Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item ESSAYS ON INNOVATION, HUMAN CAPITAL, AND SMALL BUSINESSES(2023) Xue, Jing; Maksimovic, Vojislav; Yang, Liu; Business and Management: Finance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation comprises three essays that explore how human and social capital influence innovation and promote firm dynamism, particularly for small businesses. It studies how firms' uptake of projects is shaped by the local environments, such as superstar firms, talent clusters, and local social capital. In the first essay, I study the labor channel underlying the agglomeration of innovation activity. It identifies the reallocation of human capital as a key channel of agglomeration spillovers for innovative firms. To measure agglomeration spillovers, I study how R&D labs in different local labor markets respond differently to scientific breakthroughs, which create large and unexpected shocks to innovation productivity in certain technology categories. I document four main findings. i), following scientific breakthroughs, affected labs in thicker local labor markets (i.e., commuting zones with more inventors innovating in a certain field) produce more patents and higher-quality patents, consistent with positive agglomeration spillovers. ii), the increase in patenting is mostly attributed to new hires rather than incumbent inventors. iii), the thick labor market effect is concentrated in states and industries where there is lower enforceability of non-compete agreements and labor is more mobile. iv), using textual analysis to identify lab-level exposure to scientific breakthroughs, I find that inventors are reallocated to labs that are more favorably affected by shocks, which helps labs in thicker labor markets to more easily bring in inventors working in the same niche fields and having a diverse knowledge base. Taken together, these results point to labor mobility as a key force in explaining why innovative firms cluster and suggest that the clustering of firms in thick labor markets can foster corporate innovation by facilitating the productivity-enhancing reallocation of human capital following scientific breakthroughs. In the second essay, I identify the entry effects of top innovative firms on incumbent innovation. I exploit the inter-temporal variation in patenting activities of local inventors in chosen commuting zones that attracted the firm headquarters and in runner-up commuting zones that were finalists of location choice. Treated and control groups have similar trends prior to the entry, while the local inventors in the chosen zones apply 6.7% more patents, gain 16.8% more top patents, and receive 11.6% more citations. Entry effects are stronger among local inventors who are technologically or socially closer to the entering firm, after controlling for innovation incentives and labor mobility. Social closeness, isolated from technological proximity, consistently explains the innovation gains, which suggests knowledge diffusion is the important channel for local innovation productivity spillovers. In the third essay, we investigate why small businesses exploit business opportunities better in some areas than others. In a sample of 1.2 million consumer-facing establishments, social capital predicts the uptake of risk-free loans controlling for close-by bank branches, income, and education. One standard deviation increase in the social capital metric accounts for 20 percent of the variation in uptake across zip codes, surpassing the impact of a bank branch within 1000 yards. Strong social capital benefits large, low-growth stores in less-dynamic areas, whereas bank branches benefit small, high-growth stores in more-dynamic areas. Virtual connections have the greatest effect on uptake in already advantaged locations.Item THE ROLE OF THE SOCIAL PROTECTION SYSTEM “CHILE CRECE CONTIGO” ON CHILDREN’S DEVELOPMENT(2022) Echenique, Juan Agustin; Bhargava, Alok; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In April 2007, the Government of Chile established a comprehensive support system for early childhood named ”Chile Crece Contigo” (ChCC). This social protection system was the first one of its class in Latin America. However, ten years later, the empirical evidence about the benefits of this policy is still scarce. This dissertation looks to fill that knowledge gap and answer broader questions about promoting skills formation in the first years of life. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the complex structure of the comprehensive support system Chile Crece Contigo, revises the literature that argues the need for this program, and finally revises the existing evidence about this policy. In Chapter 2, I study a novel service offered as part of the comprehensive early childhood support system Chile Crece Contigo: the stimulation workshops. This service consists of workshops for children and their parents designed to foster and accelerate the learning process of those lagging in their developmental benchmarks based on psycho-motor evaluation. The paper exploits variations in the provision of the service (only children with lags in development are offered the referral to sensory rooms) and non-compliance in treatment attendance to test if the treatment can meet their target of closing the gap in human capital formation between children who received help for enhancing their development trajectory and those who followed the usual path of development. Based on information from Electronic Health Records from an urban district in Santiago, Chile, I document in first place take-up rate behavior based on observable characteristics and baseline evaluations indicating positive sorting into the treatment. Second, I show how the stimulation services offered by Chile Crece Contigo have a higher rate of effectiveness in reducing developmental lags in children with lower test scores at baseline. The average difference for children diagnosed with developmental lags at baseline ranges between 0.7-0.4 standard deviations between 8mo-18mo and 1.0-0.5 standard deviations for 18-36mo. These results suggest that the effectiveness indicator used by policy-makers underestimates the returns of the intervention due to its heterogeneity. Second, efforts to increase the take-up rates for children close to the cutoff values are needed to improve the overall returns of the intervention. Chapter 3 studies the effects of a comprehensive early childhood support system on human capital accumulation. Specifically, we explore differences in educational