Essays on the economics of human capital formation

Zou, Jian

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124550 Copy

Description

Title

Essays on the economics of human capital formation

Author(s)

Zou, Jian

Issue Date

2024-04-24

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Bernhardt, Daniel

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Bernhardt, Daniel

Committee Member(s)

• Marx, Benjamin
• Megalokonomou, Rigissa
• Weinstein, Russell

Department of Study

Economics

Discipline

Economics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Economics of Education
• Human Capital Formation, Peer Effects
• Teacher
• School Spending

Abstract

This dissertation addresses open questions regarding human capital on its measurement, causes, and consequences. The four interrelated chapters of the dissertation study how peers, peer parents, teachers, and school spending affect a student’s human capital formation. The first chapter studies how school spending impacts student achievement by exploiting the US interstate branching deregulation as state tax revenue shocks. Leveraging school finance data from universal school districts, our difference-in-differences estimation reveals that deregulation leads to an increase in per-pupil total revenue and expenditure. The rise in revenue is primarily attributed to higher state revenues, while the expenditure increase is more prominent in low-income school districts. Using restricted-use student assessments from the Nation’s Report Card, we find that deregulation results in improved student achievement, with no distributional effects evident across students’ ability, race, or free lunch status. We introduce an instrumental variables approach that accounts for dynamic treatment effects and estimate that a one-thousand-dollar increase in per-pupil spending leads to a 0.035 standard deviation improvement in student achievement. The second chapter studies the impact of peers’ persistence, a personality trait reflecting perseverance in the face of challenges and setbacks, on student achievement. Little is known about the impact of peer personality on human capital formation. Exploiting student-classroom random assignments in middle schools in China, I find having more persistent peers improves student achievement. I find three mechanisms: (i) an increase in students’ own persistence and self-disciplined behaviors, (ii) teachers exhibiting greater responsibility and patience, along with increased time spent on teaching preparation, and (iii) the formation of endogenous friendship networks characterized by academically successful peers and fewer disruptive peers, especially among students with similar levels of persistence. The third chapter revisits the peer parental education spillover literature. The educational background of peer parents is more than a proxy for peer quality. Exploiting random assignments in middle schools in China, we find a causal relationship between the average college attainment of classmates’ mothers and a student’s test score. Besides peer quality and teacher response, we identify the change in the mother’s parenting style as a mediating factor. The parental responses (time, money, and parenting style) also differ by family background, leading to heterogeneous spillover on the test score. Lastly, the fourth chapter investigates how a licensing policy that affects teacher labor supply could impact student achievement. The recent controversial roll-out of the educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) - a performance-based exam - raises the bar of initial teacher licensure in the US. We leverage the quasi-experimental setting of different adoption timing by states and analyze multiple data sources containing a national sample of prospective teachers and students of new teachers in the US. With extensive controls of concurrent policies, we find that the edTPA reduced prospective teachers in undergraduate programs, less-selective and minority-concentrated universities. Testing various specifications and sample criteria, we do not find evidence that the new license standard increased student test scores.

Graduation Semester

2024-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Jian Zou

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