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Title: Essays on Macroeconomics of Human Capital Accumulation
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Dudareva, Iuliia
Essays on Macroeconomics of Human Capital Accumulation
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2022
Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): College Education; Human Capital; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Occupational Choice; Parental Investments; Project Talent; Teachers/Faculty

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

In the first chapter, I study how pre-college parental investment affects sorting of students into colleges. I estimate the efficiency of the decentralized allocation and explore the implications of pre-college investment for intergenerational mobility. I embed a student-to-college assignment model into a two-period overlapping generations model with endogenous human capital investment. I calibrate the model to NLSY97 cohort and find that the race to the top induces overinvestment in pre-college human capital and associated output losses relative to the first best. The effect is more pronounced for high-income families which promotes income persistence at the top of the college distribution.

In the second chapter, we explore one aspect of U.S. education that has not garnered a lot of attention until fairly recently that is occupational choice. We add an education sector to an otherwise standard Hsieh et al. (2019)-style model to explore the extent to which changes in career opportunities in other occupations affect the selection of workers into teaching careers. In our model, changes in the allocation of teaching talent have implications for the evolution of class size as well as quality of instruction and hence the accumulation of human capital during the workers' formative years. This gives rise to a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency, which we quantify by way of a structural model.

Bibliography Citation
Dudareva, Iuliia. Essays on Macroeconomics of Human Capital Accumulation. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2022.