achievement of the first generations of children exposed to the comprehensive child development support system ”Chile Crece Contigo.” To study this, we exploit the gradual implementation of the policy and the age eligibility requirements to estimate the returns of availability of the policy on data from seven cohorts (2012-2018) of fourth-grade students in Chile. We find sizable positive effects in mathematics (0.21 of a standard deviation) and language (0.23 of astandard deviation) test scores for municipalities that started the program during or before their prenatal stage compared to children that the program began when they were older than sixty months. Estimates from an event-study design show that the exposure returns dissipated for children thirty-six months old or older when the policy started. This result is consistent with the schedule of interventions and early detection instruments established. When we look at the difference in the returns to exposure across gender and socioeconomic status, we find evidence that (i) a comprehensive child support system has higher returns on boys, which could be explained partially by differences in access to need-based services, (ii) these differences across gender differences occur in children with higher levels of exposure, and (iii) we do not find relevant differences between students classified as low-socioeconomic background and not classified in this category.Item Competition and Prosocial Incentives: Essays on the Role of Gender When Choosing to Compete for Others(2021) King, Benjamin Charles; Agarwal, Rajshree; Starr, Evan P; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines how prosocial and selfish incentives affect individuals' willingness to compete as a critical behavioral choice, and the role of gender in this relationship. Understanding more about this connection is key, as men are more competitive than women, on average, and higher levels of competitiveness are correlated with positive career outcomes. Using insights from economics and psychology, I test and expand theory that individuals become more willing to compete when the rewards benefit a charity or another individual. I suggest practical implications for organizational designers who seek to reduce gender gaps in wages and achievement.Item ESSAYS ON DISPLACED WORKERS AND RESIDENTIAL MIGRATION(2016) Ueda, Ken Masahiro; Hellerstein, Judith; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I explore how workers’ human capital, local industry composition, and business cycles affect employment outcomes and residential migration for job losers and other workers. I first examine whether the poor employment outcomes of job losers are due to a lack of jobs that require their human capital within their local labor market. I answer this question by analyzing the extent to which the industry composition in the job loser’s local labor market affects employment outcomes when job loss occurs during expansions and during recessions. I find that if job losers reside in an area with a high employment concentration of their original industry of employment, they are 2.1-2.8 percent more likely to be re-employed at another job if job loss occurs during an expansion; I find an insignificant relationship in most specifications when job loss occurs during a recession, and in some specifications I even find a negative relationship between industry concentration and employment. I conclude that the industry composition within an area matters for job losers, since firms are more willing to hire workers from within their own industry, as these workers have more relevant accumulated human capital. However, firms are less likely to hire during a recession, making job losers’ human capital less important for job finding. Next, Erika McEntarfer, Henry Hyatt, and I examine whether the business cycle affects earnings changes for job losers, and the factors that explain these differences across time. We find that job losers who lost their job during the Great Recession have earnings changes that are 10 percent more negative relative to other job losers from other periods. This result is driven primarily by longer nonemployment lengths and worse subsequent job matches. Finally, Erika McEntarfer, Henry Hyatt, Alexandria Zhang, and I explore the extent to which residential migration is driven by job opportunities. We use four databases and find that changes in job moves explain some of the changes in residential migration, but the relationship is not as strong as previously documented. We find that migration patterns differ across databases, with some databases documenting steeper declines and more cyclicality.Item Shocks and Human Capital in Developing Countries(2015) Szott, Aaron; Hellerstein, Judith K; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I begin my dissertation by introducing the following two chapters. I start out by describing the basic theory underlying economists' historical interest in the effects of shocks in developing countries. I then briefly review the empirical literature on household responses to shocks and outline how it is reasonable to expect that even recurring, non-exotic shocks have substantial permanent effects on affected young peoples' completed human capital stocks. Next, I describe the contributions that the following two chapters of this dissertation make and how they are similar with respect to their use of nationally representative household survey data, their policy relevance, and the way they use basic economic theory and contextual knowledge to uncover meaningful impacts of shocks on different groups of young people. Finally, I conclude this introductory chapter by considering whether or not it should be regarded as a surprise that shocks in developing countries can be allowed by households to impact affected children's human capital stocks the way they do, despite the large returns associated with human capital investments. The second chapter considers the permanent effects of rainfall shocks on adults' completed human capital stocks. Existing research suggests that health and education investments in children are affected by aggregate income shocks, but there is considerably less evidence on what the effects of many years' worth of such shocks are on individuals' completed human capital stocks. I contribute to this literature by studying the effects of the number and timing of all the unusually wet and dry years over the first 21 years of rural West African individuals' lives on their likelihood of being literate and their completed