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Title
Empirical essays on childhood human capital in Ethiopia |
Full text
http://hdl.handle.net/1885/133188 |
Date
2017 |
Author(s)
Weldeegzie, Samuel |
Abstract
This thesis contains three empirical papers on childhood human
capital accumulation in Ethiopia. The first paper examines the
long-term education impacts of exposure to the 1998-2000
Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict. I exploit exogenous variation on
regional and birth-year intensity of the conflict, using
cross-sectional school survey data. The empirical findings
indicate that exposure to the conflict during early childhood
decreases student achievement in mathematics and language scores
a decade later (mainly for girls). In addition, exposure to the
conflict increases the probability of grade repetition (for boys
and girls) and school dropout (for boys only). The paper provides
first estimates on the long-term effect of exposure to conflict
on human capital accumulation. It further contributes to the
study of gender differences with regard to exposure to conflict.
The second paper extends the analysis of the first paper by
investigating the effect of conflict on childhood health and
education using unique child-level panel data from Ethiopia. It
also examines to what extent child health operates as a mechanism
through which conflict affects childhood education outcomes.
Identification is based on a difference-in-difference approach,
using two points in time at which older and younger children have
the same average age and controlling for observable household and
child-level time-variant characteristics. The paper contributes
to an empirical literature that relies predominantly on
cross-sectional comparisons of child cohorts born before and
after the war in war-affected and unaffected regions. The results
show that war-exposed children have a one-third of a standard
deviation lower height-for-age and higher incidence of stunting.
In addition, exposed children are less likely to be enrolled in
school, complete fewer grades (given enrollment), and are more
likely to exhibit reading problems (given enrollment). Suggestive
evidence indicates that the conflict reduces child education
directly as well as through its effect on child health.
The final paper examines whether student retention improves
achievement later and to what extent the former is correlated
with school dropout. The relationship between grade repetition
and subsequent achievements as well as school dropout remains
entirely an empirical question as theoretical predictions are
inconclusive. I apply bivariate probit and endogenous treatment
regression models to cross-sectional student-level survey data
from Ethiopia to examine this relationship. The results indicate
that student retention does not improve achievement in
mathematics and evidence on the improvement in verbal test scores
is relatively weak. In addition, grade repetition is highly
correlated with school dropout. The findings have important
policy implications because they suggest that grade repetition
may be viewed as a waste of resources in the absence of higher
test scores, indicating that students in Ethiopia should not be
retained and that an investigation of alternative policies is
needed. |
Language
en |
Type of publication
Thesis (PhD) |
Repository
Canberra - Australian National University
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Added to C-A: 2018-11-22;14:12:56 |
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