Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Essays on Labor Markets(2024) Nguyen, The Linh Bao; Urzua, Sergio; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The modern work landscape is undergoing a period of significant transformation. In this dissertation, I delve into three distinct, yet interconnected, themes that shed light on the complex interplay between abilities, tasks, and well-being within this changing environment. In Chapter 1, I explore the mental health implications of a recent and dramatic shift in work arrangements: the rise of Work From Home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the chapter evaluates the impact of working from home (WFH) on mental health, relative to other forms of workplace arrangements during the pandemic. Leveraging the longitudinal structure of the data from the British Cohort Study, the paper explores two novel dimensions that potentially influence the mental health effects of WFH, early-age cognitive and social abilities. To account for self-selection, the identification relies on a Roy selection model with correlated factors and cost-shifters. The findings suggest that WFH has negative mental health effects compared to a workplace arrangement (WP), but positive effects compared to not working (NW). Additionally, WFH has the largest detrimental impact on the mental health of individuals with lower social abilities relative to WP, and it confers the most substantial benefits on those with higher cognitive abilities compared to NW. Finally, the model predicts that investments in cognitive and social ability mitigate the cost and amplify the benefits associated with WFH. Next, in Chapter 2, I shift the focus to a contentious education policy that has recently received much attention, affirmative action in education. In this chapter, I examine the impacts of an education affirmative action policy on not only education outcomes, but also later labor market outcomes, in the context of Vietnam. In particular, the policy in this study provides nationwide direct high school admissions to ethnic minority students, exempting them from taking a high-stakes high school entrance exam. Using the joint variation in the student's ethnicity and birth year in a difference-in-differences framework, I show that the policy improves the probability of entering high school for ethnic minorities. Further, leveraging this policy-induced variation as an instrument, I explore the policy's long-term effects on labor market outcomes. The results indicate that ethnic minority students who were encouraged to enter high school by the policy are more likely to participate in the labor force, obtain employment, and hold salaried positions. The analysis of occupation-specific skill distributions and task intensity suggests that these effects are likely attributable to the human capital channel rather than education signaling. Despite its overall benefits, the policy's impacts are not equally distributed across the gender line and wealth levels: Male and wealthy ethnic minority students benefit more from the policy. Using a random forest model to identify the compliers' characteristics confirms that future family concerns among females and financial constraints are major frictions for ethnic minorities to benefit from the policy. Overall, these results suggest that while affirmative action positively impacts education and labor outcomes for ethnic minorities, targeted policies are vital for equitable distribution, addressing gender and financial barriers. Finally, Chapter 3 closes the discussion on the topic of tasks and skills at the critical early career stages. The early stages of one's career are a dynamic period of exploration and skill development not only from formal training but also through on-the-job tasks. Therefore, the paper explores the pivotal relationship between abilities and tasks during this time. Specifically, it investigates how cognitive, social, and manual abilities are rewarded in this crucial period, while also emphasizing the role of abilities in sorting individuals across task-based occupations. The paper employs the British Cohort Study 1970 in a Roy selection model with correlated factors. In this context, the Roy model allows the analysis to focus not only on the returns to abilities, but also on the sorting process within the context of occupations categorized by their task composition. The results reveal a task-specific nature in the returns to abilities during early career stages, emphasizing the importance of aligning abilities with the specific task requirements of chosen occupations for optimal rewards. Additionally, the paper also highlights the role of abilities in early career sorting, showing that individuals with high cognitive and social abilities tend to gravitate towards knowledge-based occupations - occupations that are characterized by intensive cognitive tasks or intensive social tasks. These findings offer valuable insights for both young individuals navigating their career paths and policymakers crafting programs aimed at facilitating informed decision-making and enhancing success in the early career landscape.Item Essays on Higher Education(2024) Montoya Agudelo, Alejandra; Urzúa, Sergio; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I quantify the impact of uncertainty on schooling postsecondary choices, study the returns to higher education degrees, and analyze the effects of policies that intend to reduce college education costs. In the second and third chapters, I employ structural Roy models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to analyze postsecondary schooling decisions, focusing on four- and two-year college paths. These models have three sources of unobserved heterogeneity affecting earnings and decisions: cognitive, socioemotional, and mechanical latent abilities. The second chapter employs a dynamic Roy model to quantify the impact