This thesis is a critical examination of the „new vision‟ strategies that the Libyan government undertook in order to promote the deeper integration of the Libyan economy into the global economy of the Modern Orientalist World-System (MOWS). This process has been taking place since the lifting of the trade embargo on Libya by President Bush in April 2004. A crucial part of this new vision strategy was the promotion of human capital development amongst the Libyan population and with a particular emphasis upon English Language Acquisition (ELA). The argument, derived from neo-liberal thought, is that for Libya to transform itself it must embrace neo-liberal ideas that will see the government adopt the role of the enabling state, preparing Libyans for employment in a newly established private sector. ELA, the learning of what is called „global English‟, is the central part of the new vision human capital development goals. The assumption here is that by developing the English language skills of Libyans it will enhance their job prospects with foreign firms arriving in Libya. This strategy is being pursued in the aftermath of a state directed ban on the learning of English that was first decreed in 1986 and the consequences of which placed a significant obstacle in the way of the immediate employment prospects of a generation of young Libyan graduates. If the state developmental strategy now embraced by the Libyan government is to be successful then it must promote the rapid improvement in the second language skills of its young people (specifically „global English‟) if they are to take advantage of the opportunities offered by a newly opened economy. However, this strategy is fraught with dangers for the government as liberalising the Libyan economy weakens the control of the state over society. Thus the thesis addresses a number of key questions regarding the relationship between human capital (language skills) and the sociology of development; of human capital as a concept in the „modern Orientalist world-system‟; and the changing nature of state-society relations in Libya as the government attempts to integrate it more firmly into the MOWS. To what extent can the Libyan government transform its economy and society in a way that enhances its position in the MOWS rather than simply rendering it more dependent upon the power of the core?

In the first chapter, I examine the effect of social learning on social norms of cooperation. To this end I develop an 'anti-social learning' game. This is a dynamic social dilemma in which all agents know how to cooperate but a proportion are informed and know of privately profitable but socially costly, or uncooperative, actions. In equilibrium agents are able to infer, or learn, the payoffs to the actions of prior agents. Agents can then learn through observation that some socially costly action is privately profitable. This implies that an informed agent behaving uncooperatively can induce others to behave uncooperatively when, in the absence of observational learning, they would have otherwise been cooperative. However, this influence also gives informed agents an incentive to cooperate - not cooperating may induce others to not cooperate. I use this model to give conditions under which social learning propagates cooperative behaviour and conditions under which social learning propagates uncooperative behaviour. In the second chapter, I present a co-authored model of a self-fulfilling price cycle in an asset market. In this model the dividend stream of the economy's asset stock is constant yet price oscillates deterministically even though the underlying environment is stationary. This creates a model in which there is rational excess volatility - 'excess' in the sense that it does not reflect changes in dividend streams and 'rational' in that all agents are acting on their best information. The mechanism that we uncover is driven by endogenous variation in the investment horizons of the different market participants, informed and uninformed. On even days, the price is high; on odd days it is low. On even days, informed traders are willing to jettison their good assets, knowing that they can buy them back the next day, when the price is low. The anticipated drop in price more than offsets any potential loss in dividend. Because of these asset sales, the informed build up their cash holdings. Understanding that the market is flooded with good assets, the uninformed traders are willing to pay a high price. But their investment horizon is longer than that of the informed traders: their intention is to hold the assets they purchase, not to resell. On odd days, the price is low because the uninformed recognise that the informed are using their cash holdings to cherry-pick good assets from the market. Now the uninformed, like the informed, are investing short-term. Rather than buy-and-hold as they do with assets purchased on even days, on odd days the uninformed are buying to sell. Notice that, at the root of the model, there lies a credit constraint. Although the informed are flush with cash on odd days, they are not deep pockets. On each cherry that they pick out of the market, they earn a high return: buying cheap, selling dear. However they don't have enough cash to strip the market of cherries and thereby bid the price up. The final chapter is on identifying the role of privilege in determining inter- generational mobility. The intergenerational elasticity of income is the standard measurement economists use for intergenerational mobility. It is not clear how we should interpret intergenerational elasticities. Particularly, high intergenerational elasticities could either reflect inequality of opportunity or the importance of genetically heritable characteristics in determining genes. Behavioural geneticists have long been using a twin based variance decomposition method, the ACE model, to estimate the genetic heritability of various characteristics. It is not clear, however, what this approach implies for intergenerational mobility of equality of opportunity. I develop a novel method that extends the methodology used in behavioural genetics to identifying how much of the intergenerational elasticity of income is determined by the presence (absence) of environmental privileges associated with being children of high (low) earners. Using this approach we can examine the counterfactuals of giving a poorer child the environment of a richer child; equalising the privileges associated with family income; and equalising the family environmental factors not associated with parental income. Furthermore, this method allows us to identify how good parental income is as a measure of family environment. The model I develop nests the behavioural genetics model allowing us to relax some of the identifying assumptions used in the standard ACE model. Finally, I apply this method to data on the income elasticities between American males of different types of relation: fraternal twins, identical twins and father-son relationships. The results of this application suggest that a 1 percent increase in the privilege associated with parental income increases child income by about 1 tenth of a percent. Equalising, to the mean, the environmental privileges across the population results in about a 30 percent drop in the intergenerational elasticity of income and a 5 percent drop in the variance of income across the population. These results must be treated tentatively as the twin data comes from a separate survey to the data on intergenerational elasticities.

