Browsing by Author "Calvi, Rossella"

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    Essays in Economics of Education
    (2022-04-21) Salvati, Andrea; Cunha, Flavio; Wolpin, Kenneth; Calvi, Rossella; Perrigne, Isabelle
    This dissertation consists of two chapters on topics in economics of education. In the first chapter, I develop and estimate an equilibrium model of endogenous instruction and student effort in order to empirically investigate the relationship between instructional choices, classroom composition, and student achievement in elementary school. The model allows teachers to vary in instructional ability and to value differently the achievement of students with different levels of prior knowledge. Using a unique dataset that combines school administrative data with rich information on instructional practices from five US school districts, I find that teachers attach a higher value to the achievement of students at lower quantiles of the distribution. I further explore the model’s implications by simulating a counterfactual scenario where I track students into classrooms based on prior test score performance. Results show that tracking has heterogeneous effects on students with different levels of prior knowledge. Moreover, the distribution of these effects depends on the mechanism used to assign teachers to classrooms. In particular, the combination of tracking with the assignment of high-ability teachers to lower tracks would benefit students at the bottom tercile of the distribution despite the lower level of peer quality. The second chapter (co-authored with Flavio Cunha and Kenneth Wolpin) reports the results of the evaluation of a parenting intervention developed and implemented by the Alief Independent School District in Texas. The goal of the intervention is to encourage and train parents to teach their children foundational skills for Pre-K. The results of a randomized controlled trial based on three yearly cohorts show that the program impacted parental investments and child development as measured by two different tests of school readiness. I go beyond reporting program impacts by building and estimating a model of parental choice of input levels. The model allows for a production function of knowledge that features individual-specific coefficients that capture the marginal productivity of parental inputs. I find that the mechanism posited for the program’s impact is validated by the model estimates.
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    Essays in Education Economics and Family Economics
    (2024-04-18) Hu, Qinyou; Cunha, Flavio; Calvi, Rossella; Tang, Xun; Perrigne, Isabelle; Thirkettle, Matthew; Fiel, Jeremy
    This dissertation contains three chapters in the fields of development economics and labor economics. In the first chapter, I highlight the social impact of empathy on school bullying reduction. I collect unique data by conducting a randomized control trial---a parent-directed empathy education intervention in middle schoolers in China. Program evaluation shows it reduces bullying by indirectly changing the network structure, making bullies less popular in the classrooms. I estimate a unified framework incorporating an empathy production function, a network formation model, and a social interaction model of the final bullying outcomes. I find that the social channel of empathy accounts for almost half of its human capital effect. Policy counterfactuals suggest that targeting bullies’ friends is more effective than targeting bullies directly. The second chapter (co-authored with Flavio Cunha, Yiming Xia, and Naibao Zhao) provides the context and a comprehensive introduction to the empathy intervention program. The program leads to more parental investment and higher empathy levels. Using a state-of-the-art generalized random forest method, we find more reductions in bullying for those with lower parental investment and academic stress. Cost analysis shows that reducing one bullying incident costs $16.30 for the intervention, suggesting a scalable and low-cost strategy to inform public policy on bullying prevention in other similar settings. In the third chapter, I develop a new approach to identify intrahousehold resource allocation and the extent of joint consumption for extended families using a collective household model. It allows for endogenous living arrangement decisions with fewer data requirements. Application to nationally representative household survey data in China reveals that the elderly are allocated the least resource shares, and women tend to be more altruistic in consumption sharing than men. I also confirm that co-residence households enjoy economic efficiency gains compared to nuclear households, but there is still room for explanations on why multi-generations choose to live together.
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    Essays in Family Economics
    (2023-04-12) Sozbir, Omer Faruk; Calvi, Rossella
    This dissertation consists of three chapters addressing several family economics questions pertaining to household consumption and labor supply decisions, and intra-household inequality. The first chapter is an investigation of the intra-household repercussions of changes in labor market conditions, focusing on the mass refugee migration from Syria to Turkey that has more adverse effects on the labor market outcomes of native women than of native men. Using a structural household labor supply model and addressing the endogeneity in refugees’ location choices with a distance instrument, I estimate the impact of refugee inflows on spouses’ joint labor supply, intra-household transfers, and welfare in native families. The results show that native women’s share of household resources and intra-household welfare decrease with the refugee influx, while native men’s resource share and intra-household welfare increase. The magnitude of the estimated effects varies by spouses’ education and earnings potential. The second chapter tests the decision-making power of 12-17 years old children in their households in Bangladesh using a restriction implied by the collective household model. By comparing households with working and non-working children, I also test whether working children have a greater say in their households than non-working ones. The results do not give evidence for children’s intra-household decision-making power, regardless of their gender or work status. The third chapter (co-authored with Jacob Penglase) provides a novel test to the collective household model based on multiple job holding. We estimate the leisure demand of households where household members are engaged in multiple occupations in rural Bangladesh and use the estimates to test the collective model. We are unable to reject Pareto efficiency but do find evidence against the unitary model. The results support the use of the collective model as a framework to study the inner workings of the household.
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    Essays on women's labor supply, financial well-being and marriage market outcomes
    (2023-03-30) Farooqi, Hira; Cunha, Flavio; Calvi, Rossella
    This dissertation consists of three chapters addressing questions related to women’s socioeconomic outcomes. In scope, it covers the context of both developed and developing economies. In the first chapter I study the extent to which greater availability of remote work opportunities alleviates childbirth related costs for women’s careers and affects their fertility choices. I formulate a structural dynamic life-cycle model that incorporates women’s joint decision-making regarding fertility and employment type choices. The model is estimated through simulated method of moments using NLSY97 data. I find that mothers of children under 5 years old face a significantly higher disutility of work when they work in jobs which require on-site presence compared to jobs that allow the flexibility of working from home. I use the estimated model to simulate the effect of policies that affect the availability of remote work jobs. I find that extending the flexibility of remote work to all mothers of pre-school children increases their employment by 4%, albeit with negligible gains in women’s overall labor market participation. In contrast, increased supply of remote work jobs improves labor market participation for all women unconditional on fertility status. The model also implies that increased availability of remote jobs leads to increased fertility rates, confirming the upward fertility trend recently observed during COVID-19. The second chapter is joint work with Brielle Bryan. Qualitative research suggests that mothers play a critical role in supporting adult children both during and after experiences of incarceration, yet the implications of incarceration for the parents of incarcerated individuals have been relatively unexplored in existing research. Using mother-child linked data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult study, we investigate whether and why child incarceration appears to influence maternal wealth. We find a significantly negative relationship between child incarceration and maternal wealth. This relationship, however, is highly heterogeneous across forms of wealth. Separate models by race and ethnicity suggest that child incarceration may be much more detrimental in dollar terms for white women, but the financial asset penalty associated with child incarceration is larger in percentage terms for black women. The third chapter studies the marriage market in Pakistan. In Pakistan, parents and elder members of a family exert a significant amount of influence in searching for marriage matches for their daughters and deciding who their daughters will marry. In this joint work with Rossella Calvi and Eeshani Kandpal, we use a hypothetical choice methodology to estimate parental preferences for various marital attributes. Our results show that parents in Pakistan prefer grooms who belong to their family which is consistent with the high prevalence of consanguineous marriages in Pakistan. We also show that parents have a high preference for marriage offers which grant their daughters a greater degree of decision making power in their marital households.