Essays in Human Capital in Developing Countries

Navarro-Sola, Laia

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-rfs8-4709

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Essays in Human Capital in Developing Countries

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This dissertation examines three empirical questions related to human capital in developing countries. Chapter 1 studies the educational and labor market impacts of the telesecundarias, Mexican secondary schools that use televisions to deliver instruction. In areas where there is an insufficient supply of qualified teachers, delivering instruction through technology may be a solution to meet the demand for education. To isolate the effects of telesecundarias, I exploit their staggered rollout from 1968 to present and across different geographical areas. I combine school-level construction data for all secondary schools in Mexico from the Ministry of Education with detailed individual-level data from the Employment and Occupation National Survey (ENOE) on labor market outcomes. I show that for every additional telesecundaria per 50 children, ten students enroll in junior secondary education and two pursue further education. This results in an average increase of an additional year of education. Additionally, there is a significant reduced-form increase in hourly income, partly driven by increased labor force participation, a shift away from the agricultural sector towards services, and a transition to the formal sector. Chapter 2 investigates the labor market returns to enrolling in junior secondary education---through telesecundarias---on earnings. I examine this question by leveraging the gradual telesecundaria expansion investigated in Chapter 1. I use it as an instrument for enrolling in secondary education, finding that an additional year of education after enrolling in a telesecundaria increases income on average twenty years after attending secondary education by 17.6%. A simple theoretical framework of sequential schooling choices highlights the main identification challenges and the cumulative nature of education returns, showing that the estimated returns combine the direct effect of attending telesecundarias and the effects of further schooling. I decompose these two effects by exploiting the differential proportion of individuals pursuing further education in locations with and without access to upper secondary schools. I find that 84% of the estimated returns come directly from junior secondary education, while the remaining 16% are returns to higher educational levels. Taken together, these findings indicate that attending junior secondary education through telesecundarias has large returns, even when no further education is available or pursued afterward. Chapter 3 is joint work with Diether W. Beuermann, C. Kirabo Jackson, and Francisco Pardo. We examine the following questions: Is a school’s impact on high-stakes test scores a good measure of its overall impact on students? Do parents value school impacts on tests, longer-run outcomes, or both? To answer the first question, we exploit quasi-random school assignments and data from Trinidad and Tobago. We construct exogenous instruments for each individual school and estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several short- and longer-run outcomes. Schools' impacts on high-stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on low-stakes tests, dropout, crime, teen motherhood, and formal labor market participation. To answer the second question, we link estimated school impacts to parents’ ranked lists of schools. We propose a modified multinomial logit model that allows one to infer preferences for school attributes even in some settings where choices are strategic. Parents of higher-achieving students value schools that improve high-stakes test scores conditional on average outcomes, proximity, and even peer quality. Parents also value schools that reduce crime and increase formal labor market participation. Most parents' preferences for school impacts on labor-market and crime outcomes are, as strong, or stronger than those for test scores. These results provide a potential explanation for recent findings that parent preferences are not strongly related to test-score impacts. They also suggest that evaluations based solely on test scores may be very misleading about the welfare effects of school choice.

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