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Title: Essays on Human and Social Capital

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: Chapter 1: The Impact of College Education on Mortality: A Study of Marginal Treatment Effects. With a newly constructed dataset that links the 2000 U.S. Census long-form to Social Security Administration records, I estimate the effect of college education on mortality. Using the proximity to college from birthplace as an instrument, I estimate the marginal treatment effect (MTE) of college education on 10-year mortality rate for adults aged 60-99 in the United States from 2000- 2010. The OLS results show a strong association between college education and lower mortality, consistent with the previous findings in the literature. The MTE results show that individuals that have unobserved characteristics that make them least likely to attend college have the largest effects of education in reducing mortality. This suggests that the individuals who would benefit most from receiving college education in terms of health are those do not attend college. The positive effects on reducing mortality are solely concentrated among men. For women, I find no evidence of an effect of education on old-age mortality. The MTE results, combined with evidence from the literature, also provide suggestive evidence that income is not the mechanism through which education reduces mortality for men. Chapter 2: Social Interactions and Location Decisions: Evidence from U.S. Mass Migration. (with Bryan Stuart) This paper estimates the strength through which social interactions influenced location decisions during two large scale migrations in the United States during early to mid 1900s. We examine the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the Southern United States and the Dust Bowl Migration of whites out of the Midwestern U.S. Using long-run data on migration patterns from the Social Security NUMIDENT file linked to Medicare Part B records for individuals born 1916- 1936, we estimate the effect of social interactions on influencing where individuals decided to migrate. We find that social interactions were very important for blacks during the Great Migration in affecting location decisions. Our results suggest that 47-69 percent of blacks chose their destination city in the North because of influence from other people that were from their hometown. For whites, we estimate much smaller effects; only 14-24 percent of whites chose their destination city because of social interactions. For blacks, social interactions played a large role in influencing migration to destinations with large shares of manufacturing employment, suggesting the importance of access to information and labor demand conditions in facilitating social influence. Chapter 3: The Effect of Social Migration on Crime: Evidence from the Great Migration. (with Bryan Stuart) Using results from the second chapter of the dissertation, which shows that social interactions were very influential in guiding migration patterns during the Great Migration, this paper estimates the effect these patterns had on crime in U.S. cities from 1960-2009. We document the large variations in the connectedness of migrants from the South that moved to different Northern cities. For example, some cities received almost one-third of their migrants from only one origin town in the South, where other comparable cities received no more than 3% of migrants from any one place. We find that, controlling for other economic characteristics, cities which received more connected migrants had lower crime rates from 1970-2000, which suggests an important role of social connectedness on crime during these periods. The results are largely driven by cities with a high population share of African Americans, and through crime increases among black juveniles. Cities that had more connected migrants had smaller increases in crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s.

Url: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/138478/evanjt_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

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Authors: Taylor, Evan, J

Institution: University of Michigan

Department: Economics

Advisor: Jeffrey A Smith

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher Location: Ann Arbor, MI

Pages: 206

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Crime and Deviance, Education, Fertility and Mortality, Health, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration, Population Health and Health Systems, Race and Ethnicity

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