educational attainment. I use historical rainfall data merged with nationally representative household surveys conducted in 12 countries, and I find that both wet and dry years have substantial negative impacts on women's human capital and smaller positive impacts on men's: The average effect of wet and dry rainfall shocks over the first 21 years of life is a 22 percent decrease in females' likelihood of being literate and a 10 percent increase in males'. I argue that this pattern of results is consistent with existing research on how West African females and males work and acquire human capital. The third chapter provides evidence on how children in different types of households are affected by food price shocks. While people in poor countries report that inflation is one of their primary concerns, there is not much evidence on how they are actually affected by it. In particular, it is not clear how food (along with other) price inflation affects individuals in net food producing and net food consuming households. I use four highly comparable household surveys collected in Egypt to examine how children's weights-for-height evolved over time and in the face of the food price crisis of 2008, and I utilize data on region of residence and parents' occupation to examine how changes over time differed by household net food consumption status. I find that despite several years' worth of solid economic growth in the run-up to 2008, most region- and parental occupation-based groups of Egyptian children's weights-for-height had not increased at all since 2005 (for example). Quantile regression results reveal that the lightest children in 2008 were considerably lighter than the lightest children in 2005, and also that children in those households most likely to have been net food producing seem to have been more negatively affected by high food prices than children in most other kinds of households. High food prices seem to have offset any possible beneficial effects of growth for children in the poorest households.Item Predictors of Bachelor's Degree Completion and the Returns to College Student Employment: An Application of Propensity Score Matching(2014) Medellin, Richard Jay; Titus, Marvin A.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawing from Bean's (1990) student attrition model and human capital theory (Becker, 1993; Mincer, 1974), this study examined the relationships between college student employment, bachelor's degree completion, and post-college salary outcomes. Using NCES Beginning Postsecondary Student Longitudinal Study (BPS:04/09) data, the investigation was conducted in separate analytic phases involving logistic regression, propensity score matching, and fixed-effects regression techniques. The application of propensity score matching addressed the selection bias present in prior studies to refine the current understanding of the returns to college student employment. The phase one results indicate many variables included in the analysis were associated with degree completion; most notably among them are the distance students live from campus, students' level of college engagement, their college academic performance, and work activities during college. The results suggest that living on-campus, active engagement in clubs, study groups, and interaction with faculty are positively associated with degree completion. The results also indicate that working during college, up to 20 hours per week, is positively related to degree completion. Conversely, working in excess of 30 hours per week is negatively associated with completing a college degree. The phase two results indicate several variables were associated with college students' future salaries, and include students' work activities during college, their institution's admissions selectivity, college degree major, and the relationship student's degree major has with their post-college job. The results indicate that working in excess of 30 hours per week while in college is positively associated with students' future earnings. The results also indicate that attending institutions with higher levels of admissions selectivity is positively related with post-college earnings. Student degree major and the relationship of students' college majors to their future jobs were also positively related to their post-college salary. The results reveal college students' participation in higher education and their work activities are not entirely antithetical. This study illustrates that under certain conditions, working during college may be supportive of students' educational pursuits and financially beneficial to students' post-college careers. This conclusion has important implications for academic advising and college career center practices and improves our knowledge pertaining to the working college student.Item The Changing Role of Human Resources in Urban Schools: Perceptions of Human Resources Leaders in the Recruitment and Retention of Quality Teachers and Principals(2014) Merry, Darlene; Parham, Carol S; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Educators and policymakers have faced persistent challenges in closing achievement gaps between low-income and minority students in urban school districts and their peers with greater financial resources and from majority backgrounds. Human Resources Leaders must work to ensure that they are implementing strategic actions that will result in recruiting and retaining highly effective teachers and principals in our most disadvantaged school districts. This qualitative study examines the perceptions of three Human Resources Leaders from urban school districts engaged in a cohort learning experience about strategic actions they have implemented to improve teacher and leader quality in their school districts. The cohort experience, with the pseudonym of the Urban Schools Human Resources Improvement Project, involved ten school districts in a learning experience over a three-year period of time. The findings from this study identify the high impact actions of three Human Resources Leaders from urban school districts engaged in the Urban Schools Human Resources Improvement Project. Data was gathered through the use of a case study methodology using purposeful sampling to identify the Human Resources Leaders in the project who met a set of criteria based on years in their positions, implementation level of the work of the Project, and their leadership experiences outside of the educational field. The Odden Framework for Strategic Management of Human Capital provided a