Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
5 results
Search Results
Item Use of private supplementary instruction (private tutoring) by U.S. high school students: Its use and academic consequences(2007-04-25) Nishio, Masako; Croninger, Robert; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this study is to examine a rapidly growing educational phenomenon in the United States: private supplementary instruction (private tutoring). This instruction is offered out-of-school time, focused on academic subjects, and provided mostly for a fee. Its primary goal is to help students prepare for college entrance examinations (advancement), or address difficulties in academic subjects (remedial). Using the concept of human capital as the primary theoretical framework, the study examines possible reasons for the use of private supplementary instruction and possible benefits that accrue to individuals from its use. The study examines if families with higher levels of educational aspirations or less academic satisfaction with their schools are more likely to use private supplementary instruction. It also considers whether students who use supplementary instruction have higher gains in mathematics achievement or higher likelihood of college acceptance. Data for this study come from the National Education Longitudinal Study and includes approximately 7,600 students who attended high school between 1990 and 1992. Students and parents were asked about the use of private supplementary instruction when students were 12th graders. Follow-up surveys in 1994 indicated students' post-secondary enrollment status two years later. Analyses of the use and effects of private supplementary instruction are calculated using OLS and logistic regressions. The research findings indicate that families with higher levels of educational aspirations are more likely to use advancement supplementary instruction, and doing so improves students' chance of college acceptance. Advancement instruction may also improve the academic performance of students, particularly students from high-income families. Use of remedial instruction, however, does not seem to improve academic performance or the likelihood of college acceptance for most students, though Asian Americans and African Americans may be exceptions. Family income also appears to play a role in both the use and effects of private supplementary instruction. Although human capital theory helps to explain specific aspects of private supplementary instruction, especially aspects associated with the use of advancement instruction, the study also demonstrates that issues related to use and effects of private supplementary instruction require additional theories to account for social and cultural factors.Item Essays On Labor Economics: Human Capital Risk And Labor Market Outcomes And Learning By Doing In Medicine(2006-06-06) Tristao, Ignez Miranda; Rust, John P.; Sanders, Seth; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation consists of two essays. In the first essay I show that there are substantial differences in unemployment durations and reemployment outcomes for workers coming from different occupations. I argue that this variation can be explained by differences in occupational employment risk, arising from two sources: (1) the diversification of occupational employment across industries; and (2) the volatility of industry employment fluctuations, including sectoral co-movements. I define and estimate a measure of occupational employment risk (OER), which I relate to unemployment durations and wage losses. My results indicate that unemployed workers in high employment risk occupations, as defined by the OER measure, have 5 percent lower hazard ratios of leaving unemployment to a job in the same occupation and have 5 percent higher wage losses upon reemployment than workers in low OER occupations. Among occupational switchers, workers in higher OER occupations have 11.5 percent higher wage losses than workers in lower OER occupations. In my second essay, I and my co-authors estimate the effect of physician's experience on health outcomes. It is a common belief that experience can improve the level of skills, which suggests that there may be some learning by doing with practice. Economists have tried to empirically determine the existence of learning by doing in the medical area, because of its important policy implications. However, it is difficult to define and measure health outcomes since they are affected by patient selection and underlying conditions, making it hard to disentangle learning by doing from other effects. In this paper, we use a 'clean-cut' medical procedure that allows us to overcome those confounding issues. We use refractive eye surgery, an operation with a well-defined eligibility criterion and objective measures of previous condition and posterior outcome, which depend minimally on post-surgical care. The data used in the study is a two-year longitudinal census of refractive surgery patients collected by us from individual patients' chart. We find that the learning is coming more from the improvement in the surgical center's ability to translate the surgical plan into the desired eyesight correction rather than from the accumulation of the physician experience.Item HUMAN CAPITAL, SOCIAL CAPITAL, AND EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION: HOW DOES THE SLICE OF PIE EXECUTIVES APPROPRIATE COMPARE TO WHAT THEY BRING TO THE TABLE?