Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education written by Jaime Lynn Thomas and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation addresses three broad issues within the fields of labor economics and the economics of education: the accumulation of human and information capital, school quality, and policy-relevant analysis of classroom organization. At the secondary-school level, I document the importance of information capital, or accurate information about postsecondary and labor-market alternatives. At the elementary-school level, I analyze the effect of combination classes and discuss different ways to measure school quality and the importance of these measures to parents of school-aged children. In the first chapter, "Information Capital and Early-Career Wages," I define one measure of information capital acquired by students during high school and develop a framework through which I analyze the effect of this measure on educational attainment, job tenure, and wages. I also investigate the school-level characteristics that influence an individual's stock of information capital. In the second chapter, "Combination Classes and Educational Achievement," I measure the effect of membership in a combination class in first grade on student achievement. I address the selection that occurs when implementing a combination class and find that first graders in 1-2 combinations can be expected to outperform single-grade students on math tests by one-seventh of a standard deviation. In addition, I find no evidence that first graders in schools offering combination classes perform worse than first graders in schools that do not offer such classes. Therefore, I conclude that combination classes may be a Pareto-improving option for school administrators. In the last chapter, "Neighborhood Demographics, School Effectiveness, and Residential Location Choice," I investigate how neighborhood demographics and school effectiveness influence the residential location decisions of parents of different income levels. I find that low-income parents in the San Francisco Bay Area respond more strongly to school effectiveness than to neighborhood demographics, but that the reverse is true for high-income parents.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education written by Seth D. Zimmerman and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics and Education written by Tomas E. Monarrez Palma and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education written by Brian Stacy and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis combines five essays in the fields of Labor Economics and the Economics of Education. The goal of the thesis is to understand the factors that influence individuals' choices with respect to their educational attainment and their labor supply. The thesis is motivated by the notion that policies at different institutional levels (e.g., at the university or at the government level) can influence these choices to some extent. The first two chapters examine the role of peer groups for student outcomes in post-secondary education. Many university entrants rely on friends and study partners as sources of information and support. To determine the effect of peer group composition on academic achievement, I exploit random assignment to orientation week groups at the University of St. Gallen. Chapter 1 examines the effect of the composition of these peer groups with respect to students' predicted performance ("peer quality"). The results are as follows: First, students' outcomes are positively influenced by their peers' quality. Second, a simulation analysis shows that a policy maker who cares about average achievement should compose groups so that peer quality across groups balances. Chapter 2 examines gender peer effects in the same context. The analysis shows that while female students seem to benefit from higher shares of females in their peer group, no clear policy rule for gender group composition can be established. Chapter 3 (co-authored with Darjusch Tafreschi and Sharon Pfister) examines the effect of course repetition in higher education. Students who do not meet a certain performance cut-off have to repeat the full first year or to drop out otherwise. We compare individuals to both sides of this cut-off, but close to the cut-off, to determine the effect of grade repetition. Grade repetition positively and persistently affects subsequent grades. The last two chapters investigate labor supply decisions. Chapter 4.

Download or read book Short and Long Term Influences of Education Health Indicators and Crime on Labor Market Outcomes Five Essays in Empirical Labor Economics written by Elisabeth Lång and published by Linköping University Electronic Press. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of how several individual characteristics, namely education (years of schooling), health indicators (height, weight, smoking, alcohol consumption, and exercise), criminal behavior, and crime victimization, influence labor market outcomes in the short and long run. The first part of the thesis consists of three studies in which I adopt a within-twin-pair difference approach to analyze how education, health indicators, and earnings are associated with each other over the life cycle. The second part of the thesis includes two studies in which I use field experiments in order to test the employability of exoffenders and crime victims. The first essay, Learning for life?, describes an analysis of the education premium in earnings and health-related behaviors throughout adulthood among twins. The results show that the education premium in earnings, net of genetic inheritance, is rather small over the life cycle but increases with the level of education. The results also show that the education premium in health-related behaviors is mainly concentrated on smoking habits. The influences of education on earnings and health-related behaviors seem to work independently of each other, and there are no signs that health-related behaviors influence the education premium in earnings or vice versa. The second essay, Blowing up money?, details an analysis of the association between smoking and earnings in two different historical social contexts in Sweden: the 1970s and the 2000s. I also consider possible differences in this association in the short and long run as well as between the sexes. The results show that the earnings