Agricultural & Resource Economics Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2739
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Item INTENDED AND UNINTENDED IMPACTS OF GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS IN AGRICULTURE AND EDUCATION(2022) Castro Zarzur, Rosa; Leonard, Kenneth; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Agriculture and education are often considered crucial programmatic areas for governmentsaround the globe. In their search for economic growth and social well-being, governments across the developing world implement policies aimed at enhancing human capital formation and increasing agricultural productivity. In this dissertation I study the intended and unintended impacts of three types of government programs commonly used to improve outcomes in agriculture and education. In countries where land was distributed to collectives or groups rather than to individuals,concerns about how collective ownership may hinder agricultural productivity led to a ”second wave” of land reforms . In my first chapter, I study a land tenure transition from collective to individual land rights, and present evidence on the impacts of the Philippine parcelization program. Contrary to its objective, the implementation of this transitional stage has increased tenure insecurity, albeit without affecting agricultural productivity for most farmers in the short term. In turn, higher tenure insecurity has prompted land leases and a reallocation of labor to the non-farm sector. These unintended effects are likely due to a nontransparent and lengthy implementation process stemming from governmental capacity constraints. My second and third chapters are on education. Teacher quality is one of the most relevantfactors influencing student learning and affecting human capital formation. Attracting the best candidates to the teaching profession has become central to improving education systems around the world. In my second chapter, I assess the effectiveness of an ability-based scholarship on attracting top-performing students into teaching majors. My third chapter is joint work with Miguel Sarzosa and Ricardo Espinoza. We studyhow free college, a policy that has been gaining momentum in Latin America, affects self-selection into teaching majors. We find that free college decreased the relative returns to pursuing a teaching career, making it substantially less popular among relatively poor high-performing students who now self-select into programs with higher returns. We also find that the reform reduced the academic qualifications of the pool of students entering teaching programs, which can negatively affect long-term teacher quality.Item Higher education, human capital spillovers and economic growth(2019) Qi, Yuandong; Leonard, Kenneth; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Many theorists suggest that the concentration of human capital in a region helps improve productivity for firms and individuals by creating social learning chances for workers. Such human capital spillovers can generate innovations and new ideas which are the driving forces for sustainable long-term growth. My dissertation provides systematic empirical evidence for human capital spillovers using micro-level data from China. In chapter 1, I provide motivation, a discussion of identification challenges, a literature review on human capital spillovers, a description of the data used in my dissertation, a description of the Chinese economy, and a preview of my identification strategies and findings. In chapter 2, I investigate the effect of aggregate human capital on productivity in an indirect way. I compare the wages of otherwise similar individuals that live in cities with different level of college share. The resulting estimates indicate that workers working in cities with higher human capital do have higher wages than otherwise similar workers in cities with lower human capital. Interestingly, I find that both skilled and unskilled workers benefit from the increase in human capital, but unskilled workers benefit more than skilled workers. This is may be due to imperfect substitution between skilled and unskilled workers. In chapter 3, I take a constant-composition approach, which in theory sepa- rates imperfect substitution effect from spillovers by holding the skill composition in the workforce constant, to further investigate the existence and magnitude of human capital spillovers. The results show that the relationship between workers’ wages and city-level human capital remains positive and statistically significant. The es- timates from individual wage data indicate that a one percentage point increase in the share of college-educated workers in the population is associated with a 1.4 to 3.6 percent increase in wages. In chapter 4, I take a direct approach to estimate the impact of aggregate human capital on productivity. Specifically, I apply a first differenced instrumental variable model to a balanced firm panel data to study the impact of an increase in the share of college-educated workers on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP). I find that one percentage point increase in college share in a city increases firms’ TFP by 0.8 to 2.1 percent. Private firms are more responsive to overall human capital than state firms, and the human capital spillovers are stronger in denser and larger cities. Chapter 5 concludes.