of uncertainty when making postsecondary schooling. While schooling choices maximize expected value, some individuals opt for alternatives that, in hindsight, do not yield the highest ex-post net value due to idiosyncratic shocks affecting earnings and schooling costs that are unknown when decisions are made. This uncertainty generates significant losses: I estimate that aggregate net value would increase by 11% if individuals had perfect foresight. Moreover, I study how decisions would change under perfect foresight and characterize individuals more likely to be affected by uncertainty. I also explore policy simulations to study the effects of an annual two-year college $16,500 subsidy, including the characterization of compliers—those more likely to attain a two-year college degree because of the subsidy. The third chapter analyzes the interplay of observed and unobserved dimensions as determinants of marginal treatment effect (MTEs) through decomposition analysis. We posit a static Roy model with unordered schooling choices. We focus on MTEs as they shape other treatment effects and capture the impact for those responding to minimal incentives. Additionally, we estimate the model separately for women and men, focusing on describing how responses and treatment effects vary between these two groups. We find different ability distributions and returns to ability for women and men. Moreover, we document how different observed characteristics and ability dimensions play different roles in determining the heterogeneity observed in MTEs across both groups. The last chapter investigates the impact of financial aid programs on high-quality private colleges' decisions, leveraging exogenous variation from a large-scale aid program in Colombia, where beneficiaries could only enroll at high-quality colleges. Using a difference-in-differences strategy and data for all private colleges in the country, we find that tuition increased by about 6.9 percent after the government launched the aid policy. We contribute to the literature by analyzing the effect of financial aid programs on tuition for high-quality universities and studying how universities might change other outcomes beyond tuition in response to the policy. We show universities hire more faculty members, keep the student-to-faculty constant, and open new undergraduate programs. Our findings support a narrative where prestigious colleges prioritize their reputation, opting for gradual expansion without compromising quality.Item ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMICS OF EDUCATION(2024) Riquelme Gajardo, María Cristina; Urzúa, Sergio; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I examine various factors shaping students’ trajectories and opportunitieslater in life. In Chapter 1, I explore the role of grade retention policies. Grade retention as a remedial policy is controversial because the benefits of extra instruction time may not outweigh its costs. Previous research has primarily examined retention for specific grades. By exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in retention generated by a nationwide promotion policy in Chile, I demonstrate that retention timing is critical in determining its effect on academic performance and access to higher education. Being held back only reduces the probability of future grade retention for young primary students. Additionally, older primary students are less likely to return to school the following academic year or graduate from high school. High school grade-retained students are the most affected, with a 10-20 percentage point reduction in their likelihood of high school graduation, and many switch to adult education in response to retention. Interestingly, even though high school students who are held back are just as likely to take the college admission test, they show a positive 0.1 SD increase in Spanish and math performance. Then, in Chapter 2, I focus on the impact of massive and sudden school closures followingthe 2011 nationwide student strike in Chile on teenage pregnancy. We observe an average increase of 2.7% in teenage pregnancies in response to temporary high school shutdowns, equal to 1.9 additional pregnancies per lost school day. The effect diminishes after three quarters since the strike’s onset. The effects are predominantly driven by first-time mothers aligned with highschool absenteeism periods and are unrelated to the typical seasonality of teenage fertility or pregnancies in other age groups. Additionally, we document that the strike had a larger disruptive role by affecting students’ educational trajectories, evidenced by a persistent increase in dropout rates and a reduction in college admission test take-up for both female and male students. Lastly, in Chapter 3, I explore inequalities in performance associated with the school typestudents attend, particularly the contribution of teachers to student performance in Chile’s college admission test (PSU). Our analysis is based on a unique teacher-student matched dataset and decomposition methods. The findings suggest that teachers’ performance on the PSU and the characteristics of their educational degrees are significant predictors of students’ success. When controlling for students’ and predetermined school characteristics, the gap between voucher and public schools reduces. Productivity differences emerge as key factors driving the disparities across school types. The analysis underscores the crucial role of teacher-student interactions in shaping student outcomes.Item Essays in the Economics of Immigration(2023) Soriano, John Joseph Sanchez; Hellerstein, Judith K; Pope, Nolan G; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chapter 1 sets the stage for Chapters 2 and 3, which involves the empirical analyses of the effects of two prominent immigration policies: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This chapter begins