Browsing by Subject "Labor economics"
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Item Essays on poverty, microfinance and labor economics(Texas Tech University, 2006-08) De Silva, Sandaradura Indunil Udayanga; Rahnama, Masha; Steinmeier, Thomas L.; McComb, Robert P.This dissertation presents three essays examining some of the issues concerning poverty, microfinance and returns to education. The first essay examines the micro-level determinants and correlates of poverty, and presents a poverty profile for Sri Lanka. This is the first study that examines the probable determinants and correlates of Sri Lankan poverty in a multivariate framework employing both logit and quantile regressions. The empirical findings are broadly encouraging. The estimation results show that the education of the household head, being salary employed and being engaged in business to have a significant positive effect on the standard of living. The probability of being poor increases with the household size, household head being female, living in a rural area, and being a casual wage earner. The second essay applied recent advances in propensity score matching to assess the impact of microfinance on household per-capita income and savings. Microfinance for the poor has become a focus of attention in the development community over the last several years. To date, there has been no comprehensive investigation of their impact on household income and savings. The results for the mean impact indicate that program participation significantly increases household per capita savings for the bottom four quintiles, though the magnitude varies by matching method. Even though there are sizable gains in household per capita savings for program participants, this is not evident for household per capita income. Results suggest that there is no impact on household per capita income across all quintiles. The third essay investigates the returns to education in Sri Lankan labor market using the latest Consumer Finance and Socio-economic Survey. This essay employs the quantile regression technique for each conditional quantile wage group rather than mean regression analysis used in most labor market analysis. Quantile regression results suggest that returns to education are positive and significant across all quantiles. However, a comparison of wage returns to education between ethnic groups reveals that returns are higher for Sinhalese workers than for Tamil Workers.Item Essays on the economics of higher education(2015-05) Denning, Jeffrey Todd; Black, Sandra E.; Manoli, Dayanand; Abrevaya, Jason; Linden, Leigh; Heinrich, CarolynThis dissertation contains three chapters that examine the effect of price in higher education. The first chapter considers the effect of community college tuition on college enrollment using a natural experiment in Texas where discounts for community college tuition were expanded over time and across geography. Additionally, the long-term effects of community college are examined including transfer to universities and graduation with a bachelor's degree. This chapter uses Texas administrative data from 1994-2012 on the universe of high school graduates and their college enrollment and graduation. For high school graduates, community college enrollment in the first year after high school increased by 7.1 percentage points for a \$1,000 decrease in tuition. Lower tuition also increased transfer from community colleges to universities. There is also marginally statistically significant evidence that attending a community college increased the probability of earning a bachelors degree within eight years of high school graduation by 23 percentage points. The second chapter examines whether students respond to immediate financial incentives when choosing their college major. From 2006-07 to 2010-11, low-income students in technical or foreign language majors could receive up to \$8,000 in Federal Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grants. Since income-eligibility was determined using a strict threshold, this chapter determines the causal impact of the grant on student major with a regression discontinuity design. Using administrative data from public universities in Texas, it is estimated that income-eligible students were 3.2 percentage points more likely than their ineligible peers to major in targeted fields. Brigham Young University had a larger impact of 10.1 percentage points. The third chapter considers the effect of financial aid arising from students being declared financially independent on educational outcomes including reenrollment, credits attempted, and graduation. Students who are 24 at the end of the calender year cannot be declared dependent while students who are 23 at the end of the year can be. This sharp change in eligibility is leveraged to compare dependent students to independent students in a regression discontinuity framework. The analysis uses administrative data from from all public universities and colleges in Texas from 2003-04 to 2013-14. Financial independence is associated with modest changes in educational outcomes.Item Three essays in labor economics and public finance(2009-08) Rodriguez Zamora, Carolina; Trejo, Stephen J., 1959-This dissertation consists of three essays. The first one brings together the areas of public and labor economics by developing a hypothesis that relates optimal taxation and time use. Using Mexican data on household time use and consumption, we find significant substitution between goods and time in home production and different elasticities of substitution for different house-hold commodities. Adding these findings to the optimal tax problem, we show it is optimal to impose higher taxes on market goods used in the production of commodities with a lower elasticity of substitution between goods and time. This is an analog of the classical Corlett and Hague (1953) result, differing in that we allow for the possibility of substitution between goods and time in the production of commodities. The second chapter is about international migration, in the area of labor economics. On one hand, surveillance of the border between Mexico and the United States by the U.S. government has increased dramatically over the last two decades. On the other hand, undocumented Mexican migrants often make multiple trips between the two countries. Thus, my hypothesis is that these migrants respond to heightened surveillance by increasing the length of stay of the current trip. I estimate a semi-parametric hazard model following Meyer (1990). Using data from the Mexican Migration Project I find no evidence that border enforcement affects the hazard of leaving the U.S. by undocumented Mexican Immigrants. The last essay is about mother's time and children related expenditures. Using data from the Mexican Time Use Survey and the National Household Survey of Income and Expenditure from 2002, I examine the time Mexican mothers dedicate to taking care of their children and the amount of money spent by the household in raising children. The main contribution of this paper is that it analyzes child care time use and child care expenditures simultaneously. The age of the youngest child is the most important determinant of both child care time and money expenditures. It is the case that more educated mothers spend more money on their children. With respect to child care time use, more educated mothers spend more or less time with their children depending on whether they are working or non-working mothers. At all levels of non-mother's income, working mothers spend significantly more money relative to time in child care than non-working mothers. For both groups the ratio of money over time increases at a decreasing rate; however, for non-working mothers the income expansion path is much flatter.