Other Economics Commons^™

Three Essays On Education And Health Economics, Kalvin Mudrow

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The first chapter explores the impact of online education on student outcomes by comparing students pre-2020 school closures to students post-2020 school closures. Using student-level panel data from a large U.S. school district spanning 2017-2023 and two outcome variables, reading tests and end-of-level exams, I estimate the effects on different demographic groups, the dynamics of these effects over time, and how these effects differ across students ages. I find a significant decline in student performance after the move to online learning, with additional adverse effects on students who are classified as low-income, female, special education, or ELL. Mechanisms contributing to …

Religion And Growth, Sascha O. Becker, Jared Rubin, Ludger Woessmann

ESI Working Papers

We use the elements of a macroeconomic production function—physical capital, human capital, labor, and technology—together with standard growth models to frame the role of religion in economic growth. Unifying a growing literature, we argue that religion can enhance or impinge upon economic growth through all four elements because it shapes individual preferences, societal norms, and institutions. Religion affects physical capital accumulation by influencing thrift and financial development. It affects human capital through both religious and secular education. It affects population and labor by influencing work effort, fertility, and the demographic transition. And it affects total factor productivity by constraining or …

An Analysis Of The Factors That Influence Success Rates Of Honors College Students, Braden Bateman

Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness Undergraduate Honors Theses

University honors programs provide students with challenging yet rewarding opportunities. Pursuing honors often offers students opportunities (such as access to uique coursework or specialized mentorship) that are not available to the general student popultion. However, honors programs also hold students to more or higher educational milestones in order to graduate with honors. Data from the University of Araksas Fayetteville (UAF) suggest students who start in honors as new freshmen typically graduate at rates much higher than students who were not honors freshmen. However, the percentage of those honors freshmen who complete their honors requirements is much lower than those who …

Meta Analysis Of Rct Interventions, Ayo Ellis

Master's Theses

External validity of an RCT intervention enables understanding of where interventions are successful.

Meta-analysis allows for more generalized statements to be made on the effectiveness of RCTs across countries of different geographic and national income profiles. By comparing the findings from similar studies carried out in different settings I seek to describe whether RCTs in certain sectors are more sensitive to high GDP growth or higher levels of GDP. I consider 402 health, education, and industry development RCT studies done between 1980 and 2015 in 201 countries compiled by development non-profit Aidgrade. I find no significant effect of income level …

Time To Play: The Relationship Between Time Spent Playing And Educational Outcomes In Peru, Jasmine Davidson

Economics Honors Projects

Every day, children around the world are playing. There has been plenty of research on the importance of different kinds of play, but very little on the importance of the quantity of play. Understanding the relationship between educational outcomes and the amount of time spent playing would allow parents to better structure their children’s time and would settle the debate between psychologists and economists on whether play has inherent value for a child’s future outcomes. I focus on Peru because conducting this research in a developing country context broadens the current research mostly focused on high-income countries. Using child-level, longitudinal …

After School Programs And Their Effect On Children's Well-Being, John Steenrod

Honors Theses

As female labor force participation has gone up, families have turned more and more towards after school programs to provide adult supervision for their children, especially in low income areas. This paper utilizes longitudinal household data to examine the effect of these after school programs on noncognitive outcomes in children, and, in particular, follows the early education literature in using within-family comparisons for identification. I find that children who participate in after school programs are less likely to be depressed, and are more likely to have a high degree of emotional, social, and psychological well-being. Generally, participation is associated in …

The Impact Of Remittances On Education Attainment: Evidence From Dominican Republic, Tahiya Begum

Honors College Theses

This paper will examine the relationship between remittances and education attainment focusing on Dominican Republic in 2002. This study will focus on households in Dominican Republic using surveys from IPUMS international and the data is cross-sectional. Sending remittances increases the income for households, which in return, influences the spending on education. The study of remittances is analyzed in a more cultural and social value rather than entirely economic. The dynamic and structure of a family is crucial when studying the effects of remittances in a developing country. Key findings from this analysis is that the relationship between education attainment and …

The Impacts Of Natural Disasters On Educational Attainment: Cross-Country Evidence From Macro Data, Lois Onigbinde

Master's Theses

Do natural disasters impact educational attainment? Education as a paramount factor of economic development suffers from the uncontrollable effects of these increasing events from storms to floods, earthquakes to wildfires. Globally, educational resources are destroyed, directly and indirectly, students and teachers are displaced or killed, parents’ income is affected because of natural disasters. Investments in human capital for rich- and low-income countries are exposed to the uneven impact of natural disasters that adjusts household and country-level decisions, leaving them to short and long-run losses. Exploring the influence of natural disasters on secondary school attainment across a sample of 85 countries …

The Impacts Of Natural Disasters On Educational Attainment: Cross-Country Evidence From Macro Data, Lois Onigbinde

Master's Theses

Do natural disasters impact educational attainment? Education as a paramount factor of economic development suffers from the uncontrollable effects of these increasing events from storms to floods, earthquakes to wildfires. Globally, educational resources are destroyed, directly and indirectly, students and teachers are displaced or killed, parents’ income is affected because of natural disasters. Investments in human capital for rich- and low-income countries are exposed to the uneven impact of natural disasters that adjusts household and country-level decisions, leaving them to short and long-run losses. Exploring the influence of natural disasters on secondary school attainment across a sample of 85 countries …

Unemployment, Does It Really Hurt?, Claudia Vargas

Theses and Dissertations

This paper analyzes the consequences of changes in the unemployment rate in Colombia on the level of education attained for adolescents. Increases in the unemployment rate are associated with an increase in the average number of years of education. No significant effect was found for men of the same age.