with a review of the history of modern US immigration policy and relevant empirical evidence regarding it. It then focuses on three special topics: immigration and labor markets, immigration and crime, and the effects of enforcement policy. These topics are chosen for their contextual relevance for DACA and IRCA, as well as for marriage. Chapter 2 examines the impact of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on the marriage outcomes of its recipients. DACA, an immigration policy introduced by President Barack Obama in 2012, provides temporary benefits to unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the US as children. By analyzing data from the American Community Survey (ACS), the study examines the effects of DACA eligibility on the probability of being married and the types of individuals DACA recipients marry. The findings suggest that DACA eligibility increased the likelihood of marriage by approximately 2 percentage points, with deportation relief being a key driver for women and work authorization playing a more prominent role for men. The analysis also reveals that DACA recipients are more inclined to marry US natives, emphasizing the desire for assimilation, and tend to choose spouses who are fluent in English, indicating the influence of DACA on language-related assimilation. Chapter 3 investigates the impact of the legalization provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) on marriage rates. The IRCA offered a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants. Using data on unauthorized immigrants that were legalized under the IRCA from the Legalized Population Survey (LPS) and a comparison group of US natives from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), the study implements an individual fixed effects strategy to estimate the changes in marriage rates as a result of the IRCA legalization. The findings reveal a statistically and economically significant increase in marriage rates for both men and women following IRCA legalization. Men experienced a 6.51 percentage point increase, while women saw an 8.29 percentage point increase. Unlike the effects observed in Chapter 2 for DACA, the permanent nature of the IRCA contributed to a stronger impact on marriage rates. The study explores potential mechanisms but finds inconclusive evidence regarding labor market outcomes and education as drivers of the marriage effect resulting from immigration liberalization.Item Essays in Labor Economics(2023) Gonzalez Prieto, Nathalie; Abraham, Katharine G; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation has as a unifying theme the analysis of labor markets. It includes three papers that analyze labor markets from three different perspectives: the role of firms in workers’ careers, the effect of public policies on firms’ decisions, and the aggregate labor market effects of individual migration choices. These diverse perspectives show the complexity of labor markets and highlight some ways in which labor markets affect workers, firms and communities.In the first essay, the objects of study are the career outcomes of workers. More specifically, using Chilean employer-employee data, we provide evidence of the divergent trajectories of workers’ careers based on the type of firms they work at. We focus on earnings, periods of employment, and the number of jobs held over the five years after a job transition. Our findings indicate that there is an earnings penalty of 6.7% for joining a startup vs. an established firm. Workers who join a startup have a lower probability of being employed and hold fewer jobs over the five years we follow them. The second chapter focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of a public policy implemented at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when mandated quarantines prevented firms from operating, to maintain existing job relationships by providing liquidity in the form of payments to furloughed workers. We leverage a discontinuity in the eligibility for the policy and are able to identify a positive effect on the likelihood of job survival for workers with short tenure. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the effect was larger in sectors more affected by the pandemic and for more vulnerable workers. Finally, the third chapter looks at the aggregate labor market effects of experiencing a labor demand shock in a Commuting Zone (CZ) in the US. The main goal of that chapter is to better understand why local labor markets in the US experience a persistent decline in labor force participation following a recession. Using uniquely granular data from the Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), we show that there is a differential migration response to local demand shocks based on the age of individuals. In particular, we find that younger adults increase their in-migration to CZs experiencing a positive labor demand shock. Additionally, while the in-migration response of the retirement-age population also is positive, it is muted and their out-migration response to a positive shock is positive, effectively delivering a negative net migration response to a positive labor demand shock for this age group. The combination of these results indicates that following a positive labor demand shock, local labor markets in the US experience a persistent re-composition of their age structure that leaves them with a higher proportion of young people. On the flip side these results point to the fact that labor markets experiencing a negative demand shock being left with a higher proportion of retirement-age people as the product of the age differentiated migration.Item Essays in Labor and Health Economics(2022) Hou, Claire; Hellerstein, Judith; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chapter 1 investigates the impact of the opioid crisis on the foster care system, motivated by a growing literature suggesting