(2004-11-24) Di Gregorio, Dante Dominic; Smith, Ken G; Stevens, Cynthia K; Management and Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Prior research has identified the manner in which human capital, social capital, and other intangible resources create value for organizations. Among such resources, those contributed by a firm's top managers have been singled out as particularly important for the generation and preservation of competitive advantage. However, the costs incurred to gain access to these resources, which reside at the individual and relational levels rather than at the firm level, are rarely considered. In this dissertation, I focus on individual executives as the level of analysis instead of the traditional view of firms as unitary actors in order to study intra-organizational value appropriation. I focus on the most direct and economically significant form of value appropriation by top managers: executive compensation. I introduce a theoretical framework linking executive compensation to executive-level intangible resources including human capital and social capital. I distinguish between generic and firm-specific forms of capital due to differences in the causal mechanisms linking each type of resource to compensation. Generic resources convey market power and are directly appropriable by executives. Firm-specific resources have no value outside the firm and therefore do not convey market power, yet they will convey a different sort of power derived from familiarity, visibility, and legitimacy. Drawing on a sample of 71 executives from 36 publicly-traded US firms in high-technology industries, I provide empirical results that are broadly supportive of three of four hypotheses. Executive compensation is found to be positively related to generic human capital (measured by the breadth of executives' experience across multiple industries), generic social capital (external network size, external network range) and firm-specific social capital (the strength of intra-TMT ties, internal network size, criticality of internal ties, criticality of external ties). I find no evidence linking executive compensation to firm-specific human capital. These results demonstrate the hazard of focusing on the value created by human capital and social capital without also considering the costs firms incur to access those resources.Item Labor Market Skill, Firms and Workers(2004-08-23) Nestoriak, Nicole; Haltiwanger, John C; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The role of skilled labor in the modern economy and its importance in explaining trends in wage inequality and productivity has been a focus of a broad strand of research in economics. Labor is an input into production that is very different from capital or materials. One key difference is that workers must decide where they are going to live, and in making that decision, they thereby limit the opportunity set of jobs available to them. In turn, firms must also make a location decision that affects their access to labor and potentially affects their decisions on the technology they will adopt. While many economists have studied issues related to technology adoption and worker skill broadly, the geographic element is rarely developed. This dissertation exploits the variation in the concentration in skilled labor across local labor markets in a sample of U.S. States to study how movements of workers affect the distribution of skill across geography, the investment decisions by firms in reaction to the variation in skill and finally the effect of this variation on worker's wages across local labor markets. Given that skilled labor is an important force in the economy, variation in the concentration of skilled workers across local labor markets may also play an important role. The research set out here confirms this hypothesis. Workers locate non-randomly across geography and their movements reinforce the existing distribution of skill across local labor markets. As predicted by a model of endogenous technology, firms react to the skill level of their local labor market. Variation in firm level investment can be partially explained by variation in the availability of skilled labor. The empirical work shows that among a sample of manufacturing firms in 1992, a one standard deviation increase in county skill leads to a 10% increase in firm level investment in computers. Finally, highly skilled workers receive higher wages in metro areas with strong concentrations of skill. Deeper examination of the data shows that this wage gap is largely due to higher returns to skill in highly skilled areas.Item The Role of Capital-Skill Complementarities in Child Labor & Schooling(2004-06-18) Chamarbagwala, Rubiana Merwan; Betancourt, Roger R; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)We explore complementarities between parents' investment in their children's human capital and firms' investment in physical capital as a determinant of child labor and schooling in developing economies. In the first essay, we develop a theoretical model where human and physical capital investments are shown to be decreasing in firms' cost of investing in skill-biased capital, increasing in the quality of education, and decreasing in the cost of education. Our contribution is two-fold. First, when there is a unique equilibrium, there is an unambiguous improvement in the welfare of all agents in response to policies that improve the quality of education or lower the cost of education or skill-biased capital. Second, this welfare improvement can be achieved by policies that target only a proportion of workers or firms. In the second essay, we test the theoretical proposition that human capital investments respond to changes in the returns to education in India. Using National Sample Survey data, we first estimate the rates of return to primary, middle, high school, and college education for males and females in each Indian state for four separate years - 1983, 1988, 1993, and 1999. The response of children's participation in child labor and schooling to the rates of return to primary and middle school is then examined. We find that child labor amongst both boys and girls, falls in response to higher rates of return to education. However, only boys' participation in school increases in response to higher rates of return to education. In the third essay, we first examine changes in relative wages and returns to education in India from 1983 to 1999, which coincides with India's liberalization of trade and investment. We then conduct a simple demand and supply analysis using the non-parametric method proposed by Katz & Murphy (1992) to examine alternative explanations for changes in relative wages in India. We find that relative demand changes contributed significantly to changes in relative wages and that international trade in manufactures predicts increases in the relative demand for both high-skilled men and women.