Essays on the economic effects of human capital investments

This thesis is a collection of three essays analyzing the economic effects of human capital investments. The first chapter evaluates the effects of a major educational reform in India called Operation Blackboard. The teacher component of Operation Blackboard increased the number of primary school teachers by ten percent. I find that despite substantial misallocation of teachers appointed under the program, on balance the program reduced the prevalence of single-teacher schools and increased the number of teachers per school. Moreover, the program significantly raised primary school completion and literacy for girls but had no effect on boys. Finally, two-stage least squares estimates obtained using the exogenous variation in school quality provided by the program suggest a higher returns to school quality than their ordinary least squares counterparts. The second chapter, co-authored with Hoyt Bleakley, examines the returns to language skills. We take advantage of the fact that younger children learn languages more easily than older children to generate exogenous variation in language skills. We find a significant positive effect of English-language skills on wages among individuals from the 1990 Census who immigrated to the U.S. as children. We control for non-language effects of age at arrival with immigrants from English-speaking countries. Our estimated effect of English-language skills on wages is larger than the effect suggested by estimates that do not correct for endogeneity. Much of this effect appears to be mediated by years of schooling and occupational choice.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2001

Author dc:creator

• Chin, Aimee Yee Ying

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Joshua Angrist and Abhijit Banerjee.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8654

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8654