that the opioid crisis has negatively impacted children. This paper builds on prior work by separately identifying the causal effects of parental illicit opioid use and prescription opioid (PO) misuse on foster care entry and caseload after 2010. Two baseline opioid supply measures from 2000, at the onset of the opioid crisis, instrument for post-2010 changes in opioid overdose death rates among adults of prime parenting age. Using county-level mortality data and administrative foster care records, I find that moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of change in the illicit opioid death rate leads to a 1.1 (2.4) standard deviations larger percent growth in foster care entry (caseload). In contrast, a 10th to 90th percentile difference in the change in PO misuse does not significantly affect total entry or caseload. Female illicit opioid use has larger effects than male illicit opioid use. Effects are similar across child age at the time of removal. Illicit opioid use has similar effects across all placement settings, whereas PO misuse only increases entry to kinship care. Chapter 2 studies how an expansion of public health insurance affects self-employment dynamics. I investigate this question in the context of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion, which made Medicaid available to all non-elderly adults with family income up to 138% of the federal poverty level. By increasing access to health insurance outside of wage employment, expanding Medicaid eligibility could (i) induce some wage workers to become self-employed, and (ii) increase persistence in self-employment for the currently self-employed. Using the 2003-2016 CPS-ASEC linked to respondents' earnings histories from tax returns, I estimate the effect of expanding Medicaid eligibility on the probability of self-employment, wage employment to self-employment transition, and self-employment persistence among childless adults, the group that saw the largest increase in Medicaid eligibility as a result of the expansion. Using difference-in-differences that takes into account pre-ACA cross-county variation in population shares of "at-risk" groups and triple differences, I find suggestive evidence that the expansion of Medicaid eligibility may have increased persistence in self-employment for those with a relatively high valuation of health insurance, but no effects on wage employment to self-employment transitions or self-employment rates. Chapter 3 (with Katharine Abraham, John Haltiwanger, Kristin Sandusky, and James Spletzer) examines the role of self-employment in older workers' transitions to retirement. Self-employment rates rise with age, especially past the age of 50. Using unique integrated survey and administrative data, we find the share of the employed who are primarily self-employed more than doubles from age 47-52 to 65-70 – rising from under 10% to more than 20%. This growth reflects the differential patterns by age of all of the transitions among wage and salary employment, self-employment and non-employment. There is a sharp decline in the likelihood that workers switch from self-employment to wage and salary employment with age, but not the reverse. The share of wage and salary workers who transition to non-employment each year rises more rapidly with age between 53-58 and 65-70 than is the case for the self-employed. Just as important, there is a much sharper decline with age in the pace of transitions from non-employment to wage and salary employment than in the pace of transitions from non-employment to self-employment. The interaction of these changing transition rates, as opposed to simply their individual effects, plays a large role in accounting for the increase in the self-employment rate with age. We investigate how education, cumulative earnings over the prior 20 years, and earnings volatility over the prior 20 years affect these changing transition dynamics by age. We find, for example, that wage and salary workers who are more educated and have higher cumulative earnings are more likely to move to self-employment and less likely to move to non-employment, with both of these effects larger at older ages.Item ESSAYS ON THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC POLICIES ON HOUSING, EMPLOYMENT, AND INCOME INEQUALITY(2021) Pardue, Luke; Kearney, Melissa S; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I study the impact of public policies on three related but distinct economic outcomes: employment, housing stability, and income inequality. In the second chapter, I examine the employment impact of the Paycheck Protection Program, a key element of the federal government’s fiscal stimulus efforts during the 2020 coronavirus-induced recession. To assess the effect of this support on small business employment, I exploit differential timing in when firms rolled off headcount requirements needed to receive loan forgiveness. I find that as the PPP covered period expired, companies reduced active employment by a statistically significant 0.41% per week and 1.6% in the four weeks post-expiration. I estimate that, in aggregate, 907,200 jobs were lost within the four weeks after firms’ covered periods expired, as companies no longer need to maintain pre-COVID-19 headcount levels to receive PPP loan forgiveness. In the third chapter, I investigate the effectiveness of housing vouchers, the most common form of low-income rental assistance, in preventing households from facing eviction. I examine this question using newly-available public data on the universe of court-ordered evictions in the United States and exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in historical housing voucher allocation. I find that every four to six vouchers prevent one eviction in a given county, and that this effect is greater in counties with higher rent burdens and longer voucher waitlists. