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- All Subjects: Education and state
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- Creators: Herrendorf, Berthold
Description
This dissertation consists of three essays on education and macroeconomics. The first chapter analyzes whether public education financing systems can account for large differences among developed countries in earnings inequality and intergenerational earnings persistence. I first document facts about public education in the U.S. and Norway, which provide an interesting case study because they have very different earnings distributions and public education systems. An overlapping generations model is calibrated to match U.S. data, and tax and public education spending functions are estimated for each country. The benchmark exercise finds that taxes and public education spending account for about 15% of differences in earnings inequality and 10% of differences in intergenerational earnings persistence between the U.S. and Norway. Differences in private education spending and early childhood education investments are also shown to be quantitatively important. The second chapter develops a life-cycle model to study increases in college completion and average ability of college students born from 1900 to 1972. The model is disciplined with new historical data on real college costs from printed government surveys. I find that increases in college completion for 1900 to 1950 cohorts are due primarily to changes in college costs, which generate large endogenous increases in college enrollment. Additionally, I find strong evidence that post-1950 cohorts under-predicted large increases in the college earnings premium. Modifying the model to restrict perfect foresight of the education premia generates a slowdown in college completion consistent with empirical evidence for post-1950 cohorts. Lastly, I find that increased sorting of students by ability can be accounted for by increasingly precise ability signals over time. The third chapter assesses how structural transformation is affected by sectoral differences in labor-augmenting technological progress, capital intensity, and capital-labor substitutability. CES production functions are estimated for agriculture, manufacturing, and services on post-war U.S. data. I find that sectoral differences in labor-augmenting technological progress are the dominant force behind changes in sectoral labor and relative prices. Therefore, Cobb-Douglas production functions with labor-augmenting technological change capture the main technological forces behind post-war U.S. structural transformation.
ContributorsHerrington, Christopher (Author) / Prescott, Edward C. (Thesis advisor) / Ventura, Gustavo (Thesis advisor) / Herrendorf, Berthold (Committee member) / Schoellman, Todd (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Are heterogeneous labor market outcomes a product of markets efficiently allocating resources or the result of structural market failures which should be corrected through well-crafted policy? In order to address this fundamental question in modern economics, we must first understand the forces which shape individuals' earnings, employment, and occupational choices. This collection of essays provides new evidence to support several novel channels which influence labor markets. First, I evaluate the connection between technological change and labor market outcomes by bringing new data and methods to study the mechanization of American agriculture in the early 20th century. Using an instrumental variables estimation strategy, I find that exogenous increases in exposure to technological change generated occupational displacement for incumbent laborers, increased income inequality, and had important impacts on intergenerational mobility for the children of affected workers. Additionally, I investigate the connection between low-opportunity neighborhoods and public housing residents' labor market outcomes. Leveraging quasi-random variation in neighborhood quality due to a public housing demolition, I find that residents' wages increased after moving to higher-opportunity neighborhoods and that more intense supportive services improved post-move employment. Taken together, these essays provide new evidence that both large-scale factors like new technologies and local factors like neighborhood quality contribute to heterogeneity in labor market outcomes both historically and up to the present day.
ContributorsFrench, Jacob (Author) / Zafar, Basit (Thesis advisor) / Aucejo, Esteban (Thesis advisor) / Silverman, Daniel (Committee member) / Herrendorf, Berthold (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
In the wake of both the end of court-ordered school desegregation and the growing popularity of accountability as a mechanism to maximize student achievement, the authors explore the association between racial segregation and the percentage of students passing high-stakes tests in Florida's schools. Results suggest that segregation matters in predicting school-level performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test after control for other known and purported predictors of standardized test performance. Also, these results suggest that neither recent efforts by the state of Florida to equalize the funding of education nor current efforts involving high-stakes testing will close the Black-White achievement gap without consideration of the racial distribution of students across schools.
ContributorsBorman, Kathryn M. (Author) / Eitle, Tamela (Author) / Michael, Deanna L., 1961- (Author) / Eitle, David J. (Author) / Lee, Reginald (Author) / Johnson, Larry (Author) / Cobb-Roberts, Deirdre (Author) / Dorn, Sherman (Author) / Shircliffe, Barbara J. (Author) / Arizona State University. College of Education (Contributor)
Created2004
Description
The dissertation consists of three essays that deal with variations in economic growth and development across space and time. The essays in particular explore the importance of differences in occupational structures in various settings.
The first chapter documents that intergenerational occupational persistence is significantly higher in poor countries even after controlling for cross-country differences in occupational structures. Based on this empirical fact, I posit that high occupational persistence in poor countries is symptomatic of underlying talent misallocation. Constraints on education financing force sons to choose fathers' occupations over the occupations of their comparative advantage. A version of Roy (1951) model of occupational choice is developed to quantify the impact of occupational misallocation on aggregate productivity. I find that output per worker reduces to a third of the benchmark US economy for the country with the highest level of occupational persistence.
