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.

In my dissertation, I study the short- and long-term effects of early-life circumstances on individual’s human capital and explore some potential mechanisms driving these impacts. The focus on early-life conditions is motivated by the growing body of research showing the important role that early-life conditions play in shaping adult outcomes (Barker, 1992; Cunha and Heckman, 2007; Almond and Currie, 2011a). Evidence from natural experiments has found that adverse conditions during the in-utero and childhood periods (e.g., disease outbreaks, famines and malnutrition, weather shocks, ionizing radiation, earthquakes, air pollution) can have negative effects on health, education, and labor market outcomes (e.g., Almond, 2006; Almond et al., 2010; Van den Berg et al., 2006; Currie and Rossin-Slater, 2013; Almond, Edlund and Palme, 2009; Sanders, 2012). I focus on a particular shock which is violence – i.e., wars, armed conflicts, urban crime – that represents one of the most pervasive shocks for individual’s well-being and which mostly affects developing countries (Currie and Vogl, 2013). The World Bank (2013) estimates that more than 1.5 billion people in the developing world live in chronically violent contexts. Violence creates poverty, accentuates inequality, destroys infrastructure, displaces populations, disrupts schooling, and affects health. While recent research has shown the large damage on education and health outcomes from early life violence (Camacho, 2008; Akresh, Lucchetti and Thirumurthy, 2012; Minoiu and Shemyakina, 2012; Brown, 2014; Valente, 2011; Leon, 2012), several key questions remain unaddressed. First, how does violence affect other domains of human capital beside education and health (i.e., cognitive and non-cognitive skills)? Identifying such effects is important both because measures of human capital (physical, cognitive, and non-cognitive indicators) can explain a large percentage of the variation in later-life educational attainment and wages (Currie and Thomas, 1999; McLeod and Kaiser, 2004; Heckman, Stixrud and Urzua, 2006) and to understand mechanisms behind previous effects found for educational attainment and health. Second, to what extent do the effects of violence at different developmental stages (i.e., in-utero vs. in childhood) differ? Do the effects of violence persist in the long-term? Do impacts on the particular type of skill considered (e.g., health vs. cognitive outcomes) differ by the developmental timing of the shock? Third, given the size and persistence of the effects of violence, it is also natural to ask whether and how parental investments also may respond to these shocks. Family investments are important determinants of human capital (Cunha and Heckman, 2007; Aizer and Cunha, 2014) and parental responses can play a key role in compensating or reinforcing the effects of a shock (Almond and Currie, 2011a). At present, well-identified empirical evidence on this question is scarce. Finally, and perhaps most importantly from a policy perspective, is there potential for remediation?: Can social programs that are available to the community help mitigate the negative effects of violence on vulnerable children? My identification strategy exploits the temporal and geographic variation in local violence conditions. In particular, I exploit the occurrence of specific violent events such as homicides and massacres at the monthly-year-municipality levels in Colombia and I use large and varied micro data sets to provide causal estimates. I believe that the results from my research can shed some light on the consequences of early-life exposure to violence on human capital, some of the potential mechanisms through which these impacts operate, and provide some insights on possible public policy implications. In the first essay, “Early-life Conditions, Parental Investments, and Child Development: Evidence from a Violent Country,” I investigate how exposure to community violence during the in utero and childhood periods affect a child’s physical, cognitive, and socio-emotional development; how violence affects parental investments such as parenting quality; and whether social policies available to the community help mitigate the negative effects of violence on children. I focus on children, which is a particularly vulnerable subpopulation: Children in developing countries are subject to more and more frequent adverse conditions, start disadvantaged, and receive lower levels of investments compared with children from wealthier environments (Currie and Vogl, 2013). I show that children exposed to massacres in their municipality during their in utero and in childhood periods achieve lower health, cognitive, and socio-emotional outcomes and that the timing in which these exposures occur matters. In particular, exposure to massacres in late pregnancy and in childhood reduce child’s health and exposures in early pregnancy and in childhood lower cognitive test scores. Adequate interaction, an indicator of child socio-emotional development, falls among children who were exposed to violence after birth. Moreover, results show that violence is negatively associated with birth weight, an important input in the production of human capital. This impact is driven by exposure during the first trimester of pregnancy. Furthermore, I find that changes in violence during a child’s childhood are associated with lower quantity and quality of parenting. In particular, I find that an increase in violence is associated with a decline in the time mothers spend with their child, a decrease in the frequency of routines that stimulate a child’s cognitive development, and an increase in psychological aggression, which could reflect a mother’s stress. Overall, these results show little evidence that parents compensate the negative effect of violence on child outcomes. This is the first study to investigate the effects of early-life violence on child cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes in a developing country and among the first to investigate the role of parenting as a potential channel of transmission. Lastly, I find weak evidence that social programs have remediating impacts on children affected by violence. In the second essay, titled “The Hidden Costs and Lasting Legacies of Violence on Education: Evidence from Colombia”, I provide evidence of the long term impacts of exposure to crime and violence, from the prenatal period to age five, on an individual’s educational attainment. My identification strategy exploits the temporal and geographic variation in cohorts of individuals exposed to homicide rates during in their early lives during the 1980s and 1990s in Colombia, a period with an unprecendented rise in criminal activity. I use Census data that provide detailed information on the date and municipality of birth, and long-run outcomes (i.e., education) for each individual, which enables me to identify the violence to which a person was exposed in utero and in early childhood (as well as in later stages). I find that high violence in early-life is associated with lower educational attainment in the future (years of schooling and lower school enrollment). The findings also show that in utero and early-childhood exposure to violence has a more pronounced impact on human capital attainment than exposure at other stages of the life course (i.e., school age, adolescence). The timing and the magnitude of the effects are important considering the huge inequality in education in developing countries.