This essay investigates the potential educational mismatch of immigrants compared to natives concerning the Swedish labor market. The data is collected from the European Social Survey between 2002-2014. Our results show that immigrants tend to be more overeducated than natives. Our results also indicate that more recent cohorts are more likely to be overeducated compared to cohorts that have lived for a longer time period in Sweden. Disparities in language and country specific skills but also if a person belong to an ethnic minority are reasons for why these mismatches occur.

The role of improved schooling has become controversial because expansion of school investment has not guaranteed improved educational outcomes. This thesis pays attention to why government investments in education have not produced the desire effects of increased educational attainment and higher enrolment rate. We show that the results depend on the methodology. We also provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of the economic benefits of effective school policy: we find that, countries that improved their cognitive skill, through different facets of school choice, autonomy and accountability over time experienced relative increases in their growth paths. We show that quality of education significantly matter for technological progress and that it is a source of divergence in OECD economies. We also analyse in a dispassionate way, voters influence on public policy especially, that pertaining to public school resource allocation, in one country India we take India because the country’s overall success story hides striking inter- and intra-state variation in literacy rates. There is suggestion that larger districts with more elected legislators and also districts with higher voter turnout benefit from greater allocation of public school resources, which in turn are expected to boost schooling outcomes. In other words, these results highlight the power of democracy in ensuring a better allocation of public school resources in our sample.

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

This dissertation is a collection of three studies in the field of higher education. Chapter 2 evaluates the higher education tax benefits which began in 1998. This study analyzes whether the tax treatment has caused changes in the enrollment behavior among those eligible. It explores the effects on full time and part time enrollment and the effects of the rule changes in 2002 and 2003, as well as examines how marginal changes in the tax benefits affect the probability of enrollment. There is an increase in overall enrollment which can be attributed to the tax benefits, although the expansion of the program had very small effects and there were very few changes in full time student status due to the program. The second essay examines students who take a break in their schooling but return to school before beginning their careers. This can cause two separate effects; as time passes, they are growing older, maturing and learning about themselves. However, they also risk depreciation of the human capital they have acquired. This study examines these competing effects on outcomes for individuals who took time off between completing their undergraduate studies and attending law school. Results indicate that those who take time off earn higher grades on average, but that the effect on earnings is dependent on what the individual did during the schooling gap. There does appear to be a small but persistent penalty for those who have a gap in schooling. In the third essay, a model is where altruistic parents care about the bundle of goods their children consume is presented and analyzed. The model results in some empirically testable predictions, which are tested using the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS). In particular, students whose parents pay the entire cost of schooling should have a lower return to the amount invested than those who pay some of the cost themselves. However, the data show very little difference in the return to the amount invested between the two groups. / text

No description available.

