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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

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the causal effects of malaria and poor health in general on economic outcome in Sub-Saharan Africa. This study uses panel data from the Living Standard Measurement Survey (LSMS) for Tanzania from 1991 to 2004. Three main hypotheses are tested. First, the study evaluates the effect of malaria and other chronic illnesses on labor supply using the number of hours worked per week as a measure of outcome. Second, it determines the impact of poor health on human capital accumulation by measuring the number of weekly school hours lost to illness. The third objective deals with the question of whether changes in preconditioning factors such as income levels and healthcare accessibility have improved the disease environment in Sub-Saharan Africa over time. The study uses several identification strategies in the empirical estimation process. The first estimation strategy applies the standard Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Fixed Effects (FE) estimators to the schooling and labor supply models. In addition to OLS and FE, the preferred methods of estimating the causal effects of malaria on schooling and labor supply outcomes are Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) and Limited Information Maximum Likelihood (LIML). Findings in this study suggest that malaria significantly increases school absenteeism. In particular, 2SLS and LIML estimates of the number of school hours lost to malaria suggests that children sick with malaria are absent from school for approximately 24 hours a week. However, the results show the effect of malaria on work hours is inconclusive. Furthermore, difference in difference estimates of the disease environment show slight improvements in the disease environment resulting from changes in income levels. The study finds no statistically significant improvements in the disease environment due to increases in the number of health facilities over time.

This dissertation examines the effect of changes in the stock of human capital on the labor force participation decision of women aged 25-54. Without the option of homebased work, some women choose to leave the labor market and stay at home temporarily for family reasons. Working women realize that time out of the labor force could impose penalties on their work careers. This is because during the break, they do not accumulate any new human capital while the existing job skills continuously depreciate. Nowadays, home-based work becomes possible for many jobs because rapid development in personal computers and advances in information and communications technology have reduced employers’ cost of offering home-based work arrangements. Working women can resolve the time conflict between demand for paid work and family responsibility by working from home. In a previous study, the home-based work decision depends on the fixed cost of working and potential home production. Women who are disabled, have small children, or live in rural areas are likely to work from home because they have high fixed costs of working and high potential home production. However, none of the existing studies applies the human capital theory of labor supply to the home-based work decision. Using data on the female labor force from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) of housing units from the 2000 U.S. Census, I estimate a nested logit model to examine the effects of expected costs of non-participation, in terms of forgone earnings, forgone human capital accumulation and human capital depreciation, on women’s labor force participation decision. I find that, other things being equal, women aged 25 to 44 who have potentially high human capital accumulation and high human capital depreciation are likely to stay in the labor force. In the case that the value of their home time is so high that they choose to stay at home, they prefer to work for pay at home than to be out of the labor force.

Thesis advisor: Theodore Papageorgiou / This dissertation addresses questions in the labor market with a focus on firms. In the first chapter, I examine different learning opportunities across firms by distinguishing learning from coworkers and firms. The second chapter studies firm organizational spillovers. In the third chapter, I investigate how exporting affects firms' hiring decisions in the entry-level labor market. Chapter 1: This chapter examines and separately identifies two types of learning at the workplace: learning from coworkers and learning from firms. I consider a structural model of idea flows in a competitive market where workers' compensation consists of learning, amenities, and wages. Workers accumulate human capital by interacting with their coworkers and directly from their firm. Using German employee-employer matched data, I exploit a clustering method to classify firms into learning and amenity groups. Then I allow learning functions to differ across groups and separately estimate firm learning and coworker learning parameters. Amenity value is estimated from switchers by relying on features of the model. I find that both types of learning are significant, consistent with previous studies examining each learning type separately. There is significant heterogeneity across firms of different types: some firms provide workers with more firm learning, while in others, workers' learning mostly comes from their coworkers. The relationship between two non-wage compensation also varies across workers. I explore the implication of the findings for inequality. Chapter 2: In this chapter, Div Bhagia and I study whether the organizational decisions of new entrants in a market are influenced by the hierarchical structure of their incumbent peers. Using matched employer-employee data from Brazil, we classify establishments into one to four-layer entities and examine how a new entrant’s decision to add an organizational layer varies with the average number of layers of other establishments in their industry and location. To address the potential endogeneity of peers’ layers, we construct an instrument based on layers of other establishments in peers’ firms that operate in different markets. We find that new entrants are twice as likely to add a layer within five years if their average peer has one more layer at the time of entry. Our results suggest that organizational structure spillovers can provide a new source of agglomeration advantages. We also find that the influence of peers is stronger in more similar industries. Additionally, we show that new entrants with high-layer peers hire more workers from within the market in the newly created layers, indicating personnel exchanges as a mechanism for organizational spillovers. Chapter 3: I investigate the impact of exporting on hiring decisions in the entry-level labor market. Firms face higher opportunity costs of foregone output when they hire inexperienced workers, who require more training than experienced workers. Using Korean establishment-level data, where I distinctively observe experienced and inexperienced new hires, I show that exporting firms hire fewer inexperienced workers but more experienced workers than non-exporting firms. Moreover, foreign market opportunities further induce exporters to favor experienced workers. This finding suggests that high export opportunities, which increase the opportunity costs of training, may increase barriers to better jobs in the entry-level labor market for young workers. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

The major aim of this study is to develop an integrative framework of the determinants and consequence of international human capital, the human capital which enables a firm to compete globally. The open systems view is introduced to develop a comprehensive measurement of international human capital, which includes input-based, transformational, output-based, and managerial international human capital. Human capital accumulation modes (the documentation mode and the socialization mode) are identified as the potential determinant, and global initiatives (global learning and global marketing) and financial performance as the potential outcome. The Structural Equation Modeling technique is employed to investigate the determinants and outcome of the human capital system. The results support our expectation that human capital accumulation modes foster the development of international human capital, which in turn enhances a firm¡¦s global initiatives and financial performance. Important role of output-based and managerial international human capital are also identified. Output-based international human capital not only enhances a firm¡¦s financial performance, but also facilitates its global initiatives. Managerial international human capital, on the other hand, indirectly fosters a firm¡¦s financial performance and global initiatives through its direct positive influences on the other international human capital components.

