Essays in Economics of Education

This dissertation consists of two chapters on topics in economics of education. In the first chapter, I study how parents perceive the uncertainty of the returns to investment of the child development process and how this uncertainty impacts their actual investment in children. To do so, I develop an elicitation procedure of parental subjective belief distributions about the technology of skill production and their subjective investment costs that is guided by a model of parental investment. I collect data using this procedure and extend existing measurement error correction methods that are necessary in the belief estimation. I show that parents hold downward-biased mean beliefs about returns to investment. Moreover, parents who have higher mean beliefs also hold lower levels of uncertainty about their beliefs. Both mean beliefs and uncertainty correlate with actual investment measures. Finally, I estimate a model of parental investment with reference-dependent preferences and show that even though parents hold low mean beliefs, they have a strong incentive to invest if their child is at risk of having a developmental delay. The second chapter (co-authored with Flavio Cunha), I study the child care workforce in Texas. The quality of the early environment children experience influences their human capital development. I investigate retention and compensation in the Early Care and Education workforce by merging datasets from three different government agencies in Texas. I employ non-structural methods to compare turnover and pay in Early Care and Education with those in other sectors that employ similar workers. I estimate a dynamic discrete choice occupational model to quantify the labor supply and turnover elasticities in this industry. In addition, I simulate the impact of wage supplementation programs.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Social Sciences

Grantor

Rice University

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Ki Hyung Lee, Marcos

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Cunha, Flavio

• early childhood
• beliefs
• childcare

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1911/116187

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.rice.edu:1911/116187