Social assistance programmes (SAPs), understood as non-contributory transfers aimed at ad-dressing poverty, have spread in developing countries since the late 1990s. National govern-ments in Latin America have sought to extend the coverage of SAPs through human devel-opment conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTs). CCTs share several implementation features. First, they employ targeting and selection methods based on means, and proxy means, tests. Research on targeting and selection methods has evolved hand in hand with the adoption of CCTs in Latin America, Africa and South East Asia. Second, CCTs involve the provision of cash transfers directly to households, but with conditions attached to human development objectives. Transfers are given to households in poverty contingent on investment in the human capital formation of their children. A third feature relates to the presence of programme exit conditions. To date, scarce research is available on the design and outcomes associated with exit condi-tions from CCTs. This thesis thus contributes to the literature in the implementation of SAPs by providing a critical examination of exit conditions in SAPs with specific emphasis on CCTs. The thesis provides a systematic theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of exit conditions in the implementation of CCTs. The thesis develops and tests two basic principles underlying the role of exit conditions. First, the exhausted-effectiveness principle suggests that the effectiveness of a CCT varies over time. The research reported in this examines the effectiveness of programme over time with the aim of identifying potential thresholds after which a given SAP's effectiveness de-clines. A two-period child human capital investment model is developed to study analytically the conditions in which programme effectiveness varies over time. This is examined empirically in order to demonstrate the existence of the time-varying effectiveness associated with the implementation of the Colombia's CCT, Familias en Accion. A continuous treatment effect model is estimated following Hirano and Imbens (2004), in which the length of exposure allows for the graphical analysis of dose-response functions. The results indicate that the design of SAPs must take account of time-varying effectiveness. Second, a principle of the non-recurrence of poverty states that beneficiaries should be able to exit an effective programme when two conditions apply: (i) they are not in poverty; and (ii) they face a low probability of becoming poor in the near future. This principle acknowledges the implications of poverty dynamics for the implementation of SAPs with a particular focus on exit conditions. This thesis characterises the poverty dynamics of beneficiary households through the estimation of a Markovian poverty transition model using data from the Familias en Accion programme. The findings from the empirical work suggest that programme participation should not end when households are non-poor, but attention must be paid to probabilities of recurrence, in order to secure non-recurrence in the near future. Taken together, the exhausted-effectiveness principle interacts with the non-recurrence of poverty principle in the sense that the first sets a maximum length of exposure to the intervention, while the second determines minimum levels of exposure.