Education drives labour market outcomes and social mobility. When educational attainment is influenced by socioeconomic factors, many students from disadvantaged backgrounds are left behind. This is undesirable as it greatly reduces the human capital that could have been present in the national economy, therefore affecting the potential of economic growth. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the impact of a policy that has the purpose of reducing the gap in educational attainment between disadvantaged students and their peers.  The analysis takes place over a 12 year time span and across 22 local authority areas in Wales. The results highlight the importance in the measure of the attainment gap. The implementation of Pupil Premium can be correlated with a reduction in the gap that is defined by the proportional difference between disadvantaged students and their peers. The magnitude of the attainment gap has stayed fairly constant but overall attainment has risen significantly over the period under analysis.  There is room for further study into the possibility that the impact of Pupil Premium has affected some groups of students more than others.

abstract: Environmental regulations such as carbon taxation and air quality standards can lead to notable improvements in health outcomes and ambient air quality. However, these types of policies may have significant impacts on the labor market, in particular for workers in energy-intensive industries, especially if these workers have acquired specific human capital in those industries. This dissertation focuses on the general equilibrium consequences of environmental regulation on the labor market. Specifically, I examine costly reallocation of workers between sectors, the welfare effects of involuntary unemployment, and the heterogeneous effects of this policy on different types of workers. To this end, I develop a two-sector search model with sectoral human capital accumulation to explore the effects on the labor market of implementing a per unit of energy use carbon tax in the US. I separate the economy into a high-intensive sector (’dirty’) and a low-intensive sector (’clean’). I calibrate the model using 2014 U.S. data. I find that a carbon tax increases total unemployment by 0.06 percentage points, decreases the dirty employment rate by 2.1 percent, and increases the clean employment rate by 1.04 percent. Firms in the dirty sector adjust by decreasing the demand for high-skilled workers and increasing the number of vacancies in the low-skilled market / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Economics 2019

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Allgemeine Gleichgewichtsmodelle (Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models) werden oft genutzt, um Erkenntnisse über die gesamtwirtschaftlichen Auswirkungen bildungspolitischer Maßnahmen zu gewinnen. Eine Literaturrecherche zur Integration des Bildungs- und Ausbildungssystems in CGE-Modellen zeigt klare Limitationen bisheriger Studien bezüglich der Darstellung des Bildungs- und Ausbildungssystems und identifiziert damit eine wichtige Forschungslücke, der sich diese Dissertation widmet. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist das Hauptziel dieser Dissertation die Entwicklung eines neuartigen Ansatzes zur Einbeziehung der anerkannten Bildungs- und Berufsbildungssysteme in CGE-Modellen, einschließlich aller potenziellen Verbindungen zwischen diesen beiden Systemen. Das entwickelte Modell ermöglicht die Akkumulation von Arbeitskräften entsprechend der Veränderungen der Anzahl der Absolventen und Schulabbrecher eines integrierten Bildungs- und Ausbildungssystems. Es handelt sich um ein rekursiv-dynamisches Ein-Land-CGE-Modell (STAGE-Edu), das die mittel- bis langfristigen gesamtwirtschaftlichen Effekte verschiedener Bildungs- und Ausbildungspolitiken abbildet. Der Sudan gehört zu den Ländern der unteren mittleren Einkommensklasse, die bezüglich der Förderung der menschlichen Entwicklung vor zahlreichen Herausforderungen stehen. Aus diesem Grund werden in der vorliegenden Dissertation verschiedene bildungspolitische Maßnahmen analysiert und deren Auswirkungen auf das Wirtschaftswachstum und die Humankapitalbildung im Sudan bewertet. Der entwickelte Modellierungsrahmen leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zur gesamtwirtschaftlichen Darstellung der durch Bildung und Ausbildung bewirkten menschlichen Entwicklung sowie der drauf abzielenden politischen Maßnahmen. STAGE-Edu bietet politischen Entscheidungsträgern ex-ante Erkenntnisse bezüglich der potenziellen Auswirkungen von Maßnahmen zur Verbesserung der Arbeitsqualifikation und letztlich zur Erhöhung des Lebensstandards der Bevölkerung. / Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models have been widely used to generate insights into the economy-wide implications of education policy measures. A literature review on incorporating the education and training system in CGE models reveals explicit limitations of previous studies depicting vocational education and training system, hence, identifying a significant research gap, which shall be addressed in this dissertation. Against this background, the main objective of this dissertation is to develop a novel approach to incorporate the acknowledged education and vocational training systems in CGE models, including all potential exiting bridges between these two systems. The developed model enables labor force accumulation according to changes in the number of graduates and dropouts from an integrated education and training system. It is a recursive-dynamic single-country CGE model (STAGE-Edu), which depicts the medium- to long-run economy-wide effects of various education and training policies. The Sudan is one of the lower-middle-income countries that face numerous challenges in accelerating human development. For this reason, in the dissertation at hand different education and training policy measures are analyzed and their implications on economic growth and human capital accumulation in the Sudan are assessed. The developed modeling framework contributes to the field of economy-wide depiction of human development triggered by education and training as well as related policy measures. STAGE-Edu provides policymakers with ex-ante insights on potential impacts of measures for enhancing labor skills and ultimately for improving the livelihood of the population.