Essays on Human Capital and Development Economics

Abstract

This dissertation contains three chapters that study the determinants of human capital in resource-constrained settings: middle managers’ role in workplace mental health, information interventions in college major selection, and how historical examination systems can shape allocation of talents. In the first chapter, I study how middle managers can promote their subordinates’ mental wellbeing in the workplace. This paper examines key managerial determinants - expertise, attention, and beliefs - in helping subordinates manage emotional challenges. In a field experiment with 6,000 workers at a Chinese automobile manufacturer, I provide middle managers with mental health support training (enhancing expertise), and a subset also receive top management’s directive (manipulating attention). I find significant improvements in subordinate workers’ mental health and reduction in absenteeism only when managers received both training and directive. Using survey data and a lab-in-the-field experiment, I identify increased supervisor-subordinate interactions as the key mechanism driving these improvements. Analysis of manager behavior reveals that successful adoption of new practices depends critically on mitigating adaptation costs, whether through external directives or internal reallocation of attention. In a follow-up survey experiment, presenting these results to a separate group of managers (altering beliefs) leads to an increased participation in mental health initiatives. Taken together, the results provide actionable recommendations for developing organizational policies to improve workplace well-being. In the second chapter, which is joint work with Fei Yuan, we investigate the alignment between individual capabilities and educational choices. Choosing a career path aligned with personal interests and strengths profoundly impacts professional success. In early-specialization education systems, students are required to select a college major without sufficient knowledge to make informed choices. This challenge is particularly pronounced among the rural Chinese high school students in our sample, where females are significantly less likely than males to select majors that align with their personal strengths. In this paper, we use a randomized controlled trial to show that providing students with detailed information about the disciplinary characteristics of specific majors significantly reduces this gender gap. Our intervention leads to more informed choices only among female students, reducing their uncertainty, increasing perceived personal fit, and resulting in improved mental health and academic performance. Notably, these effects are strongest among females transitioning from science to humanities majors. Our findings have immediate policy relevance for the role of targeted information in addressing gender disparities in educational choice and enhancing student wellbeing. The third chapter adopts a historical perspective on human capital allocation, investigating how institutional incentives shaped intellectual pursuits in imperial China. It examines the role of the Chinese civil service examination system (Keju) in discouraging Chinese literati from engaging with science and technology. This study leverages a natural experiment from 1713, when the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing dynasty removed all questions related to natural sciences from the civil service examination. Using variation in prefectural examination quotas, the analysis demonstrates that this curriculum reform significantly disincentivized scientific inquiry—prefectures with higher quotas per capita, where the expected returns to exam success were greater, experienced a sharper decline in published scientific works. These effects are even more pronounced when employing an instrumental variable approach to address potential omitted variable bias. The findings suggest that the exclusion of natural sciences from the curriculum distorted intellectual incentives, steering Chinese scholars away from scientific pursuits. This institutional constraint likely played a role in the Great Divergence, contributing to China's lag in scientific production relative to Western Europe.