Human capital formation is a fundamental requirement for countries' long term economic development and societal prosperity. This process can be enhanced or disrupted by internal factors such as migration and remittances, or external ones like wars. This thesis is interested in investigating both phenomena. The following questions are addressed: what is the impact of migrant remittances on human capital formation, do these private inflows induce any changes in the behavior of remittance-receivers towards education expenditure, and finally what is the short term micro-economic effect of armed conflicts on education in post war countries. In investigating these issues, focus is made on two perspectives: first youth, an active group in the society whose age matches up higher education levels and labor force entry simultaneously; second gender differentials both in terms of impact and behavior. The research explores new surveys from the Middle East, datasets that have not been analyzed previously from an education angle and that are not generally available to researchers. These datasets come from Jordan and Lebanon, two middle income non-oil producer countries. The thesis is composed of three independent essays. The first examines the impact of migrant remittances on human capital accumulation among youth in Jordan and highlights the various ways in which remittances influence education outcomes. The analysis takes a gender dimension and examines whether the effects and magnitude of such impact is different between males and females. The second essay considers remittances receipt, from both domestic and international sources, and examines their impact on Jordanian households' education spending patterns. Following the literature on intra-household bargaining and gender expenditure preferences, the analysis examines whether such impact is potentially different between male and female headed households. The third essay tackles the impact of the 2006 war on education attendance of youth in Lebanon. The chapter captures households' schooling responses in the aftermath of the war. By looking at the implications of a diversified array of damages sustained; reflecting physical, human, income and employment losses; the chapter examines possible linkages between the nature of the damage incurred and the manner and magnitude in which such damage affects education.

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the effects of public policies on rural-urban migration and human capital expansion, and to examine the role of human capital (among other domestic and external factors) in the long-term economic growth of developing countries. Human capital expansion and labor migration from villages to cities are two aspects of the structure of labor markets in poor countries that are continuously influenced by public policies— policies that are often either ineffective or have unintended adverse consequences. For example, while much of human resource policy in developing countries is directed toward increasing the supply of educated labor, inter sectoral in-country migration and unemployment have become more pronounced, requiring new thinking on policy responses. This dissertation analyzes the outcomes of such policies and offers insights into how they might be improved. Chapter 2 extends a two-sector, general-equilibrium model of rural-urban migration to include government spending. Provision of public goods acts as a productivity-enhancing input in private production that results in external economies of scale. This approach is generalized by introducing an unbalanced allocation of public expenditure in rural and urban sectors due to political economy considerations, differential sector output elasticities with respect to government input, and distortionary taxation. The chapter studies the effects of an increase in public spending and taxation on sectoral outputs, factor prices, urban unemployment, and welfare. Of particular concern here is to study the effect of an unbalanced allocation of government spending between rural and urban areas. Chapter 3 studies the effects of selected education policies on the size of the educated labor pool and on economic welfare using the “job ladder” model of education, which is relevant to liberal arts education in developing countries. The policies considered are (1) increasing the teacher student ratio, (2) raising the relative wage of teachers, and (3) increasing the direct subsidy per student. In addition, the chapter analyzes the impact of wage rigidities in the skilled or modern sector on the size of the educated labor force. The analysis consists of five major sections. First, it reformulates the Bhagwati-Srinivasan job ladder model to make it amenable to analyzing the comparative static results of the effects of selected policies. Second, since higher education is mostly publicly financed, the analysis extends the job ladder model to incorporate public financing of the education sector. It then examines that model along with the effects of changes in policy parameters. Third, the analysis develops another extension of the job ladder model to include private tuition practices by teachers that are prevalent in many developing countries. Fourth, to analyze the impact of wage rigidities in a less restrictive framework where individuals can choose education based on ability and cost, the chapter develops an overlapping generations model of education with job ladder assumptions of wage rigidities in the skilled or modern sector. The chapter examines the flexible market and fixed market (with wage rigidities) equilibrium scenarios, and compares the impact on the threshold level of abilities and the size of the educated labor force. Finally, using specific functional forms of human capital production, cost, and ability density functions, the chapter analyzes the equilibrium outcomes. The analysis shows that in an economy with wage rigidities in the skilled sectors (modern and education sectors), the result of quality-enhancing policies under the simple job ladder model is an increase in the total size of the educated labor force. However, under an extended version of the job ladder model, the result depends on the relative size of the effects of an increase in the cost of education and the effects of an increase in the expected wage. The overlapping generations/job ladder model formulation used in the chapter finds that an increase in the present value of the expected wage and/or an increase in the marginal product of education will increase the demand for education. The minimum threshold level of ability falls, and more people are encouraged to acquire educational skills. Chapter 4 estimates the effects of openness, trade orientation, human capital, and other factors on total factor productivity (TFP) and output for a pooled cross section, time-series sample of countries from Africa and Asia, as well as for the two regions separately. The models are estimated for the level and growth of both TFP and output by using panel fixed effects. The generalized method of moments is also applied to address endogeneity issues. Several variables related to political, financial, and economic risks are used as instruments, together with the lagged values of the dependent and endogenous explanatory variables. The data for this study span 40 years (1972–2011) and are grouped into five-year averages. Several sources were used to obtain the most updated data, including the newly released Penn World Table (Version 8.0). The chapter finds that inducing a greater outward orientation generally boosts TFP, per capita output, and growth. Greater accumulation of human capital has a consistently positive effect on output and TFP growth in both Africa and Asia. Its positive influence comes rather independently of trade variables than interactive terms with openness. Furthermore, inflation does not negatively affect growth, although inflation variability is found to adversely affect TFP and output in Africa. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation by providing conclusions, a summary of major results, and possible directions for future research.

