Suchergebnisse

Deep ethnic and socioeconomic gaps in the access and quality of education are pervasive in the United States. Many of these inequalities are at least partly determined by a historical legacy of exclusionary public institutions, the vestiges of which continues to be felt today. In particular, three key contemporaneous education policy issues -- public school segregation on the basis of race, the emergence of a potentially predatory for-profit college sector, and unequal college access for minorities -- are all directly connected to public institutions. In this thesis, I present empirical studies on the role and effect that institutions have in determining these gaps, with varying focus on mechanisms and causal effects across these different policy topics. In Chapter 1, I study school attendance boundary policy, the most common student allocation mechanism in U.S. public schools, and its relationship to school racial segregation. I ask: given existing patterns of residential segregation, what do existing school attendance boundaries reveal about local government's preferences over school integration? Using a novel database on the attendance boundary maps of hundreds of school districts, I define a desegregation policy index based on simple counterfactual attendance boundary maps. Exploiting this index, I find wide heterogeneity in the extent to which districts choose to desegregate their school systems by gerrymandering boundaries. I develop a theory of school attendance boundary choice, based on a trade-off between racial integration and aggregate daily commuting distance to school. I propose a methodology to estimate the extent of this trade-off, using geographic census data on the spatial distribution of race. Estimating a model of desegregation policy level as a function of marginal commuting costs, I find evidence of district demand for racial integration. In addition, I find that court desegregation orders and greater levels of racial tolerance among local whites act as positive shifters of desegregation demand. These findings have far reaching policy implications, the most important being that the tools developed here allow researchers to better monitor local governments' policies. I close this chapter with a case study evaluating of the stability of desegregation policy with respect to endogenous residential sorting, finding high residential compliance rates and little real estate valuation effects stemming from sudden changes in attendance boundary policy. Chapter 2, joint work with Christopher Walters, studies how different structures in post-secondary education markets affect local student populations. For-profit college chains (FPCs) have rapidly expanded over the last two decades, opening almost 1,000 campuses across the U.S. First, we examine the determinants of FPC entry, finding that counties with worsening local unemployment and poverty rates are more likely to see the opening of an FPC campus. Then, exploiting variation in the timing of FPC entry, we estimate the impact of FPC entry on enrollment and degree completions. Using an event-study framework, our estimates show that FPC entry leads to increases in county-wide college enrollment and degree completions, with effects concentrated in short-term certificate programs. Additionally, we find little indication of negative enrollment effects at traditional public and non-profit private institutions, including community colleges. We interpret these findings as indication that for-profit chain colleges tend to enter markets facing excess demand for higher education, and that the extent to which they directly compete with traditional colleges is limited at best.In Chapter 3, I zoom-in to a narrower topic, focusing on the issue of college access for undocumented high school students. Specifically, I estimate the impact of state level tuition equity reform on the educational outcomes of undocumented immigrant students in Texas. This type of reform, granting in-state tuition to qualifying undocumented students, can be interpreted as a partial relaxation of the institutional constraints associated with lack of legal immigration status. Exploiting administrative data from education agencies in Texas, I formulate a generalized differences-in-differences framework to produce within-school, across-cohort estimates of the impact of the 'Texas Dream Act' on a range of educational outcomes from college demand to college-bound investments during high school. Estimates show a significant closing of the college demand gap between immigrant and control group high school graduates. However, estimates regarding college-bound investments contain mixed results. I attribute this to a complex policy environment in public high schools during the analysis period. The results suggest that affordable college access policies can have a significant impact on the attainment of the immigrant population at the college entrance stage, but that, given other policies in place, college tuition incentives down the educational ladder may not be sufficiently salient to generate spillover effects.