construct through which the strategic actions of the Human Resources Leaders could be examined. Findings from this study revealed that there was evidence to suggest that Human Resources Leaders' strategic actions were aligned with the Odden framework. The Human Resources Leaders indicated that having a clear district goal and strategy drives the work of Human Resources to design the roles of high quality teachers and principals and select candidates who have the competencies and motivations that match the role expectations; they identified numerous strategies for recruitment and retention that are promising in urban school districts; and having a context that supports strong selection, performance management, and compensation of high quality candidates will improve the conditions for students in urban school settings.Item Essays on Transatlantic Differences in Taxation, Redistribution and Provision of Public Goods(2013) Torul, Orhan; Drazen, Allan; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates differences between the U.S. and Europe in the levels of taxation, redistribution, provision of public goods, and perception of fairness in income inequality. The first chapter concentrates on the differences between the U.S. and Scandinavia in higher education, and asks how it is possible that the U.S. has considerably more unequal higher educational attainment, higher reliance on private education and lower taxes than Nordic Europe, given similar political institutions. To address this question, I develop a parsimonious overlapping generations model in which agents can choose between public and private education. I first show that for a given tax rate difference of 7 percent, the model can deliver the observed educational Transatlantic differences, without having to rely on cross-country differences in preferences, parameters or other unorthodox elements. Next, I show the model can provide insight into how either the U.S. or the Nordic tax regimes could receive political consent. My explanation is due to the fact that per-capita output and other macroeconomic variables are U-shaped in taxes, both in the model and in the cross-country data. The economic intuition behind this finding is that while at low tax rates an increase in taxes and public education provision dampen human capital accumulation due to marked drops in private education attainment, at high tax rates public education provision gets sufficiently large that a majority of the population prefers public over private education, and further increases in taxes boost public education attainment more than they reduce private one. The second chapter incorporates the Transatlantic differences in perceptions into the picture and asks how the fact that a majority of Europeans believe income differences are primarily due to luck while a majority of Americans attribute such differences to the role of effort and skill reconciles with Transatlantic macroeconomic differences. I extend the model from the first chapter to include two sources of individual income differences: an inborn competence shock which affects labor supply choice and education decisions, and a luck shock on income, which is orthogonal to decision rules and inborn abilities. I find that low taxes coupled with low public education provision, as in the U.S. case, induce a large impact of inborn competence on schooling and labor supply, which in turn implies that a large share of the U.S. income differences are due to skill, education and effort. By contrast, a combination of high taxes and high public education, as in Europe, minimizes total income inequality and differences due to effort and inborn competence, and magnifies the impact of luck on inequality, in accordance with the existing beliefs. I also show that the U-shaped behavior of macro variables and welfare gains in taxes, as documented in the first chapter, carries over to this model, thereby providing insight into the political sustainability of macroeconomic variables and perceptions.Item WORKING FOR PAY OR RAISING A FAMILY? THREE PAPERS ON WOMEN'S WORK EXPECTATIONS AND MARKET OUTCOMES(2013) García-Manglano, Javier; Bianchi, Suzanne M; Kahn, Joan R; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the gender revolution of the 1970s, we have learned a great deal about the determinants of female employment. One of the themes most frequently discussed in the literature refers to the role played by work expectations in shaping women's market achievement. As a supply-side explanation for women's market performance, work expectations emphasize women's internalized attitudes and preferences, which might lead some of them to make work and family decisions that will curtail their options down the road. To this point, most scholars have favored demand-side and contextual accounts of women's market achievement; these highlight mechanisms such as workplace discrimination against women or mothers, and similar structural constraints embedded in the larger cultural, social and economic systems. In this dissertation, I use longitudinal data to expand our understanding of women's work expectations in three directions. First, I revisit the neoclassical human capital argument's claim that individuals with low work expectations will invest less in human capital and choose jobs with lower penalties for work interruptions. I find support for this argument: work expectations are relatively good predictors of early baby-boom women's human capital accumulation, job characteristics, employment rates, hourly wages, and occupational prestige. Second, I explore variation in the role of work expectations across two cohorts of American women, early and late baby boomers. I find that rapid social change made it easier for later cohorts to absorb the negative market consequences of holding low work expectations in young adulthood. Third, I model the life-course employment trajectories of early baby boomers from ages 20 to 54, and find that a significant proportion of them exhibited intricate work patterns throughout adulthood, with periods in which they were focused on their career and other periods in which they seemed to pursue other life interests. My research shows that -when observed over time- most women's work behavior is characterized by a high degree of complexity. This calls for a more nuanced approach to the study of women's market performance, one that -together with the structural forces constraining their action- explicitly accounts for women's subjective expectations, preferences and attitudes towards work and family.