Nous proposons, à l’aide d’une approche pluridisciplinaire, de mieux rendre compte des compétences entrepreneuriales d’un dirigeant de PME, de jeter les bases d’un modèle d’évaluation de la capacité à entreprendre à partir de l’analyse des cycles d’exploitation. Ce modèle sera construit sur les bases d’une enquête exploratoire, puis testé au sein d’une PME de négoce afin d’en vérifier la pertinence et d’en améliorer l’applicabilité.Une estimation pertinente de la capacité à entreprendre pourrait rendre possible une meilleure évaluation de la valeur ajoutée des dirigeants de PME et une esquisse plus précise de la stratégie de soutien aux actions entrepreneuriales. Evaluer la capacité à entreprendre est tout autant un défi pour la communauté financière et comptable que l’est l’évaluation du capital humain. La présente propose une nouvelle approche pour mieux aborder la "vraie" valeur d’une entreprise, avec l’espoir que notre modèle sera utile aux parties prenantes de l’entrepreneuriat. / We suggest, by means of a multidisciplinary approach, reporting better entrepreneurial skills of a leader of SME, to lay the foundations for a model of evaluation of the capacity to be undertaken from the analysis of the cycles of exploitation. This model will be built on the bases of an exploratory investigation, then tested within a trade SME to verify the relevance and improve the applicability.A relevant estimation of the capacity to be undertaken could make possible a better evaluation of the added value of the leaders of SME and a more precise sketch of the strategy of support for the entrepreneurial actions To estimate the capacity to be undertaken is just as much a challenge for the financial and accounting community than is it the evaluation of the human resources. The present proposes a new approach to approach better the "real" value of a company, with the hope than our model will be useful for the stakeholders of the entrepreneurship.

by Choi Wai Yip. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 51-54). / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Introduction --- p.1-8 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- "Educational Choice, Educational Finance and Credit Rationing" / Chapter Section A: --- Benchmark Model --- p.9-21 / Chapter Section B: --- Redistribution Policies / Chapter (a) --- Intragenerational Transfer: Tax on unskilled workers to subsidize young educated --- p.22-32 / Chapter (b) --- Intergenerational Transfer: Tax on old skilled workers to subsidize young educated --- p.33-39 / Chapter Section C: --- Educational Choice with Credit Constraint --- p.40-46 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Conclusion --- p.47-50 / References --- p.51-54 / Chapter Appendix A: --- Proofs of Propositions and Lemmas --- p.55-87 / Chapter Appendix B: --- Tables --- p.88-95 / Chapter Appendix C: --- Figures --- p.96-104

The aim of the thesis was an analysis of factors influencing the competitiveness of selected industry in foreign markets. For this purpose, the aircraft manufacturing industry was chosen. Firstly I analysed current trends in the aircraft manufacturing, external factors influencing the industry and competitive forces of industry. Based on the lessons learned factors having the greatest influence on the international competitiveness of the aircraft manufacturing industry were identified. These factors were afterwards individually analyzed and the conclusion of this analysis was identifying of opportunities for increasing the competitiveness of the Czech aircraft manufacturing industry on foreign markets in various areas.