In the second chapter, I use occupational prestige as a proxy of social status to estimate intergenerational occupational mobility for 50 countries spanning the breadth of world's income distribution for both sons and daughters. I find that although relative mobility varies significantly across countries, the correlation between relative mobility and GDP per capita is only mildly positive for sons and is close to zero for daughters. I also consider two measures of absolute mobility: the propensity to move across quartiles and the propensity to move relative to father's occupational prestige. Similar to relative mobility, the first measure of absolute mobility is uncorrelated with GDP per capita. The second measure, however, is positively correlated with GDP per capita with correlations being significantly higher for sons compared to daughters.
The third chapter analyses to what extent the growth in productivity witnessed by India during 1983--2004 can be explained by a better allocation of workers across occupations. I first document that the propensity to work in high-skilled occupations relative to high-caste men increased manifold for high-caste women, low-caste men and low-caste women during this period. Given that innate talent in these occupations is likely to be independent across groups, the chapter argues that the occupational distribution in the 1980s represented talent misallocation in which workers from many groups faced significant barriers to practice an occupation of their comparative advantage. I find that these barriers can explain 15--21\% of the observed growth in output per worker during the period from 1983--2004.
The first chapter documents that intergenerational occupational persistence is significantly higher in poor countries even after controlling for cross-country differences in occupational structures. Based on this empirical fact, I posit that high occupational persistence in poor countries is symptomatic of underlying talent misallocation. Constraints on education financing force sons to choose fathers' occupations over the occupations of their comparative advantage. A version of Roy (1951) model of occupational choice is developed to quantify the impact of occupational misallocation on aggregate productivity. I find that output per worker reduces to a third of the benchmark US economy for the country with the highest level of occupational persistence.
In the second chapter, I use occupational prestige as a proxy of social status to estimate intergenerational occupational mobility for 50 countries spanning the breadth of world's income distribution for both sons and daughters. I find that although relative mobility varies significantly across countries, the correlation between relative mobility and GDP per capita is only mildly positive for sons and is close to zero for daughters. I also consider two measures of absolute mobility: the propensity to move across quartiles and the propensity to move relative to father's occupational prestige. Similar to relative mobility, the first measure of absolute mobility is uncorrelated with GDP per capita. The second measure, however, is positively correlated with GDP per capita with correlations being significantly higher for sons compared to daughters.
The third chapter analyses to what extent the growth in productivity witnessed by India during 1983--2004 can be explained by a better allocation of workers across occupations. I first document that the propensity to work in high-skilled occupations relative to high-caste men increased manifold for high-caste women, low-caste men and low-caste women during this period. Given that innate talent in these occupations is likely to be independent across groups, the chapter argues that the occupational distribution in the 1980s represented talent misallocation in which workers from many groups faced significant barriers to practice an occupation of their comparative advantage. I find that these barriers can explain 15--21\% of the observed growth in output per worker during the period from 1983--2004.
ContributorsSinha, Rishabh (Author) / Herrendorf, Berthold (Thesis advisor) / Schoellman, Todd (Thesis advisor) / Bick, Alexander (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This dissertation consists of three essays on the task approach to labor markets. In the first chapter, I document that since 2000 the polarization of wages in the U.S. labor market stopped, as the wages of non-routine manual occupations fell in relative and absolute terms. I analyze the end of wage polarization through the lens of a dynamic general equilibrium model with occupation-biased technical change, human capital accumulation, and occupational mobility. I show that wage polarization ended because workers in non-routine manual occupations had lower initial human capital and lower human capital accumulation over time, and because after 2000 mobility across occupations fell, which magnified the differences in human capital accumulation across occupations. The second chapter estimates the effect of the import competition from China on the intensity of tasks performed by workers within U.S. manufacturing establishments between 2002 and 2017. I measure the changes in the intensity of these tasks by linking information on occupational employment from the Occupational Employment Statistics to the occupational characteristics from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). I find that this “China shock” led establishments to significantly decrease the intensity of cognitive and interpersonal tasks, and to increase the intensity of manual and routine tasks. These estimations are consistent with US establishments reallocating employment to become more similar to their Chinese competitors and have important implications for the design of public policies. The third chapter explores the importance of changes in the intensity of tasks performed by workers to explain the evolution of wages. Despite changes in the workplace, the literature is based on the questionable assumption that the intensity of tasks remains constant over time. I harmonize and compare over time the intensity of non-routine cognitive, non-routine manual, interpersonal, and routine tasks in the Dictionary of Occupation Title (DOT) and the O*NET. I find the new fact that a sizable part of wage changes is due to increases in the return and the intensity of cognitive tasks. I show that this fact has implications for three well-documented wage trends during the last decades: wage polarization, increasing college premium, decreasing gender-wage gap.
ContributorsGarcia-Couto, Santiago (Author) / Herrendorf, Berthold (Thesis advisor) / Ventura, Gustavo (Committee member) / Ferraro, Domenico (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021