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that, on average, one fourth of the cost of a housing voucher can be recovered through savings in eviction prevention alone. In the final chapter, I conduct an empirical simulation exercise that gauges the plausible impact of increased rates of college attainment on a variety of measures of income inequality and economic insecurity. Using two different methodological approaches—a distributional approach and a causal parameter approach—I find that increased rates of bachelor’s and associate degree attainment would meaningfully increase economic security for lower-income individuals, reduce poverty and near-poverty, and shrink gaps between the 90th and lower percentiles of the earnings distribution. However, increases in college attainment would not significantly reduce inequality at the very top of the distribution.Item Essays on Education in Costa Rica(2021) Vega Monge, Melissa Vanessa; Battistin, Erich; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation consists of three chapters related to education economics. In the first chapter, I investigate the effects of class size on educational outcomes for secondary schools of Costa Rica. To assess the impact of class size, I take advantage of an administrative rule that sets caps to the size of classes in schools. My results suggest that class-size reductions have a positive and statistically significant effect on pass rates for students in lower secondary education. In particular, a reduction of 10 students raises pass rates by 5 percentage points, which represents a 5% increase in the historical pass rate in lower secondary education. I find that the effect of class size on pass rates in upper secondary education is statistically significant only for schools in rural areas. Specifically, a class-size reduction of 10 students in upper secondary education yields an increase of 11% in the historical pass rate for rural schools. Other measures of educational attainment, such as the graduation rate, yield similar findings, but these estimates lack statistical precision. Overall, results of this chapter indicate that rural secondary schools would benefit the most from class-size reductions. This finding is important to inform the ongoing discussion in the country on how to reform class size formation, and how to allocate resources and teachers across urban and rural areas.Chapter 2 is joint work with Erich Battistin. We study the effects of granting tenure (i.e., open-ended contracts) to primary school teachers using quasi-experimental variation in job offers arising from the centralized recruitment algorithm in Costa Rica. This algorithm matches applicants to school districts using Deferred Acceptance (DA) matching with non random tie-breakers, and school-teacher matches within districts are formed at random. We use the job offers resulting from this algorithm as instruments for the tenure status of teachers in regressions that adjust for the applicant’s “risk” of being granted tenure. Using teacher employment records combined with census and payroll data, we study the interplay between improved job security, better and more stable income trajectories, and outcomes at the school of employment after tenure. Our findings indicate that tenure has negative effects on future educational outcomes. There is, therefore, a definite need to reform the current recruitment process of teachers in Costa Rica to better target high value-added applicants prior to offer tenure positions. Finally, chapter 3 evaluates the effect of unconditional salary bonuses on upward mobility and future salary trajectories of teachers, as well as on educational outcomes of students. I take advantage of the centralized recruitment process in Costa Rica, where applicants may receive different wage offers from the same school district depending on which school they are matched to by the centralized algorithm. Specifically, only certain schools within the same school district are eligible for wage bonuses. To assess the impact of being employed in a school with bonuses, I use an event study design that exploits the random assignment of applicants to positions within school districts. My findings indicate that wage bonuses have a positive impact on the career prospects of teachers. In particular, I find that being employed in a school with bonuses induces a permanent shift in a teacher’s wage profile that represents approximately 5% increase in annual earnings. Also, this permanent change in compensation allows teachers to negotiate better job positions in the future. In addition, I document a positive impact on student learning outcomes two years after receiving the bonus offer.Item Essays on Treatment Effects from Multiple Unordered Choices(2021) Galindo Pardo, Camila Andrea; Urzúa, Sergio S; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I study some of the methodological and empirical challenges associated with estimating treatment effects of one option versus another, in contexts where agents can choose from many alternatives with no clear rank (i.e., one option is no better than the other, for everyone). In particular, I focus on educational decisions throughout the life-cycle, such as parental choice of childcare, students' choice of high school, and college enrollment. First, I present a strategy to overcome a limitation of instrumental variables in these settings, where there are many endogenous choices. I use this strategy to provide empirical evidence from an early childhood development intervention in Colombia, where parents can choose among different childcare options (e.g., small centers, large centers, or home care). In the third chapter, I focus on the Chilean high school context where students can choose from three types of schools: academic, vocational, or hybrid. I find that, while academic schools seem to improve the student's academic achievement, the effects of hybrid and vocational schools depend on