The aim of this dissertation thesis is an analysis and comparison of the wages and the wage differentials between public and private sectors in the Czech Republic for the years 2008 and 2009, including an analysis of influence of the individual factors (education, length of experience, age and region) on the level of wages in public and private sectors and how the wage differentials affect the size of wage differentials between workers with tertiary and secondary education and the private rate of return on investment in education in the public and private sectors. The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of economic theories and research on human capital, wage differentials and the private rate of return on investment in education. The second chapter is focused on analysis and comparison of the public and private sectors wages for the years 2008 a 2009 using descriptive statistics, the ANOVA analysis, Tukey's multiple comparison and regression analysis. The third chapter is concentrated on the calculation of wage differentials and on the calculation of private rate of return to investment in education of public and private sector using Mincer equation and Elaborated method. The result of this dissertation thesis is the finding that the influence of individual factors on the level of wages in the public sector is different from the private sector and that the private rate of return to investment in tertiary education in the public sector is smaller than in the private sector.

Universidade Federal do Cearà / A teoria econÃmica e as evidÃncias empÃricas mostram que o capital humano à decisivo para determinar tanto os rendimentos individuais quanto a renda agregada. Como decorrÃncia, o capital humano à determinante do bem-estar individual. Nesse sentido, o presente estudo foge ao comum ao definir capital humano como um vetor de duas variÃveis tidas a priori como endÃgenas â educaÃÃo formal e estado de saÃde do trabalhador â as quais comporÃo um trinÃmio base na determinaÃÃo dos diferenciais de rendimentos individuais, aqui tomados em termos domiciliar per capita. Para atender as hipÃteses teÃricas montou-se, como base metodolÃgica, um modelo de equaÃÃes simultÃneas envolvendo aquelas trÃs variÃveis endÃgenas, tendo como mÃtodo de escolha para estimaÃÃo os mÃnimos quadrados em trÃs estÃgios. Para a verificaÃÃo empÃrica foram utilizados os microdados da Pesquisa sobre PadrÃo de Vida (PPV) do IBGE, para o perÃodo 1996-1997, comparando-se as regiÃes Nordeste e Sudeste. Das estimaÃÃes, comprovou-se a simultaneidade da hipÃtese teÃrica de endogeneidade envolvendo as duas variÃveis de capital humano e rendimentos. As duas componentes de capital humano contribuem, sobremaneira, para explicar o diferencial de rendimentos dos indivÃduos em favor da regiÃo Sudeste. Os resultados mostram que a condiÃÃo de saÃde dos indivÃduos pode ser explicada em atà 11% pelo seu nÃvel educacional, enquanto que indivÃduos que possuem uma condiÃÃo de saÃde entre regular a excelente chegam a possuir um nÃvel educacional atà 4,32% maior que a mÃdia. Jà os indivÃduos com a renda domiciliar per capita mÃnima tendem a possuir um nÃvel educacional 9,61% a menos que a mÃdia, em situaÃÃo contraria os que possuem o valor mÃximo da renda domiciliar per capita chagam a possuir 54,58% a mais que a mÃdia educacional dos indivÃduos. Outro resultado importante mostra que sob as mesmas condiÃÃes indivÃduos residentes na regiÃo Nordeste tendem a ganhar 28,03% a menos que os residentes na regiÃo Sudeste. Corroborando com a literatura jà existente o estudo trÃs tambÃm resultados inerentes aos atributos individuais que geram discriminaÃÃo no mercado de trabalho, onde se constata que sob as mesmas condiÃÃes: as mulheres tendem a ganhar em torno de 7,81% a menos que os homens e indivÃduos nÃo-brancos chegam a contribuir para a renda do domicÃlio com 9,24% a menos que os brancos.