Early Childhood Human Capital

Date
2015-12-01
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Abstract
This thesis consists of three essays examining the early childhood human capital. The first chapter sets out to identify the effect of sibling birth spacing on children's academic achievement and engagement in risky behaviours by using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). Some unobservable variables in the family such as parental personality or wealth can affect both spacing and a child's performance and may cause an endogeneity problem. To overcome this, I use family fixed effect to control for unobservable family-specific characteristics. The second chapter investigates the influence of the ``No Child Left Behind'' (NCLB) act, based not only on its own target but also on the unintended consequences of this act. More specifically, I evaluate the effect of this act on mathematics and reading using a new approach and investigate whether this act did, in fact, reduce the educational gap between different subgroups. Furthermore, I consider two aspects as unintended consequences of this act: first, the impact of the NCLB act on students' test scores in untargeted skills such as non-cognitive skills and science; and second, the effect on the distribution of students' test scores. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Kindergarten data set, I implement the difference-in-difference methodology between public schools receiving Title-I federal funding versus public schools not receiving federal funding because only Title-I public schools were penalized by this act. Moreover, since low and high performing students might be affected differently, I use the quantile regression to evaluate the distributional effect of this act. The third chapter explores the mechanisms behind the NCLB act. I consider two channels of change: improving teaching productivity and reallocating time at the expense of non-targeted courses. To investigate these two channels, I develop a model of a school optimization behavior and a production function of skill formation. The estimated parameters of the model, together with data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten, are used to conduct a counter-factual experiment to find time allocation in targeted and non-targeted skills if this act had not been implemented.
Description
Keywords
Education, Education--Early Childhood, Economics, Education
Citation
Zahedi, R. (2015). Early Childhood Human Capital (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25766