This thesis is composed of three distinct chapters. The first two contribute to the economics of higher education literature, while the third estimates a structural model of household behavior. Chapter 1 presents a study assessing the impact of grading standards (GS) in Italian departments on the labor market outcomes of university graduates. The influence of heterogeneous GS on labor market performance can occur through two different channels: a productivity and a signaling effect. The empirical papers trying to answer the same research question are quite rare due to limitations in data availability. This study provides first evidence on the dynamic effects of GS on university graduates in Italy, evaluating the impact on wages, employment and overeducation. The analysis is performed using unique data provided by Almalaurea on graduates in years 2008 and 2009 matched with department-level information on research quality and resources. Italy is an interesting case study since university graduation rates are low but, at the same time, returns to higher education are below the average of other developed countries. The human capital accumulated is also quite low. The PIAAC data, measuring the level of skills in OECD countries by level of education, place Italian university graduates at the bottom of the ranking. For these reasons it is important to find policies that can increase the average productivity of highly educated workers. Furthermore, in the last decades the increased supply in the market for higher education and the 3+2 reform lead to a larger heterogeneity in quality and in GS between institutions. The estimation strategy is divided in two steps. Firstly, we estimate a proxy for GS as the part of final grades which cannot be explained by differences in individual characteristics (student's quality) and other relevant inputs (quality of the institution attended). Then, the effect of GS on wage and other labor market outcomes is estimated. We show that differences in GS are large across departments. More generous grades are associated to a wage penalty on the labor market 5 years after graduation. In particular, graduates from 'generous' departments earn 3.4% less than people who studied in the 'strict' departments, they have a lower employment rate and a higher probability of being too educated for their jobs. The effects on wages are stronger for high ability workers while employment is more affected for low ability and female graduates. Chapter 2 assesses the impact of the first Italian Research Evaluation Exercise (REE) on students' enrollment choices. All Italian REEs have been followed by lively debates. Critics of REE maintain that they are very expensive and excessively based on quantitative (e.g., bibliometric) indicators. Advocates of REEs rebut that in a period of shrinking public funding of Higher Education it is more important than ever to allocate resources in an effective and efficient way. However, there is no evidence on the effect of the REE on students' choices. Our paper is related to the literature which, especially in the US, has investigated the effects on student application and matriculation decisions of ratings and rankings of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) produced by private `intermediaries'. We provide a first assessment of the impact of the 'Valutazione Triennale della Ricerca' (VTR) on student choices using a before-after estimator which exploits differential treatment intensities across HEIs. In particular, we investigate whether departments that received a better score also beneted of more student enrolments and enrolments of students with better entry qualications after the VTR. This identication strategy enables us to control for both department-specific time invariant unobservable heterogeneity and pre-existing department trends. The analysis is performed using data on enrollment at the department level between 2002 and 2011 merged with data on research quality of departments from the first REE accomplished in Italy (the VTR). Italy is an interesting case study since enrollment has been decreasing in Italy in the last decade, especially in the South, so assessing the effect of research quality on the quantity and quality of enrolled students is important. Our analysis demonstrates that increasing the percentage of excellent products by one standard deviation at the department level increases student enrollments by 6.5 percent. Effects are larger for high quality students, namely those with better high school final marks (10 percent) or coming from the academic track (11.8 percent). Departments in the top quartile of the quality distribution gained more from a good performance in the evaluation exercise. Effect magnitudes appear to be similar across all macro-regions (North, Centre and South and Islands), but are precisely estimated only for universities in Northern Italy. Finally, Chapter 3 presents and estimates a model of household behavior with endogenous labor supply and fertility choices. The estimated model is then used to assess the effect of a childbirth transfer on household decisions. We contribute to the recent literature (Adda et al., 2015) performing ex-ante structural evaluations of policies having the objective to modify the fertility and labor supply behavior of households. The model is estimated using the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) for the period 1984-2014, a dataset collected by the Bank of Italy every two years. The model parameters are estimated through the Method of Simulated Moments. We obtain moments from households in the 1960 cohort, i.e. people born in years 1957-1963. Structural estimation offer some important advantages with respect to reduced form approaches. First, it allows to model different sources of endogeneity (ex. self-selection into labor market participation). Second, it provides parameters from a theoretical model that can be used to simulate the effects of policy experiments. The model is able to explain quite well the behavior of men and women in the cohort. Preliminary results show that the permanent childbirth transfer is successful in increasing the total fertility rate of married women, even if it has a negative effect on employment.

"Modern Labor Economics: Theory and Public Policy, now in its fourteenth edition, continues to be the leading text for one-semester courses in labor economics at the undergraduate and graduate levels. It offers a thorough overview of the modern theory of labor market behaviour and reveals how this theory is used to analyze public policy. Designed for students who may not have extensive backgrounds in economics, the text balances theoretical coverage with examples of practical applications that allow students to see concepts in action. The authors believe that showing students the social implications of the concepts discussed in the course will enhance their motivation to learn. As such, this text presents numerous examples of policy decisions that have been affected by the ever-shifting labor market. This new edition continues to offer: a balance of relevant, contemporary examples; coverage of the current economic climate; introduction to basic methodological techniques and problems; tools for review and further study. This fourteenth edition presents updated data throughout and a wealth of new examples, such as the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns, gig work, nudges, monopsony power in the technology industry, and the effect of machine learning on inequality. Supplementary materials for students and instructors are available on the book's companion website."

My dissertation broadly examines how individuals respond to incentives imbedded in various policy designs. I study a variety of policies, including teacher retirement incentives, child care subsidies, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. The evidence presented here is of importance to policy analysis and design.In the first chapter, I examine what types of teachers respond to early retirement incentives (ERIs). In recent years, many education programs have been faced with steep budget cuts. In response to these budget shortfalls, many school districts have turned to the use of ERIs to induce higher cost, but highly experienced teachers to retire. A key question is how these incentives affect students. Using a newly assembled panel dataset of school district ERI policies in California. I employ a difference-in-differences strategy and find that after districts offered retirement incentives, student test scores improved. These results suggest that less-effective, but highly experienced teachers respond the most to the retirement incentives. The second chapter examines whether child care subsidy policies, which are intended to provide work-related support for low income families, can actually discourage work. Specifically, I examine how the sharp phase-out of subsidy benefits creates an incentive for parents near the maximum income eligibility limits to lower their labor supply in order to qualify for the subsidy. I exploit recent changes in income eligibility thresholds across different states and years and construct an exogenous simulated measure of eligibility. I find that an increase in subsidy generosity, primarily driven by an increase in maximum income eligibility thresholds, has a net negative effect on hours and earnings for single mothers. Finally, the third chapter, which is joint work with Professor David Neumark, studies whether state supplemental Earned Income Tax Credits (EITCs) encourage participation in the federal EITC. The EITC provides refundable tax credit for working families with low to moderate income. Existing research has linked the EITC to many positive labor supply and welfare outcomes for low to moderate income families. States and local governments should be interested in maximizing participation of their constituents in the federal EITC not only because of these anti-poverty effects, but because of other economic benefits, such as an increase federal tax dollars being spent by EITC recipients. We use recent state EITC policy variation during a period when there were no major changes in the federal EITC to explore whether state EITCs actually influence participation in the federal program. We find evidence that state EITCs encourage federal participation for single filers with children.