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Technological Impacts on Return to Education in Brazil

by Yirui Zhao

Abstract 

The wage return to education has been studied for a long time. Acemoglu and Autor (2010) connect the decrease of medium-level job opportunities in the U.S. with technological advances. Their theoretical model predicts that if technology replaces routine jobs, workers with medium-level skills will experience decreases in wages relative to both high-skill workers (who become more productive with the improved technology) and low-skill workers (who can less easily be replaced since their work is not routine). Moreover, their theoretical model predicts that if medium-skill workers are closer substitutes for low-skill workers than they are for high-skill workers, the relative return of high-skill workers to low-skill workers should increase. Using education as proxy of skill (Acemoglu & Autor, 2012), this paper checks if these three predictions about relative wage returns to education also hold in Brazil. This paper finds that the impact of technological change on the Brazilian formal labor market between 1986 and 2010 is consistent with predicted changes in the return to education for medium-skill workers relative to both low and high skill workers. The impact is consistent with predicted changes in the return to education for high-skill workers relative to low-skill workers when Lula’s presidency is considered in the model.

Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Faculty Advisor
Daniel Xu, Faculty Advisor

JEL classification: J24; J31; O33

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Long-term Benefits of Breastfeeding: Impact on Education in Indonesia

By Natalie Gulrajani

Abstract
Healthy breastfeeding behaviors have been shown to produce many long-term health benefits
including improved cognition. This study uses data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey
(IFLS) to assess the longitudinal impact of exclusive breastfeeding duration and early life
breastfeeding practices on education. Though a positive correlation was found between
breastfeeding duration and years of schooling in naïve regressions, the significance and
magnitude of this effect decreased when household fixed effects were added. A stronger
correlation was found between early life breastfeeding and schooling, with income-stratified
results demonstrating that poorer households are potentially subject to greater benefits.

Professor Erica Field, Faculty Advisor

JEL classification: I0; I12; I21

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Bridging the Persistence Gap: An Investigation of the Underrepresentation of Female and Minority Students in STEM Fields

By Aaditya Jain and Bailey Kaston

Prior literature on mismatch theory has concentrated primarily on minority students, whose lower average levels of pre-enrollment preparedness tend to discourage them from persisting in STEM fields as often as their non-minority counterparts at selective universities. Our study shifts the focus to the persistence gap between men and women, invoking social cognitive career theory to investigate how factors beyond preparedness – such as self-confidence – cause women to switch out of selective STEM programs at higher rates than men. Using the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we investigate the drivers of STEM persistence for all students and arrive at two main conclusions. First, higher levels of STEM preparedness are more beneficial to STEM persistence at selective universities, confirming mismatch theory in the sample. We then simulate the counterfactual scenario and find that 33% of students at selective schools would have been more likely to persist in STEM had they attended less selective schools, a figure that reaches 50% for underconfident female students. This observation ties to our second conclusion – that underconfidence in math relative to one’s true performance decreases the likelihood of STEM persistence for all students at selective universities, and that female students at selective schools are more likely to be underconfident than their male counterparts. Our findings suggest that the appropriate policy solution to reduce STEM attrition rates among women should then become a two-pronged approach: (1) more selective universities should better support the STEM self-confidence levels of female students, and (2) home environments should ideally cultivate that self-confidence long before women even reach college. In our final set of analyses, we thus explore the factors that drive math overconfidence in the first place, and conclude that both student and parental biases against female STEM ability are detrimental to the STEM self-confidence of female students.

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Advisors: Professor Peter Arcidiacono, Professor Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: I2, I24, I26

Cashing Out the Benefits: The Spillover Impact of Cash Transfers on Household Educational Investment

By Mitchell Garrett Ochse and Matheus Dias

Using electricity price, generation, installed capacity, and carbon price data from the European Union from January 2015 to December 2018, this study finds that the carbon pricing in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) incentivizes electricity sector carbon emission reductions through renewable energy deployment only for economically advanced EU members. Transitional economies show a weak to modest carbon emission increase despite a common carbon price. This study estimates an electricity supply curve, or merit order, for 24 EU ETS members using a Tobit regression model and analyzes changes in this curve using a linear bspline. These shifts provide insight into how carbon pricing affected energy generation, price, and CO2 emissions for two distinct categories of EU member states. The advanced category as a whole saw a strong electricity sector decrease in carbon emissions, both over time and from carbon pricing, while the transitional category as a whole saw a weak increase. This indicates that advanced EU members in Northern, Western, and Central Europe likely sold permits to transitional ones in Southern and Eastern Europe. While these findings may initially reflect the gains from trade of carbon emissions, permits inherent in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme’s design, the implications of how these two distinct groups have changed electricity generation present challenges to the ultimate long-term goal of EU-wide carbon neutrality by 2050, particularly in transitional economies’ electricity sectors.

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Advisors: Professor Xiao Yu Wang, Professor Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: C93; I21; I24

The Impact of Violence in Mexico on Education and Labor Outcomes: Do Conditional Cash Transfers Have a Mitigating Effect?

