Essays on human capital acquisition

These essays investigate causes of interpersonal variations in skill acquisition during youth, a crucial starting point for inquiries into unemployment, poverty traps, wage inequality, and other issues at the heart of labor economics. Common to the essays is a focus on non-cognitive skill acquisition by myopic agents, an attempt to bring new modes of thought to bear on old problems.; Chapter I posits a model in which rational but myopic adolescents optimize by trading off privileges against leisure, while schools set an implicit "price" of leisure by revoking privileges or imposing punishments for low effort choices. The analysis estimates the response of student effort choices and skill acquisition outcomes to changes in the price of leisure (as measured by an index of school-specific discipline policies.) Court climate and density of public interest lawyers instrument for the price of leisure. Results show that students appear to consume less leisure when costs of leisure are higher, and that long-run skill outcomes appear higher for students from schools with higher prices of leisure.; Chapter II uses micro-level data on friendship networks to estimate effects of social capital on skill acquisition. The analysis shows that years of schooling and college attendance are positively correlated with an individual's social capital, 7 years earlier---as measured by connections to and from other agents. The correlation persists when grade-cohort connectedness instruments for individual connectedness and school dummies are included. Also, grade-cohort ethnic fractionalization is associated with significantly lower levels of social capital---rare micro-level evidence of a relationship between heterogeneity and disconnectedness.; Research in Chapter III indicates that effort elicitation, rather than the teaching of specific skills, may be the dominant channel by which small classes influence disadvantaged students. The analysis uses the transition from grade 3 to grade 4 in San Diego Unified School District as a source of exogenous variation in class size (given a California law funding small classes only up until grade 3). Empirical findings indicate that class-size expansion may reduce gains for low-effort students more than for high-effort students, but no significant difference in reductions of gains is observed when types are defined by ability.