Emily Nix. 360 State Street Department of Economics. New Haven, CT New Haven, CT Telephone: +1 (504)

Transcription

1 Emily Nix Home Address: Office Address: 360 State Street Apartment 817 New Haven, CT Telephone: +1 (504) Personal web page: Citizenship: USA Fields of Concentration: Labor Economics Desired Teaching: Labor Economics Economics of Education Public Economics Development Economics Comprehensive Examinations Completed: 2012 (Oral): Labor (with distinction), Development 2011 (Written): Microeconomics, Macroeconomics Dissertation Title: Human Capital Accumulation over the Life Cycle Committee: Professor Joseph Altonji (co-chair) Professor Costas Meghir (co-chair) Professor Lisa Kahn Professor Nancy Qian Expected Completion Date: May 2016 Degrees: Ph.D., Economics,, 2016 (expected) M.Phil., Economics,, 2014 M.A., Economics,, 2012

2 B.A., Mathematics and Economics (with highest distinction), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009 Fellowships, Honors and Awards: ISPS and Yale Economics Department Awards for summer research, 2015 Yale Institute for Social and Policy Studies Fellowship, Graduate Dissertation Fellowship, Royichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship, 2013 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Fellowship, Morehead-Cain Scholarship, UNC Chapel Hill, Phi Beta Kappa, 2008 (inducted junior year) Teaching Experience: Introductory Microeconomics (undergraduate, instructor: C. Udry), Fall 2013 Public Economics (undergraduate, instructor: E. Washington), Spring 2014 Freakonomics (MBA, instructor: L. Kahn), Spring 2015 Research and Work Experience: Research Assistant to Kareen Rozen, 2013 Research Assistant to Costas Meghir, Research Assistant to Fabian Lange, Short Term Consultant, World Bank, Executive Director and Co-Founder, MedPLUS Connect, Board of Directors, MedPLUS Connect 2010-present Publications: Bridging the Gender Gap: Identifying What is Holding Self-Employed Women Back in Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania, and the Republic of Congo, (forthcoming) with Elisa Gamberoni and Rachel Heath, World Bank Economic Review Working Papers: Learning Spillovers in the Firm, (November 2015), Job Market Paper Human Capital Development and Parental Investment in India with Orazio Attanasio and Costas Meghir, (September 2015) The Fluidity of Race: `Passing in the United States, with Nancy Qian (October 2015), NBER Working Paper Works In Progress: Quantifying Dynamic Complementarities Among Different Dimensions of Human Capital During the Early Years of Life: Evidence from Four Developing Countries with Orazio

3 Attanasio, Costas Meghir, and Francesca Salvati, Invited for Special Issue of Review of Economic Dynamics on Human Capital and Economic Inequality A Three Step Estimator for Nonlinear Factor Models with Sarah Cattan and Sami Stouli, (2015) Intergenerational Human Capital Development with Fabian Lange, Costas Meghir, and Martin Palme, (2015) Seminar and Conference Presentations: IFAU Seminar Series, December 2015 IGC Political Economy Group, June 2014 Languages: English (native), Spanish (intermediate) References: Prof. Joseph Altonji Phone: joseph.altonji@yale.edu Prof. Costas Meghir Phone: costas.meghir@yale.edu Prof. Lisa Kahn Phone: lisa.kahn@som.yale.edu Prof. Nancy Qian Phone: nancy.qian@yale.edu

4 Human Capital Accumulation over the Life Cycle My dissertation examines human capital accumulation over the life cycle. Chapter one assesses the theoretical and empirical implications of colleagues as inputs into the production of human capital on the job. Chapter two analyzes and estimates a production function for human capital throughout childhood in India. Chapter three presents a new, 3 step approach to estimate nonlinear production functions using dynamic factor models. Chapter 1: Learning Spillovers in the Firm [Job Market Paper] To produce output for a firm, colleagues inevitably interact. This paper examines the possibility that as a by-product of these interactions, colleagues learn general skills from each other that increase future productivity. The first half of the paper establishes a novel theoretical result: firms may not fully internalize learning spillovers. When learning spillovers depend on average education in the firm, this can lead to inefficient investments in education. The second half of the paper shows that learning spillovers are empirically relevant. I match Swedish data on workers, their peers, and their firms to show that spillovers exist, are reasonable in magnitude, and are an important component of wage growth. The key insight for the inefficiency is that colleagues function as public goods within the firm. As a result, when workers value the learning spillovers differently, firms must pay personalized wages in order for a competitive equilibrium to exist and internalize the spillovers. As the public goods literature has shown, personalized prices are not plausible due to thin markets and asymmetric information. The second half of this paper provides empirical evidence on learning spillovers within the firm. To accomplish this, I merge 10 data sets covering the universe of workers, their peers, and firms in Sweden from I use a combination of fixed effects and controls to address bias from worker sorting and firm heterogeneity. I also show that using fixed effects removes the upward bias due to measurement error when estimating social returns functions. I find evidence that peers produce general skills for their coworkers. Increasing average education of a given worker s colleagues by 10 percentage points increases that worker s wages in the following year by 0.3%. This result stands up to a number of controls and robustness checks. The effect is also persistent, in that average education of colleagues impacts wages up to five years in the future, although the impact decreases over time. In addition, I document interesting heterogeneity consistent with learning spillovers. I show that the spillover is largest for younger coworkers, with no impact for coworkers who are older than 40. I also find that the effect varies in expected ways across occupations. For example, professionals and managers obtain the largest spillovers from their coworkers, while drivers, who interact little with colleagues, experience the smallest impact.

5 Chapter 2: Human Capital Development and Parental Investment in India (Joint with Costas Meghir and Orazio Attanasio) In this paper, we examine the production of health and cognitive skill from birth to age 15 among children in India. In our model, cognition and health are produced by parental background, the past levels of cognition and health of the child, and investments by parents. The production functions allow for complementarity between various background variables and investments, generating heterogeneity in responses and allowing for the possibility that the timing of investments for children matters. Our approach advances the existing literature in two ways. First, we consider the interaction of health, cognition, and investment over the entirety of childhood, from birth up to age 15. This allows us to identify the ages that are most sensitive to health and cognition interventions and how health and cognition may feed into each other. Second, we are able to account for the endogeneity of investments and the way investments relate to family background and family structure. Chapter 3: A Three Step Estimator for Nonlinear Production Technologies Using Dynamic Latent Factor Models In this paper, I propose a new econometric methodology to estimate nonlinear production functions. The methodology relies on dynamic latent factor models, and as in Cunha, Heckman and Schennach (2010), it captures the relationship between a parsimonious set of latent factors over time. The approach controls for measurement error and can also control for endogeneity of inputs, provided appropriate instruments are available. For example, Chapter two of this dissertation implements this estimation approach to identify the production of human capital in childhood, using a rich set of measurements (test scores, weight, height, and many more) on health, cognition, investments, and parental background each period to identify the dynamic interactions between latent health, cognition, and investments over time. Prior to this paper, nonlinear filtering algorithms have been used to estimate these sorts of problems. I suggest an alternative algorithm that proceeds in three steps. In the first step I estimate the joint distribution of the measurements. In the second step I use the joint distribution of the measurements to estimate the parameters of the underlying joint distribution of the latent factors, control variables, and instruments, given assumptions on the measurement equations. I then use these estimates to simulate values of the latent factors, control variables, and instruments. In the third step I estimate the production function parameters using the simulated data. The advantage of this three step approach is that it is both flexible and easy to use, even when allowing for correlated measurement error, many possible specifications of the production functions, and complex distributions of the underlying latent factors.

6