Are Education And Economic Growth Related? Some Evidence From The States, R. W. Hafer

Center for Applied Economics

It seems common sense that the more educated someone is, the greater the chances that they will have relatively higher incomes. Indeed, on average someone with a college degree is more likely will have a higher lifetime stream of earnings than someone who only graduates from high school. Does this same relationship hold at the state level? Are states with better education outcomes also the states that tend to grow faster? More specifically, what does the evidence on Missouri’s educational achievement predict for the state’s economic future?

We investigate whether differences in economic growth across states are in part explainable …

Cognitive Performance Across The Life Course Of Bolivian Forager-Farmers With Limited Schooling, Michael Gurven, Eric Fuerstenberg, Benjamin C. Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Bret Beheim, Helen Davis, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Cognitive performance is characterized by at least two distinct life course trajectories. Many cognitive abilities (e.g. “effortful processing” abilities including fluid reasoning, and processing speed) improve throughout early adolescence and start declining in early adulthood, while other abilities (e.g. “crystallized” abilities like vocabulary breadth) improve throughout adult life, remaining robust even at late ages. Although schooling may impact performance and cognitive “reserve”, it has been argued that these age patterns of cognitive performance are human universals. Here we examine age patterns of cognitive performance among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Bolivia, and test whether schooling is related to differences in cognitive performance …

University Rankings: Evidence And A Conceptual Framework, Jonathan G.S. Koppell, Jacob Fowles, H. George Frederickson

Publications from President Jonathan G.S. Koppell

University ranking has high public visibility, the ranking business has flourished, and institutions of higher education have not been able to ignore it. This study of university ranking presents general considerations of ranking and institutional responses to it, particularly considering reactions to ranking, ranking as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and ranking as a means of transforming qualities into quantities. The authors present a conceptual framework of university ranking based on three propositions and carry out a descriptive statistical analysis of U.S. and international ranking data to evaluate those propositions. The first proposition of university ranking is that ranking systems are demarcated …

Economic Growth And Development In Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, And Latin America: The Impact Of Human Capital, Angui D. Macham

Applied Economics Theses

My thesis is that human capital has been important to growth, but has had differential impact in three areas: Sub-Sahara Africa; Asia; and Latin America. I estimated three regional models to determine the impact of human capital on the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Each model was estimated using the pooled OLS approach with a sample of 10 countries within each region. I make use of data from the Penn World Table- international comparisons of production data bank. I found that only the African region had statistically significant coefficients for both physical and human capital. For the …

Risky Business: An Analysis Of Teacher Risk Preferences, Daniel H. Bowen, Stuart Buck, Cary Deck, Jonathan N. Mills, James V. Shuls

ESI Publications

A range of proposals aim to reform teacher compensation, recruitment, and retention. Teachers have generally not embraced these policies. One potential explanation for their objections is that teachers are relatively risk averse. We examine this hypothesis using a risk-elicitation task common to experimental economics. By comparing preferences of new teachers with those entering other professions, we find that individuals choosing to teach are significantly more risk averse. This suggests that the teaching profession may attract individuals who are less amenable to certain reforms. Policy-makers should take into account teacher risk characteristics when considering reforms that may clash with preferences.

Effects Of Shoe Donations On Children’S Time Allocation Toms Shoes In El Salvador, Flor Calvo

Master's Theses

What are the impacts of TOMS shoe donations in rural El Salvador? This paper tries to answer the question by studying the changes in time allocation among children age 6 to 12 years in El Salvador. By taking advantage of a Randomized Control Trial performed between January 15, 2012 and February 21, 2013 I study time allocation differences between baseline and follow-up periods among treatment and control groups. The primary findings of the study show that children part of treatment communities reduced the time spent on school related activities by approximately 0.657 hours per day while increasing the time spent …

A Household Model Of Careers And Education Investment, Jessica F. Young

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper develops a two-stage non-cooperative household game, in which parents make career decisions and an investment into their child’s human capital. The model is solved for Nash equilibrium outcomes and extended for a cooperative solution. In non-cooperative pure strategies, both parents choosing to work is a Nash equilibrium, though there are alternative outcomes when the conditions underlying the career decision are varied. The investment behaviour of agents is analysed. We find that choices are critically affected by the magnitude of the cost (and reflected quality) of a high education investment relative to a low investment, and the intrinsic value …

Does Gender Inequality In Education Affect Educational Outcomes?, Kevin Sheehan

Honors Scholar Theses

There is little doubt that education has a major effect on economic growth. Studies have traditionally used years of schooling (a quantitative variable) to measure education, but there has a shift towards using qualitative measures of education when trying to test the relationship between education and growth. In fact, there is strong evidence that the quality of education is much more important for economic growth than the quantity of education. The best way to measure the quality of education in a given country is to measure educational outcomes, and the best way to measure outcomes across countries is to look …

Public Spending On Education And The Incentives For Student Achievement, William Blankenau, Gabriele Camera

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We build a model where homogeneous workers can accumulate human capital by investing in education. Schools combine public resources and individual effort to generate productive skills. If skills are imperfectly compensated, then in equilibrium students may under-invest in effort. We examine the effect on human capital accumulation of three basic education finance policies. Increased tuition subsidies may not be beneficial because they increase enrollment but they may lower the incentives for student achievement, hence the skill level. Policies directed at enhancing the productivity of education or making degrees more informative are more successful at improving educational outcomes.

Socioeconomic Index Scores For Metropolitan Connecticut, 1970, William H. Groff, John N. Wright

Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station

No abstract provided.