acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation consists of three essays which examine household decisions regarding education in a developing country. The theme underlying each of the three essays is the importance of school quality. The first essay uses a data set from Honduras to study the determinants of school attainment. The contribution of this essay lies in (a) the use of data regarding various facets of school quality to supplement household data and (b) the use of a proportional hazards regression model which deals with the problem of censoring without the use of restrictive parametric assumptions. The essay also uses recently developed tests for model specification. The key finding is that school quality does have a positive influence on school attainment in rural areas in Honduras, but the effect is weaker in urban areas. The findings suggest that policy emphasis on increasing resources per child may be misguided, and that improving teacher training, providing school lunches, and re-examining policies regarding school size may be more effective options The second essay uses another data set from Honduras to study the determinants of the age at enrollment in primary school. The essay uses a proportional hazards regression model, with a symmetric treatment of the problem of under-age as well as over-age enrollment. The estimation method tests for the proportionality hypothesis and provides a correction where it is needed. The key finding is that a number of individual, household and school quality variables influence the age at enrollment. The essay supports earlier research about the importance of family background variables in determining educational outcomes, and provides supplemental evidence regarding the impact of these variables in determining the age at enrollment. The essay concludes that the age at enrollment can be influenced by educational policy, and suggests the need for better informed policy regarding the provision of child care for young children The third essay uses a data set from Indonesia to study the willingness of households to pay for school quality. The essay is the first attempt to analyze the relationship between school quality and household educational expenditures. The contribution of this essay lies in (a) the use of data regarding expenditure on schooling for individual students matched with data about school quality from the specific schools attended by the students, (b) the use of a specification which handles the problem created because households may select schools on the basis of school quality and (c) the presentation of quantile regression results which enable an examination of the nature of the willingness to pay for school quality along the distribution of educational expenditures. The key finding is that households are very responsive to school quality in spending more for higher test scores, and that this responsiveness is greater at the lower end of the spending distribution. The findings provide evidence to support policy initiatives which transfer greater decision making authority to parents of children enrolled in primary school / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

Essay 1. We propose an international policy structure that provides incentives for participants of a global market for pollution permits to behave efficiently. Market participants are affected by production or consumption externalities. The efficiency properties of the international market depend upon the type of externality, production or consumption, and on the timing of policymaking. If centralized income redistribution takes place before decentralized environmental policymaking and emissions affect production only, market behavior is unaffected by income transfers. However, it depends on income transfers if emissions affect consumption directly. Market behavior is efficient despite the externality type when income redistribution occurs after environmental policymaking Essay 2. An international mechanism intended to curb global carbon dioxide emissions, mirrored after the Kyoto Protocol, is composed of decentralized regulatory and enforcement authorities and two supranational agencies that are in charge of promoting international transfers and imposing punitive fines. Regulatory enforcement is costly and imperfect. Polluting firms located in various sovereign nations may not comply with emission regulations. We show that there is a combination of decentralized emission quotas and centralized income transfers and fines, with decentralized leadership in policy making, which induces regional regulatory authorities to internalize all environmental and pecuniary externalities Essay 3. We examine the pollution haven hypothesis for dirty goods generating simultaneously global and local pollutants. Under domestic emissions trading for both pollutants, richer countries have higher prices of both types of emission permits. Trade will cause the polluting industry to shift the poorer countries. This pollution haven effect may be weakened if the emission permits for the global pollutant are traded internationally. Redistributive income transfers across countries may further reduce and even reverse the pollution haven effect. Emission cutbacks of the global pollutant by other countries will lead the home country to increase the emission of the global pollutant while reducing the emission of the local pollutant / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation consists of two essays in the field of economic theory of clubs The first essay is concerned with the problem of deriving Pareto-optimal conditions for an economy in which people affected by the quality of services themselves determine the number of people to be affected in order to maximize the utility received from the services. Three cases are investigated: (1) the efficiency conditions for the club where the club is constrained to choose the price scheme in the form of fixed-charge; (2) the conditions under which a system of segregated clubs is optimal; and (3) the efficiency conditions for the club size where the optimal size of it is large relative to total population The second essay examines some controversies which appeared in the club literature: (1) the conflict between objectives of club problem; (2) the question of whether a single unified framework can apply to both replicable and nonreplicable clubs; (3) the question of whether members should be distinguished from non-members; and (4) the issue concerning the self-financing Above all, it is argued that the optimal number of clubs, the composition of population and the objective of clubs, as well as the form of both the utility function and the constraint in the model, are crucial in determining the true Pareto-efficiency conditions / acase@tulane.edu

The objective of this study is to empirically examine union-nonunion wage differential in the context of human capital theory As a starting point, previous theoretical and empirical studies explaining the union-nonunion wage differential are surveyed. Most recent empirical studies surveyed since Lewis' work (1963) have shown that there exists a quite large wage differential of about 15 to 30 percent. In examining the underlying causes which bring it about, most conventional studies stand on the view of the wage differential as monopoly rent. This approach, however, does not fit in explaining several aspects of real phenomena. Recently, several theories to interpret the wage differential from different points of view have been developed This study attempts to analyze the role of unions in the creation of wage differentials via their effect on investment in specific human capital. From the theoretical argument one testable hypothesis follows: the worker-financed stock of specific human capital would be increased under unionism, and thereby some portion of the allegedly higher wage of union workers would be explained by the return to increased union worker-owned specific human capital. The other implication of the thoretical analysis for an empirical testing is that the stock of specific human capital in a particular industry might be proxied by the rehire rate of the industry The basic wage equation to be employed for the empirical test is the expanded human capital model in which the specific human capital variable and other control variables are included. The empirical content of the hypothesis is tested by the introduction of the interaction term between union dummy variable and rehire rate. The primary data for the study were taken from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience (NLS) for young men. Cross-sectional results show that one-third or one-quarter of union wage premium might be credited to the specific human capital possessed by union members. Additionally, the empirical estimates from the wage change equation, which are utilized to take fuller advantage of the longitudinal nature of the data, provide some indirect evidence for the support of the hypothesis / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu