Download or read book Essays on Human Capital Accumulation in the Presence of Social Influences written by Sean Christohpher Lewis-Faupel and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these essays, I model the impact of social forces on individuals' human capital decisions and use relevant data to produce empirical estimates of the importance of these social influences as well as the potential impact of related policies. In the first chapter, I examine the formation of friend networks in high school and measure the degree to which policy can alter these social structures and, consequently, academic outcomes. In the second essay, I leverage particular aspects of data from a large study of high school students to measure the impact of friends on college application and attendance behavior in a novel manner than loosens assumptions made in earlier work. In the final chapter, I analyze a model of human capital accumulation and marriage and use panel data to estimate model parameters and obtain measures of how marriage affects schooling and work earlier in life.