Essays on Health, Schooling, and Occupational Choices under Imperfect Information and/or Heterogeneity
详细信息
- 作者：Nyshadham ; Anant ; Ph.D.
- 学历：Ph.D.
- 年：2012
- 关键词：Entrepreneurship ; Schooling ; Education ; Heterogene
- 导师：Boozer, Michael
- 毕业院校：Yale University
- 专业：Economics, Economics, Economics
- ISBN：9781267577139
- CBH：3525303
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：10826584
- Pages：258
文摘
This dissertation studies the economics of health, schooling and occupational choices in the presence of imperfect information and/or heterogeneity. In Chapter 1, I explore the roles of heterogeneous ability and learning in the developing country household's decision to engage in microenterprise. Entrepreneurial activity has been argued to be an important stimulus of growth, especially in less developed countries. However, measuring the returns to entrepreneurship is made difficult due to potential selection on the basis of unobservable abilities and the agents' imperfect information about their own comparative advantage in entrepreneurship.
I develop a novel extension to projection-based panel data methods to estimate a model of returns to entrepreneurship that accounts for heterogeneous abilities, learning, and financial constraints. My approach has two main advantages: 1) it is robust to arbitrary relationships between latent heterogeneity and sector and input choices; and 2) using this method, I can test between the full model and nested models featuring homogeneous returns and/or perfect information, allowing the data to determine the need for the additional complexity. I estimate the model using panel data from Thailand, and find strong evidence of selection into entrepreneurship on the basis of comparative advantage.
The results show that the households with low ability in the default sector have high productivity gains from switching to entrepreneurship, and suggest that these households learn about their comparative advantage through lower-than-expected productivity in the default sector and /or positive productivity realizations in entrepreneurship. Importantly, the structural results do not suggest a salient role for savings or credit constraints in entrepreneurship decisions. I conduct additional analysis using agricultural output prices and their interactions with the household's farm acreage as instruments for savings and self-reported credit constraints and find no significant effects of these on entry into entrepreneurship.
Similarly, in Chapter 2, I explore the individual's decision to enroll in college in the presence of both heterogeneous costs (access to credit) and abilities. Using data on academic performance and enrollment decisions of students from the four years following the sophomore year of high school, I show that transferable aid significantly increases the probability of applying to and enrolling in post-secondary school. I develop a fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) strategy that exploits eligibility cutoffs for merit-based tuition subsidy programs. Attenuation in analogous ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates as compared to FRD estimates suggests that endogenous allocation of aid on the basis of need is the primary source of bias in OLS estimates.
My results suggest that those who are moved to enroll as a result of a tuition subsidy are less likely to work while enrolled and spend less time on extracurricular activities and volunteer work and more time on academics. Additionally, these students on the margin have less intention of continuing their education into graduate school. As implied by a model of enrollment and effort decisions in the presence of heterogeneous costs and returns to schooling, this evidence suggests the remaining population on the margin is more constrained by low ability than by high costs.
In Chapter 3, along with my co-author Ach Adhvaryu, I present robust estimates of the effects of formal sector healthcare on the subsequent health outcomes, school attendance, and labor supply of acutely ill children in Tanzania. Using variation in the cost of formal sector healthcare to predict treatment choice, we show that accessing better healthcare decreases length of illness and changes children's allocation of time to school and work. Children attend school for more days per week--but not for more hours per day--as a result of accessing better healthcare. There are no significant effects on child labor, but the results suggest that time spent in physically strenuous activities such as farming and herding increases.
Finally, in Chapter 4, along with my co-author Ach Adhvaryu, I study how heterogeneous endowments at birth affect parents' resource allocation decisions among children, exploiting variation in exposure to a large-scale iodine supplementation program in Tanzania. We find that treated children, as well as their siblings, are more likely to receive necessary vaccines and are breastfed for longer. We show, in a model of intra-household allocations, that this pattern of responses implies that parents are averse to sibling inequality, while imposing minimal structure on the child quality production function. Neonatal investments and fertility behaviors are unaffected, suggesting that parents reacted to observed endowment changes rather than indirect program effects.
I develop a novel extension to projection-based panel data methods to estimate a model of returns to entrepreneurship that accounts for heterogeneous abilities, learning, and financial constraints. My approach has two main advantages: 1) it is robust to arbitrary relationships between latent heterogeneity and sector and input choices; and 2) using this method, I can test between the full model and nested models featuring homogeneous returns and/or perfect information, allowing the data to determine the need for the additional complexity. I estimate the model using panel data from Thailand, and find strong evidence of selection into entrepreneurship on the basis of comparative advantage.
The results show that the households with low ability in the default sector have high productivity gains from switching to entrepreneurship, and suggest that these households learn about their comparative advantage through lower-than-expected productivity in the default sector and /or positive productivity realizations in entrepreneurship. Importantly, the structural results do not suggest a salient role for savings or credit constraints in entrepreneurship decisions. I conduct additional analysis using agricultural output prices and their interactions with the household's farm acreage as instruments for savings and self-reported credit constraints and find no significant effects of these on entry into entrepreneurship.
Similarly, in Chapter 2, I explore the individual's decision to enroll in college in the presence of both heterogeneous costs (access to credit) and abilities. Using data on academic performance and enrollment decisions of students from the four years following the sophomore year of high school, I show that transferable aid significantly increases the probability of applying to and enrolling in post-secondary school. I develop a fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) strategy that exploits eligibility cutoffs for merit-based tuition subsidy programs. Attenuation in analogous ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates as compared to FRD estimates suggests that endogenous allocation of aid on the basis of need is the primary source of bias in OLS estimates.
My results suggest that those who are moved to enroll as a result of a tuition subsidy are less likely to work while enrolled and spend less time on extracurricular activities and volunteer work and more time on academics. Additionally, these students on the margin have less intention of continuing their education into graduate school. As implied by a model of enrollment and effort decisions in the presence of heterogeneous costs and returns to schooling, this evidence suggests the remaining population on the margin is more constrained by low ability than by high costs.
In Chapter 3, along with my co-author Ach Adhvaryu, I present robust estimates of the effects of formal sector healthcare on the subsequent health outcomes, school attendance, and labor supply of acutely ill children in Tanzania. Using variation in the cost of formal sector healthcare to predict treatment choice, we show that accessing better healthcare decreases length of illness and changes children's allocation of time to school and work. Children attend school for more days per week--but not for more hours per day--as a result of accessing better healthcare. There are no significant effects on child labor, but the results suggest that time spent in physically strenuous activities such as farming and herding increases.
Finally, in Chapter 4, along with my co-author Ach Adhvaryu, I study how heterogeneous endowments at birth affect parents' resource allocation decisions among children, exploiting variation in exposure to a large-scale iodine supplementation program in Tanzania. We find that treated children, as well as their siblings, are more likely to receive necessary vaccines and are breastfed for longer. We show, in a model of intra-household allocations, that this pattern of responses implies that parents are averse to sibling inequality, while imposing minimal structure on the child quality production function. Neonatal investments and fertility behaviors are unaffected, suggesting that parents reacted to observed endowment changes rather than indirect program effects.