Essays in Applied Microeconomics
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis contains three chapters, each of which employs both reduced-form and structural tools of applied microeconomics to answer questions collectively in the fields of education, labour and health economics. The first chapter considers the effect of a recent expansion of private tertiary education in a set of six developing countries on the equity and efficiency of labour-market outcomes. In particular, this paper uses a structural modelling approach and data from Armenia, Bolivia, Colombia, Georgia, Ghana and Kenya to explain variation in the growth of private universities and, consequently, to consider the range of impact these institutions have on the efficiency of human capital allocation, aggregate output, and the dynamic evolution of income inequality. I show that differences in underlying parameter values across countries have important implications for the composition of the graduate workforce, the growth of private universities, output per worker and income inequality. The second chapter employs a structural model of endogenous education and occupational choice to demonstrate that youth unemployment in Ghana increases in parental wealth, and to consider the consequences of such a relationship for wage inequality, educational attainment, and aggregate productivity. I argue that, in the absence of unemployment insurance, only workers with a sufficiently high stock of parental wealth can afford to remain unemployed, and do so in order to search for scarce, high-productivity jobs. This leads to high income inequality and low match efficiency among workers of heterogeneous ability. I use the estimation results to compare the effectiveness of two alternative policy interventions: an education subsidy and unemployment insurance. I find that the education subsidy is most effective at increasing aggregate productivity, but comes at the cost of increasing income inequality, while unemployment insurance has a smaller effect on aggregate productivity but also dec…
abstract: This thesis contains three chapters, each of which employs both reduced-form and structural tools of applied microeconomics to answer questions collectively in the fields of education, labour and health economics. The first chapter considers the effect of a recent expansion of private tertiary education in a set of six developing countries on the equity and efficiency of labour-market outcomes. In particular, this paper uses a structural modelling approach and data from Armenia, Bolivia, Colombia, Georgia, Ghana and Kenya to explain variation in the growth of private universities and, consequently, to consider the range of impact these institutions have on the efficiency of human capital allocation, aggregate output, and the dynamic evolution of income inequality. I show that differences in underlying parameter values across countries have important implications for the composition of the graduate workforce, the growth of private universities, output per worker and income inequality. The second chapter employs a structural model of endogenous education and occupational choice to demonstrate that youth unemployment in Ghana increases in parental wealth, and to consider the consequences of such a relationship for wage inequality, educational attainment, and aggregate productivity. I argue that, in the absence of unemployment insurance, only workers with a sufficiently high stock of parental wealth can afford to remain unemployed, and do so in order to search for scarce, high-productivity jobs. This leads to high income inequality and low match efficiency among workers of heterogeneous ability. I use the estimation results to compare the effectiveness of two alternative policy interventions: an education subsidy and unemployment insurance. I find that the education subsidy is most effective at increasing aggregate productivity, but comes at the cost of increasing income inequality, while unemployment insurance has a smaller effect on aggregate productivity but also dec…
author: De Mel, Stephanie Christina
language: en
keywords: Higher Education Choice, Inequality, Occupational Choice, Credit Constraints, Youth Unemployment, Human Capital Investment, Unemployment Insurance, Social learning, Herd behavior, Information Cascades, Organ transplant decisions
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/a8c9e36d-90e9-45b0-b051-f006a40a374f/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2019-07-03
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:56Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.41729