Žmogiškasis kapitalas yra įgūdžių, žinių, gabumų, kuriais disponuoja žmogus, visuma. Įgūdžių, žinių ir gabumų atsargos, kurios yra tikslingai žmogaus naudojamos vienoje ar kitoje vi¬suomeninės reprodukcijos sferoje, skatina darbo našumo bei ga¬mybos augimą. Tikslingas šių atsargų panaudojimas lemia dirbančiųjų darbo užmokesčio (pajamų) augimą. Pajamų augimas stimuliuoja investicijas į sveikatą ir išsilavinimą. Žmogiškasis kapitalas neapčiuopiamas ir sunkiai išmatuojamas. / Human capital is the whole of skills, abilities, knowledge and talents that human beings have at their disposal. Resources of those skills, abilities, knowledge and talents used with a purpose in one or another sphere of public reproduction promotes the growth of trade and labour productivity. Expedient use of these resources determines an increase in salaries and wages. Increased incomes stimulate investments in healthcare and education. However, human capital is intangible and difficult to measure.

Human capital development is a prerequisite for a knowledge-based economy and for sustaining economic growth. Capability and capacity in the management of new knowledge and technology is determined by the quality of human capital. With globalization, Malaysia faces ever increasing competition in trade and investment. Therefore, the workforce will have to be equipped with a strong base in education and training. Efforts should, therefore, be made to ensure that the education and training system has the capacity to enhance the quality of intellectual capital as well as expanding the human resource base. In mainstream human capital theory, the basic principle is to measure the quality of human capital through some measure of educational achievement, such as years of schooling. It is generally assumed that more years in schooling improves the quality of human capital. Thus it is assumed by policy makers that an increased level of education will impact directly on labour market productivity. Concomitantly, policy makers argue that increasing the level of schooling will give an impact on wages. One of the obvious methods to assess the impact of investment in education is to calculate the rate of return to education. The overall impact of education on wages for society is described as the social rate of return and for the individual as the private rate of return. The major concern of this thesis is to assess the impact of investment in education on individuals. Thus I use a household income survey to estimate the private rate of return to Malaysian education from 1995 to 2004. A recent important strand in human capital literature is concerned with the role of education in emerging economies. This study is not as well established as in developed economies. Malaysia, as one of the High-Performing Asian Economies (HPAEs) over the past two decades, has experienced a steady growth with continuous improvement in the education system. Data and infonnation collected on Malaysian education and earnings serve to provide an important indicator of the benefits from investment in education for this important economy. Previous data and analysis on returns were hampered by relatively few observations and other data inadequacies. This thesis offers estimates based on a consistent set of household income surveys from 1995 to 2004. Thus, the estimation is more consistent compared with previous fmdings. Moreover, this thesis estimates the returns using both a standard and an alternative approach, i.e. Instrumental Variable (IV) that has never been applied to the Malaysian data. This is important because the latter estimation not only reduces the potential bias but also shows the impact of school reform on the returns. Additionally, returns to education using IV estimation are rarely compared between emerging economies and the developed countries. Such an analysis provides an indication of how important the human capital investment and educational reform have been at the current stage of development. Our results also provide new methodology for developing economies in estimating returns to education. The standard approach to estimating returns is based on homogenous returns to education - everyone gets the same return to the same qualification. Our results from this homogenous returns model shows the private rate of return to education in Malaysia is about the world average. However, endogeneity in schooling, omitted variables and other factors, such as ability will produce potential bias in estimation. The heterogeneous returns model allows for varying returns across individuals. This thesis clarifies differences in returns to different individuals. The exogenous impact in the Malaysian education system. i.e. the schooling reform is used as an instrument. The results reveal that the returns from IV estimation were higher than the standard approach. This result adds to literature by showing that OLS may underestimate the returns to education in the context of a developing country. The literature on rates of return paints a complex picture of the theoretical frameworks, methods and even results of such studies. Many of the benefits of education are not easily measured and are often not even recognized by rate of return studies. It is important for rate of return studies to acknowledge the methodological limitations and explain that rates of return are only an imperfect proxy to education benefits, which should ideally be used in conjunction with other measures of educational results.