Economics
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Item Essays on the Economics of Education(2022) Kutscher Campero, Macarena Isabel; Urzúa, Sergio; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)All over the world, governments are increasingly introducing reforms intending to promote school integration and equal access within the educational systems. Many aim to provide more school opportunities to families and include education vouchers, open enrollment, inter-district choice, and centralized assignment policies, among others. This dissertation consists of three essays that seek to provide evidence for the design of effective and inclusive education policies. Although many of these reforms implicitly or explicitly concern peer effects, -as they affect the composition of classrooms and schools-, they are often not fully internalized in their design [Hoxby, 2020, Heckman,1999]. The presence of peer effects may change the direction of a policy, having consequences on both the equity and the students' academic outcomes. Hence, in Chapter 2, I develop a dynamic model of social interactions at school to study the impact of peers on student outcomes. I take advantage of the dynamics of the model to deal with the main identification issues that have been documented in the literature. Then, I use this model to estimate the impact of classroom peers on students' academic achievement by using student-level administrative data from Chile. I find that social effects are positive but only significant for math. When exploring heterogeneous effects, I find that exposure to opposite-gender peers leads to higher academic performances in math for boys but not for girls. This result could be related to gender stereotypes that affect girls' attitudes and self-perceptions toward math. I also find that higher achievers experience the largest effects from high-ability peers. Conversely, students with low initial achievement levels appear to benefit less and may even experience adverse effects from top ability students. This suggests that some degree of tracking should be preferred to thoroughly mixed or random classrooms. In the following two chapters, I analyze the effects of two large-scale school choice reforms aimed at reducing social segregation across schools by influencing enrollment patterns. In Chapter 3, I study the impact of a targeted voucher program on a series of cognitive, non-cognitive, and behavioral outcomes, ranging from student test scores to aggressive behavior (bullying). I exploit a national targeted voucher policy implemented in Chile, which increased the funding for disadvantaged students by 50%. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I confirm previous findings that this policy did not significantly improve students' test scores. However, I show that the program led to meaningful improvements in students' non-cognitive and behavioral outcomes, for both low- and high-SES students. Finally, I provide evidence of the primary channel behind my results: schools participating in the policy have used the additional resources to hire more learning support staff, especially from the psycho-social area. My last chapter, written in collaboration with Sergio Urzúa and Shanjukta Nath, investigates whether adopting a centralized school admission system can alter within-school socio-economic diversity. We examine a centralized school admission system that the Chilean government introduced in 2016 as the central component of a major education reform aimed at promoting social inclusion and reducing the high levels of school segregation. We use a difference-in-differences strategy, exploiting the sequential introduction of the reform across regions to quantify its heterogeneous impact on segregation. We find no impact of the new policy on school segregation. However, we document that the reform increased within-school segregation in areas with high levels of pre-existing residential segregation and with higher provision of private education.Item ESSAYS ON TARGETED PROGRAMS IN EDUCATION(2019) Witzen, Brian Heath; Turner, Lesley J; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines three examples of education policy that affect students' decision-making at three different stages of the academic career. In the first chapter, I examine how grant aid can affect the re-enrollment and graduation rates of bachelor's degree-seeking students. I use administrative data from the State of Maryland to study the state's largest need-based grant aid program using a regression discontinuity design. I find positive effects of grant receipt on re-enrollment beginning in the second year and a 10\% increase in the rate of persistence to the fourth year, with similar-sized, but more imprecise effects on graduation within 5 years of entry. In the second chapter, I study State Loan Repayment Programs which pay down a physician's medical school debt in exchange for a period of service in a health care provider shortage area. I gather data from individual states on the amounts that their programs offer over time and use changes in designations of health care provider shortage areas to implement a generalized differences-in-differences strategy. I find no overall effect of the programs on the physician-to-population ratio of an area eligible for the program, though I do find evidence of a positive effect on the physician-to-population ratio when I focus on the age group