penalty for smoking is much stronger in the 2000s as compared to the 1970s (for both sexes) and that it is larger in the long run as compared to the short run (for men). The third essay, Two by two, inch by inch, describes an analysis of the height premium among Swedish twins. The results show that the height premium is relatively constant over the life cycle and that it is larger below median height for men and above median height for young women. The estimates are similar for monozygotic and dizygotic twins, indicating that environmentally and genetically induced height differences are similarly associated with earnings over the life cycle. The fourth essay, The employability of ex-offenders, published in IZA Journal of Labor Policy (2017), 6:6, details an analysis of whether male and female exoffenders are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. The results show that employers do discriminate against exoffenders but that the degree of discrimination varies across occupations. Discrimination against ex-offenders is pronounced in female-dominated and high-skilled occupations. The magnitude of discrimination against exoffenders does not vary by applicants’ sex. The fifth essay, Victimized twice?, describes an analysis of whether male and female crime victims are discriminated against when applying for jobs in the Swedish labor market. This study is the first to consider potential hiring discrimination against crime victims. The results show that employers do discriminate against crime victims. The discrimination varies with the sex of the crime victim and occupational characteristics and is concentrated among high-skilled jobs for female crime victims and among femaledominated jobs for male crime victims.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics and Education written by Tomas Monarrez and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics Education Employment and Gender written by Qian Liu and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by John M. McAdams and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in labor economics. The first chapter tackles a classic problem in labor economics: estimating the returns to schooling. Compulsory schooling laws have been used extensively as an instrument for years of completed schooling in estimating the causal effect of education on a number of outcomes. But pre-existing state-level trends in educational attainment induce a spurious positive relationship between educational attainment and compulsory schooling laws. An event study model reveals that the laws have no effect on the distribution of educational attainment, thus making them inappropriate as an instrument. The laws' ineffectiveness can be explained by non-compliance and by measurement error in the proxy used to assign the laws in typical micro datasets. The second chapter investigates the impact of school starting age policy on the propensity to commit crime. The timing of school entry will affect the maturity and readiness to learn of those whose entry decision is directly affected by the policy, and students who are not directly affected by changes in school entry policies may benefit from an older average cohort through positive peer effects. I find that a higher school starting age cutoff leads to lower rates of incarceration among both those directly affected by the laws and those who were only indirectly affected. However, the reduction in crime among those directly affected is smaller in magnitude, implying that delaying school entry is harmful with respect to crime outcomes. The third chapter examines whether expanding access to advanced coursework--in particular, Advanced Placement (AP) courses--in high school leads to greater student participation and changes in post-secondary outcomes. I study the receipt of two federal grants to expand student participation in AP within a large, urban school district. Exposure to the grant led to a 38 percent increase in average AP course taking, as well as higher enrollment at two-year colleges and persistence to the second year of college.

Download or read book Essays in Education and Labor Economics written by Mathias Uwe Schumann and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Anton Sundberg and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Migration Education and Income written by Isaac Charles Rischall and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Education Economics written by Alexander Lars Philip Willén and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays, each using advanced empirical methods to address important questions within the fields of labor and education economics. In Chapter 1, I exploit a Swedish reform that eliminated the fixed national pay scale for teachers to present novel evidence on the labor market effects of wage decentralization. Identification of the causal effect of the reform is achieved by using differences in non-teacher wages across local labor markets prior to the reform as a measure of treatment intensity in a dose-response difference-in-difference framework. I find that decentralization induces large changes in teacher pay, and that these changes are entirely financed through a reallocation of existing education resources. The magnitude of the wage effect is negatively related to teacher age, such that the reform led to a disproportionate increase in entry wage and a flattening of the age-wage relationship. Contrary to the predictions of the Roy model, decentralization does not impact teacher composition or student outcomes. I show that a main reason for this relates to general equilibrium and wage spillover effects to substitute occupations. In Chapter 2, which is joint work with Anders Böhlmark, we examine how ethnic residential segregation affects long-term outcomes of immigrants and natives. The key challenge with identifying neighborhood effects is that individuals sort across regions for reasons that are unobserved by the researcher but relevant as determinants of individual outcomes. Such nonrandom selection leads to invalid inference in correlational studies since individuals in neighborhoods with different population compositions are not comparable even after adjusting for differences in observable characteristics. To overcome this issue, we borrow theoretical insight from the one-sided tipping point model used by Card, Mas and Rothstein (2008). This model predicts that residential