Three Essays in Labour Economics and the Economics of Education

Three Essays in Labour Economics and the Economics of Education
Author: Mohsen Javdani Haji
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Education
ISBN:
GET BOOK

This thesis consists of three empirical essays. The first chapter is focused on the economics of gender, and the other two chapters are focused on the economics of education. A common theme in all these three chapters is studying the outcomes of disadvantaged groups in society, with an eye to policy interventions that could improve these outcomes. The first chapter examines whether women face a glass ceiling in the labour market, which would imply that they are under-represented in high wage regions of the wage distribution. I also measure the extent to which the glass ceiling comes about because women are segregated into lower-paying firms (glass doors), or because they are segregated into lower-paying jobs within firms (within-firm glass ceilings). I find clear evidence that women experience a glass ceiling that is driven mainly by their disproportionate sorting across firm types rather than sorting across jobs within firms. I find no evidence that gender differences in sorting across firms can be accounted for by compensating differentials. However, my results are consistent with predictions of an efficiency wage model where high-paying firms discriminate against females. The second chapter estimates the effect of publicly-disseminated information about school achievement on school choice decisions. We find that students are more likely to leave their school when public information reveals poor school-level performance. Some parents' respond to information soon after it becomes available. Others, including non-English-speaking parents, alter their school choice decisions only in response to information that has been disseminated widely and discussed in the media. Parents in low-income neighbourhoods are most likely to alter their school choice decisions in response to new information. The third chapter measures the extent to which cross-sectional differences in schools' average achievement on standardized tests are due to transitory factors. Test-based measures of school performance are increasingly used to shape education policy, and recent evidence shows that they also affect families' school choice decisions. There are, however, concerns about the precision of these measures. My results suggest that sampling variation and one-time mean reverting shocks are a significant source of cross-sectional variation in schools' mean test scores.

Three Essays in Empirical Labour Economics

Three Essays in Empirical Labour Economics
Author: Miroslav Kučera
Publisher:
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2011
Genre:
ISBN:
GET BOOK

The following thesis consists of three essays, each one being a study of issues of accumulation of and returns to human capital using real-world individual-level data. The first study examines what underlies differences in educational attainment between the children of immigrants to Canada and the children of the Canadian-born parents. It concludes that the children of immigrants have done better in terms of schooling, and that individual and family variables as well as unobserved characteristics such as ability cannot fully account for this difference. The second study utilizes unique Canadian surveys to investigate the effects of overeducation on wages of post-secondary graduates. It confirms that jobs requiring a post-secondary degree pay substantially higher wages than jobs that do not require education beyond high-school, and also finds a large variation both in returns to required education as well as in overeducation premia across genders, degrees and fields of study. The last essay proposes and estimates a structural dynamic model of optimal schooling and wages to explain differences between American whites and ethnic minorities of Afro-Americans and Hispanics. The study finds, among other things, that differences in educational attainment between the three ethnics can largely be explained by differences in individual endowments, while behavioural differences seem to be more important in explaining wage differences.

Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education

Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education
Author: Jaime Lynn Thomas
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN: 9781124017358
GET BOOK

This dissertation addresses three broad issues within the fields of labor economics and the economics of education: the accumulation of human and information capital, school quality, and policy-relevant analysis of classroom organization. At the secondary-school level, I document the importance of information capital, or accurate information about postsecondary and labor-market alternatives. At the elementary-school level, I analyze the effect of combination classes and discuss different ways to measure school quality and the importance of these measures to parents of school-aged children. In the first chapter, "Information Capital and Early-Career Wages," I define one measure of information capital acquired by students during high school and develop a framework through which I analyze the effect of this measure on educational attainment, job tenure, and wages. I also investigate the school-level characteristics that influence an individual's stock of information capital. In the second chapter, "Combination Classes and Educational Achievement," I measure the effect of membership in a combination class in first grade on student achievement. I address the selection that occurs when implementing a combination class and find that first graders in 1-2 combinations can be expected to outperform single-grade students on math tests by one-seventh of a standard deviation. In addition, I find no evidence that first graders in schools offering combination classes perform worse than first graders in schools that do not offer such classes. Therefore, I conclude that combination classes may be a Pareto-improving option for school administrators. In the last chapter, "Neighborhood Demographics, School Effectiveness, and Residential Location Choice," I investigate how neighborhood demographics and school effectiveness influence the residential location decisions of parents of different income levels. I find that low-income parents in the San Francisco Bay Area respond more strongly to school effectiveness than to neighborhood demographics, but that the reverse is true for high-income parents.

Three Essays on Health and Labour Economics

Three Essays on Health and Labour Economics
Author: Mina Alizadehsadrdaneshpour
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:
GET BOOK

The dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay examines a dynamic effect of diabetes on employment. The second essay uses a broader measure of health and investigates its interaction with employment. The third essay explores a dynamic effect of education on hourly wage. The first essay investigates the diabetes effect on employment in Canada. The data is taken from the National Population Health Survey and men and women between age 25 and 64 are analysed separately. In contrast to the previous static studies on the effect of diabetes on labour market outcomes, this essay uses a dynamic model to identify the impacts of diabetes on employment in Canada. Results show that diabetes has a positive but insignificant effect on employment for men. The effect of diabetes on employment for women is negative and significant. The results confirm the signs and significance of diabetes coefficients estimated by static studies; however, the numbers are much smaller. Particularly, precise estimates of diabetes effect on employment would be helpful for policy makers to know the economic burden and design the appropriate policies. The second essay uses a broader measure of health to explore the relationship with employment. In contrast to previous static Canadian studies on the impact of health on labour market outcomes, this essay estimates a dynamic model using simultaneous equations to obtain more precise model specification for the interaction of health and labour market outcome. Results show that there is a high state dependency in employment and health for both men and women. Moreover, there is a highly significant and positive effect of health on employment for both men and women. As a result, health policies that have positive and direct effects on health can have positive and indirect effects on employment. The third essay investigates the return to education using a dynamic approach in Canada. This essay uses the longitudinal Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics and estimates the dynamic model for men and women between the age of 25 and 64 separately. In contrast to the previous static Canadian studies on the return to education, this essay estimates a dynamic Mincer model through a system GMM method to obtain more precise model specification for the return to education. Results demonstrate that the hourly wage is highly persistent for both men and women between age 25 and 64. The results also show that the return to schooling is increasing at the beginning of the working life for both men and women compared to a constant return to schooling by static Mincer function. Identifying the return to education can be useful for policy makers to decide on education expenditures and finance schooling programs.