the student's fallback option (i.e., what they would have chosen if their preferred option was not available). Last, in the Colombian context, jointly with Maria Marta Ferreyra and Sergio Urzúa, I examine the labor market returns to short-cycle degrees versus bachelor’s degrees and versus obtaining a high school diploma. Chapter 2 presents a strategy to estimate causal effects in settings where agents can choose from many options along with empirical evidence from an early childhood development intervention in Colombia. I exploit the joint effect of discrete and continuous instruments on the probability of choosing an option. These combined effects of different instruments have been recognized and studied in contexts where there are only two alternatives. In turn, current methods for multiple unordered choices implicitly assume that the potential response to one instrument is the same across the distribution of other instruments. Instead, I allow for the response to the variation in one instrument (for example, an offer of a slot at a childcare center) to differ depending on other instruments (for example, proximity to the center). To do so, I employ a latent utility framework and model agent's responses to the instruments through their effect on each option's costs. With assumptions motivated by economic theory (i.e., convexity of cost functions), I define conditional vectors consisting of combinations of potential choices that differ along the distribution ofa second instrument. I use conditional vectors and recent advances in the instrumental variables literature to estimate local average treatment effects. With this strategy, I empirically assess the effect of different types of childcare (e.g., small centers, large centers, or home care) on the cognitive, nutritional, and socio-emotional development of children from 0-5 years of age in Colombia. My results suggest that childcare centers with better infrastructure and services could improve some children's cognitive development. In contrast, existing estimation methods would find overall negativeeffects of these centers on cognitive development. In Chapter 3, I estimate the effects of different high school types on educational achievement, such as high school completion and higher education enrollment. I find evidence that suggests that attending a vocational high school does not have a differential effect on the probability of enrolling in a vocational college. Moreover, while hybrid schools seem to foster student enrollment in bachelor’s programs, this effect largely depends on the student's fallback option. In particular, there is no evidence of improvements in educational achievement among students who would have chosen academic schools instead of hybrid schools. In Chapter 4, with Maria Marta Ferreyra and Sergio Urzúa, we provide evidence of diversion and expansion effects of changes in the local supply of short-cycle degrees, in the context of higher education for Colombia. Our results suggest that most students would divert from bachelor's- and into short-cycle- degrees as the local supply of short-cycle degrees changes. For these students we find significant gains, particularly among women, in terms of participation in the formal labor market and years of experience.Item Essays on Bridging Economic and Educational Disparities in America(2021) Zuo, George Wayne; Kearney, Melissa; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I study policies to bridge disparities in broadband access and job search, school discipline, and local economic development in low-income neighborhoods. In Chapter 2, I present evidence on the relationship between broadband pricing and labor market outcomes for low-income individuals. Specifically, I estimate the effects of a Comcast service providing discounted broadband to qualifying low-income families. I use a triple differences strategy exploiting geographic variation in Comcast coverage, individual variation in eligibility, and temporal variation pre- and post-launch. Local program availability increased employment rates and earnings of eligible individuals, driven by greater labor force participation and decreased probability of unemployment. Internet use increased substantially where the program was available. In Chapter 3, I quantify the tradeoffs of school suspension policies on student performance and teacher turnover. I use administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District, where suspension rates fell by over 90 percent since 2003. I instrument for school suspension rates by interacting districtwide suspension rate changes with initial school suspension rate levels. The results indicate that falling suspension rates decreased math and English test scores, decreased GPAs, and increased absences. Teacher turnover also increases, particularly for inexperienced teachers. The overall negative impact of reducing suspension rates is driven by small but diffuse behavior spillovers, which are only partially offset by large and concentrated benefits for the small number of students who are no longer suspended. In Chapter 4, I analyze the job impacts of thousands of spatially-targeted local investments to spur economic development in low-income areas, funded by $3-4 billion in annual federal block grants from the Community Development Block Grant. Using a hybrid approach combining synthetic control methods with differences-in-differences, I find that job counts increase by 7% over ten years in census tracts where CDBG investments occurred, at approximately $18,000 per job. Investments disproportionately benefited nearby low-income workers. Job impacts are greatest when investments are made to support local firms. Impacts appear larger in commuting zones that are less affluent, but within-commuting zone impacts are largest in less-disadvantaged neighborhoods. I estimate that each dollar of block grant generates $3.16 of public spending.