segregation can arise due to social interactions in white preferences: once the minority share in a neighborhood passes a certain “tipping point,” the neighborhood will be subject to white flight and avoidance, causing a discontinuity in white population growth. After having found evidence for the tipping phenomenon in Sweden, we use the tipping threshold as a source of exogenous variation in population composition to provide new evidence on the effect of neighborhood segregation on individual outcomes. We find negative effects on the educational attainment of native children. These effects are temporary and do not carry over to the labor market. We show that these transitory education effects are isolated to natives who leave tipped areas, suggesting that they may be driven by short-term disruptions caused by moving. In Chapter 3, which is joint work with Michael Lovenheim, we analyze the effect of teacher collective bargaining laws on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes, exploiting the timing of passage of duty-to-bargain (DTB) laws across cohorts within states and across states over time. We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher DTB laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: in the first 10 years after passage of a DTB law, male earnings decline by $1,974 (or 3.64%) per year and h.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Education written by Emily P. Hoffman and published by W. E. Upjohn Institute. This book was released on 1993 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics written by Arturo Harker R. and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1: I develop and estimate a dynamic household choice model that incorporates a broad set of determinants of children's labor supply and school attendance, to perform ex-ante evaluations of alternative versions of the urban implementation of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program Oportunidades. Previous research suggests that re-calibrating the targeting and parameters of the educational component of the program could potentially improve its effectiveness with respect to two key objectives: (i) increasing average schooling levels and (ii) eliminating the educational gender gap. The estimation of this behavioral model complements previous ex-post evaluations by providing a forecasting tool that can replicate how the households solve the optimization problem as the program's structure changes. I focus on evaluating cost-equivalent policy schemes that improve the program's efficacy in the first dimension. I find that, by eliminating grants at primary and lower secondary levels (where attendance is close to universal) and proportionally expanding transfers at upper secondary, attendance rates could increase by 14.8% for youth 15-17. Chapter 2: From an economic policy perspective it is crucial to understand what rationale drives individuals to prefer to be employed in the informal sector rather than the formal one, but more importantly if informality is really a choice. As a first approach to disentangle this matter, I evaluate empirically the occupational choice model introduced by Roy (1951) to evaluate if self-selection is an important factor explaining the observed wage distribution in the informal sector. I argue that, under certain conditions, differences on the degree of enforcement of labor market regulation across municipalities can be exploited as a source of variation to identify more adequately the parameters. Given the huge heterogeneity within the informal sector, the model is estimated for two sub-samples: (i) salaried workers and (ii) self-employed workers. I find evidence of positive self-sorting into the informal sector: workers endowed with higher task proficiency for informal sector activities are self-selecting into this sector.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Şule Çelik and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Labour Economics and the Economics of Education written by Mohsen Javdani Haji and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three empirical essays. The first chapter is focused on the economics of gender, and the other two chapters are focused on the economics of education. A common theme in all these three chapters is studying the outcomes of disadvantaged groups in society, with an eye to policy interventions that could improve these outcomes. The first chapter examines whether women face a glass ceiling in the labour market, which would imply that they are under-represented in high wage regions of the wage distribution. I also measure the extent to which the glass ceiling comes about because women are segregated into lower-paying firms (glass doors), or because they are segregated into lower-paying jobs within firms (within-firm glass ceilings). I find clear evidence that women experience a glass ceiling that is driven mainly by their disproportionate sorting across firm types rather than sorting across jobs within firms. I find no evidence that gender differences in sorting across firms can be accounted for by compensating differentials. However, my results are consistent with predictions of an efficiency wage model where high-paying firms discriminate against females. The second chapter estimates the effect of publicly-disseminated information about school achievement on school choice decisions. We find that students are more likely to leave their school when public information reveals poor school-level performance. Some parents' respond to information soon after it becomes available. Others, including non-English-speaking parents, alter their school choice decisions only in response to information that has been disseminated widely and discussed in the media. Parents in low-income neighbourhoods are most likely to alter their school choice decisions in response to new information. The third chapter measures the extent to which cross-sectional differences in schools' average achievement on standardized tests are due to transitory factors. Test-based measures of school performance are increasingly used to shape education policy, and recent evidence shows that they also affect families' school choice decisions. There are, however, concerns about the precision of these measures. My results suggest that sampling variation and one-time mean reverting shocks are a significant source of cross-sectional variation in schools' mean test scores.