By Hayley Jordan Barton

This research explores the potential mitigating effect of Mexico’s conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on the education and labor impacts of increased homicide rates. Panel data models are combined with a difference-in-differences approach to compare children and young adults who receive cash transfers with those who do not. Results are very sensitive to specification, but Oportunidades participation is shown to be positively associated with educational attainment regardless of homicide increases. Homicides are associated with decreases in likelihood of school enrollment and compulsory education completion; however, they also correspond with increases in educational attainment, with a larger effect for Oportunidades non-recipients.

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Advisors: Dr. Charles Becker, and Dr. Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: C23; D15; I20; I38; J24

Analyzing Student and Family-Level Effects on a Family’s Contributions to Fund a College Education

By Justin T. Rosenblum and John H. Zipf

We investigate the efficiency of the current financial aid system for prospective college students. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form reviews a family’s financial information and universities review a student’s academic prowess, but neither fully examines students and their family’s qualitative factors such as parents’ highest education level or intended major. Using the National Center for Education Statistics’ National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, we investigate academic, financial, and familial characteristics to determine if they impact a student’s level of private loans relative to their total cost of attendance. We find that students with parents who did not receive a college degree are adversely affected by the current financial aid system. In particular, these students take out a greater amount of private loans relative to their total cost of attendance all else equal. Our finding has wider policy implications; changing the current financial aid system to assist disadvantaged students could help reduce intergenerational education inequalities. In addition, colleges could reach a broader range of students by helping
the students that currently struggle the most to pay tuition.

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Advisors: Michelle Connolly, Hugh Macartney and Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: I2, I22, I23

Measuring the Long-term Effects of Orphanhood

By Nicholas Thomas Gardner

This paper works towards developing the narrative of orphans whose parent or parents died from natural disaster. By taking advantage of the unanticipated nature of death from the 2004
Indonesian tsunami, orphanhood can be treated as much closer to random than similar literature using data centered on HIV/AIDS related deaths. We use a community level fixed effects model to attempt to derive a causal relationship between orphanhood and both education and log wages. Our models suggest that orphaned males aged 14 and older at baseline complete 1-2 fewer years of education than their cohorts. The adverse effects persist in the long-term, as these orphans earn 26% less than non-orphan cohorts.

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Advisors: Duncan Thomas and Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: I24, I25, I31, J24, J31

Protecting Long Term Human Capital in a Financial Crisis: Evidence from the Indonesian Family Life Survey

By Sachet Bangia

The East Asian Financial crisis of the late nineties made its way to Indonesia in January 1998. Using longitudinal data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (1993-2015), this paper studies the impact of the crisis on education attainment. In the midst of economic upheaval, households with liquid assets at hand, particularly gold, were better able to maintain per capita expenditures. Tracing out the impact of gold ownership on completed education, I find that the effect is most apparent on 7 to 12 year olds in Indonesia. Using within-household variation in completed education, I find that a divergence in the use of gold to protect child education: urban households direct it towards older children, while rural households do the opposite. This result is best understood by considering the effect of the crisis on opportunity costs of schooling. In urban areas, wages declined sharply, while in rural areas, the return to food production increased dramatically. Thus older children in rural areas would be more likely to exit schooling during the crisis, and consequently not benefit from gold ownership in the household. The evidence examined indicates that families sought to protect their children’s long-term human capital, but in households with fewer resources, the children suffered permanent consequences.

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Advisor: Duncan Thomas | JEL Codes: D1, I2, O0

Perceptions vs. Reality: School Climate in Miami-Dade County

By Makda Habtom and Yuliya Kozina

This study looks at a sample of Miami-Dade public middle and high schools. The aim is to see if school incidents and perceived safety can be predicted by school-level diversity and other school characteristics. At first, it is found that higher diversity is associated with higher incidents and lower perceived safety. Then, looking at differences over time, it is found that diversity is no longer statistically significant. Instead, increases in school population and free/reduced price lunch over time is significantly associated with an increase in incidents. However, only an increase in the school population is associated with a decrease in perceived safety scores.

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Advisor: Hugh Macartney | JEL Codes: I2, I20

The Effect of Federal Regulations on the Outcomes of Auctions for Oil and Gas Leaseholds

By Artur Shikhaleev

This thesis attempts to analyze the impact of the differences in regulatory frameworks that govern state-owned and federally-owned lands on the outcomes of auctions for oil and natural gas leaseholds in the state of New Mexico. The analysis tries to isolate the effect of ownership by controlling for auction structure, leasehold characteristics, and prices of underlying resources. Given past research, the hypothesis is that stricter regulations carry a heavier cost to buyers, so the expectation is that federally-owned leaseholds, which are more regulated, are traded at a discount to state-owned leaseholds. However, the result of this thesis is contradictory to the hypothesis. The conclusion is that stricter regulations do not lead to a discounted auction price for an oil and gas leasehold.

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Advisor: James Roberts, Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: C12, C21, Q35, Q58 | Tagged: Auction, Education, environment, federal, natural gas, Oil, Regulation, State

Questions?

Undergraduate Program Assistant
Matthew Eggleston
dus_asst@econ.duke.edu

Director of the Honors Program
Michelle P. Connolly
michelle.connolly@duke.edu