Essays in Human Capital Development Across the Life Cycle: Understanding the Role of Teachers, Parents, Gender, and Occupations
Abstract
This thesis contains three chapters exploring skill accumulation in children and its valuation in adult workers. In Chapter 2, I leverage novel data available in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to show that early childhood education teachers' perceptions about non-cognitive (socio-emotional) delays in young children are not only influenced by children's own development, but also by the average level of development of other children in the neighbourhood. My research suggests a cascading effect of teachers' perceptions on maternal perceptions, and home and school environments. In Chapter 3 I investigate the expansion of female-favourable gaps in literacy in school-aged children, focusing on the role of time investment by mothers. I augment a household production and child skill accumulation model developed by Del Boca, Flinn, and Wiswall (2014) to account for gender-specific differences in the literacy production process, initial endowments, and parental preferences, and estimate it using the LSAC data. My findings suggest that the role of time investments by mothers in the expansion of literacy gender gaps may be limited, and these gaps are driven by other productivity differences. In Chapter 4 I focus on the human capital of adult workers and explore changes in returns to skills and quantities of human capital for workers in broad occupational groups specializing in abstract, manual, and routine tasks. I estimate the evolution of returns to occupation-specific human capital using the flat spot price identification method, which accommodates cohort quality changes over time. My findings are consistent with the skill-biased technical change explanation for the wage polarization in the U.S. between 1970 and 2022. Growing inequality at the top of the wage distribution is driven by the rise in the price of abstract relative to manual and routine human capital, while an increase in the quantity of manual relative to routine human capital drives the declining inequality at the bottom of the wage distribution.