Essays on Education and Labor Market PDF Download

Author: Shoya Ishimaru
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first chapter examines the importance of college and labor market options associated with childhood location in shaping educational and labor market outcomes experienced by a person later in life. I estimate a dynamic model that considers post-high school choices of whether and where to attend college and where to work, subject to home preferences, mobility costs, and spatial search frictions. The estimated model suggests that spatial gaps in local college and labor market options in the United States give rise to a 6 percentage point gap in the college attendance rate and an 11% gap in the wage rate at 10 years of experience between the 90th and 10th percentiles of across-county variation in each outcome. The second chapter suggests how the difference between linear IV and OLS coefficients can be interpreted and empirically decomposed when the treatment effect is nonlinear and heterogeneous in the true causal relationship. I show that the IV-OLS coefficient gap consists of three components: the difference in weights on treatment levels, the difference in weights on observables, and the difference in identified marginal effects. Using my framework, I revisit return to schooling estimates with compulsory schooling and college availability instruments. The third chapter investigates equilibrium impacts of federal policies such as free-college proposals, taking into account that human capital production is cumulative and that state governments have resource constraints. In the model, a state government cares about household welfare and aggregate educational attainment. Realizing that household choices vary with its decisions, the government chooses income tax rates, per-student expenditure levels on public K-12 and college education, college tuition and the provision of other public goods, subject to its budget constraint. We estimate the model using data from the U.S. Using counterfactual simulations, we find that free-public-college policies, mandatory or subsidized, would decrease state expenditure on and hence the quality of public education. More students would obtain college degrees due to increased enrollment. Over 86% of all households would lose while about 60% of the lowest income quintile would gain from such policies.