Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education

Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education PDF Author: Jaime Lynn Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781124017358
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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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.

Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education

Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education PDF Author: Jaime Lynn Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781124017358
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
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.

Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education

Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education PDF Author: Seth D. Zimmerman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Essays on Labor Economics and Education

Essays on Labor Economics and Education PDF Author: Tomas E. Monarrez Palma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Three Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education

Three Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education PDF Author: Brian Stacy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781321150766
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education

Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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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.

Short- and Long-Term Influences of Education, Health Indicators, and Crime on Labor Market Outcomes: Five Essays in Empirical Labor Economics

Short- and Long-Term Influences of Education, Health Indicators, and Crime on Labor Market Outcomes: Five Essays in Empirical Labor Economics PDF Author: Elisabeth Lång
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
ISBN: 9176854639
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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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.

Essays on Labor Economics and Education

Essays on Labor Economics and Education PDF Author: Tomas Monarrez
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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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.

Essays on Labor Economics: Education, Employment, and Gender

Essays on Labor Economics: Education, Employment, and Gender PDF Author: Qian Liu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789185519248
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Essays in Education and Labor Economics

Essays in Education and Labor Economics PDF Author: Mathias Uwe Schumann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays in Labor Economics

Essays in Labor Economics PDF Author: Anton Sundberg
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789150630404
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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