Human Capital Formation And Impact

From the aspect of formation of human capital,we study how family environment affects a child's cognitive development,using data from Rural China.We specifically investigate the impact of family co-residence structure and the allocation of major childcare responsibility across generations on a child's cognitive outcome.Even controlling for the school investment,initial endowment and family good investment as well as the caregiver's characteristics,the family co-residence type and childcare type still have significantly positive effect on child cognitive performance.Firstly,based on the statics model,we find that children living in multigenerational families generally do better in their cognitive tests after controlling for other factors.This result holds only for elementary school children,but not for middle school children.Additionally,children who live only with their parents and children who live only with their grandparents(the left-behind children)do not show a significant difference in their cognitive performance.Moreover,we find that the effect of family environment is different between boys and girls.Girls from multigenerational families with grandparents as the main caregiver generally do better than other girls;while for boys,three-generation co-residence has a positive impact regardless of who the main caregiver is.Additionally,there is some evidence that the co-residence and childcare arrangements respond to the cognitive performance of girls more than boys.Our exploration of behavioral factors as potential operating mechanisms in explaining our findings indicates that the influences of family environment are complex and subtle.Moreover,this paper also adapts the dynamic model to further investigate the long-term effect of family structure.And based on the dynamic model,we still found that multigenerational family plays significantly contemporaneous and lagged positive effect on child cognitive outcome.As well,there is no significant different of cognitive performance between child in nuclear family and left behind children.However,based on this dynamic model,there is no significant difference between parent-care and grandparent-care in multigenerational family.That is,in the long run,child cognitive performance is not sensitive to childcare type when they are living in the multigenerational families.Moreover,identifying the effect of family environment is challengeable and tough.Because the measurement of family environment is of various dimensions and it is difficult to quantity.This paper mainly focuses on the family structure as the measurement of family environment.The estimation results of this paper demonstrate that the effect of family environment is very complex.Meanwhile,it is also difficult to distinguish the impact mechanism of family structure on child cognitive skill.There is large space for us to deeply investigate the above question by using much more detail data.From the aspect of the influence of human capital on the labor force outcome,This study presents new evidence on expected wage by estimating the impact from multi-level human capital measures,including education,general,industry-,firm-,and occupation-specific experience.By analyzing the resumes from a leading online employment website in China,Zhaopin.com,we find that multi-level human capital measures are significant predictors of expected wage.Greater industry diversity does not contribute to human capital accumulation,while experience in occupations such as managers and top executives has a positive impact on human capital stock.Moreover,higher urgent degree for finding a job is significantly associated with lower expected wage.More specify,the job seekers of demission are more likely to sacrifice their expected wage to increase the job arrival rate than those on-the-job jobseekers.Additionally,the wage of the previous job is not always the positive signal for the next job.A further investigation of gender reservation gap shows that nearly 80% of the gap can be explained by our multi-level human capital measures and controls.