economic framework. These chapters contribute to our understanding of the development of human capital and socio-economic position. Chapter 2 and 3 examine the role of specific inputs in the human capital process. Both of these chapters focus on the earliest years of a childs' life, recognising their importance as critical periods of development. Chapter 2 expands the existing literature of human capital production function estimation by including preschool as an important input for explaining cognitive and health skills at age 5 and 8. It compares these estimates for four lower-middle income countries; Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. Chapter 3 examines if the existing understanding of human capital production functions can be improved by including a measure of an infants' disposition - temperament - using a dataset from Ireland. In contrast to the other two chapters, Chapter 4 focuses on the full period of childhood and adolescence up to early adulthood. It proposes that existing measures of socio-economic status, such as education or income, may not be the most appropriate. It proposes a more composite measure that accurately captures the complex socio-economic positions of young people in today's economy. It examines the role of distinct types of negative shocks that occur at different points in the lifespan and how these impact the likelihood of being advantaged or disadvantaged in adulthood. It also links this measure of SES to parenting behaviours and human capital at 9 months, providing some insight into intergenerational transmission of human capital.

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