where physicians are most likely to be recent medical school graduates. In the third chapter, I examine the effect of high school Career and Technical Education coursework completion on postsecondary enrollment, degree completion, and early career earnings. I utilize two estimation strategies. The first is a propensity score matching approach and the second is an instrumental variables approach based on the distance between a student's high school and a CTE Center that offers the coursework. The two strategies generally find that CTE is associated with a substitution from four-year programs to two-year programs, and positive effects on early career earnings.Item ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMICS OF ABILITY, EDUCATION, AND LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES(2014) Prada, Maria Fernanda; Urzua, Sergio; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The analysis of the heterogeneity in worker ability and its economic implications have been a focus of a broad strand of research in labor economics. Several studies have demonstrated that both cognitive and socio-emotional dimensions of ability have a positive effect on wages, schooling, and the probability of choosing high paying occupations. However, there is no theoretical reason to expect that all dimensions of ability affect outcomes in the same direction. This dissertation, composed of four chapters, shows that mechanical ability, jointly with cognitive and socio-emotional dimensions, affects schooling decisions and labor market outcomes. Moreover, it demonstrates that this facet of ability has a positive economic return and affects schooling decisions and occupational choices differently than other measures of ability. Chapter 2 introduces the concept of mechanical ability, describes the tests used to measure it, and compares this dimension with other more conventional measures of ability. Chapter 3 presents a general framework to understand the effects of multiple dimensions of ability on outcomes, taking into account that workers sort into the occupations pursuing the tasks where their ability gives them comparative advantage. This framework is used to decompose the overall effect of unobserved abilities into the components explained by schooling decision, occupational choice, and direct on-the-job productivity. I show that all three dimensions of ability have multiple, heterogeneous, and independent roles. They influence the sorting of workers into schooling and occupations, and also have a direct effect on wages. This implies that a policy that increases ability at advanced ages, when schooling and occupational decisions cannot be altered, may still have a direct impact on wages. Chapter 4, written in collaboration with Sergio Urzua, analyzes the implications of considering the three dimensions of ability on the decision to attend a four-year college. We find that, despite the high return associated with college attendance, individuals with low levels of cognitive and socio-emotional ability but high mechanical ability could expect higher wages by choosing not to attend a four-year college. These results highlight the importance of exploring alternative pathways to successful careers for individuals with a different profile of skills.Item CONTRACTING OUT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: EVIDENCE FROM COLOMBIA(2011) Bonilla-Angel, Juan Diego; Hellerstein, Judith K; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Contracting out public schools to private institutions is an instrument for reforming public education as it may facilitate academic innovation and improve student academic performance through higher school accountability and autonomy. The degree of autonomy that different providers have may vary substantially depending on the contractual and institutional arrangements they are subject to. In principle, contractual differences should generate different sets of incentives for providers that may ultimately affect student academic performance. One can expect, for example, that programs with limited achievement accountability rules might invest sub-optimally in resources aiming at improving the academic performance of their students. In this dissertation, I evaluate short- and longer-run achievement effects of the \emph{Colegios en Concesi\'on} (CEC) program, a large-scale initiative implemented in 2000 in Bogota, Colombia, which contracted out the administration of some traditional public schools (TPS) to reputed, not-for-profit private schools and universities. This program allows participating schools to operate outside public schools' collective bargaining provisions in return for being accountable, among other things, for the academic performance of their students in the ICFES test, a high-stakes college entry national standardized test. The major empirical challenge in studies of alternative school models is selection bias. Students who attend CEC schools may differ in a number of ways from public school students. To overcome potential selection bias of CEC attendance, I exploit variation in distance from a student's residence to the closest CEC institution as an instrument for CEC attendance. While distance may in theory be correlated with unobservable characteristics of students, I demonstrate using a variety of empirical strategies that this instrument is conditionally exogenous of unobserved determinants of academic achievement. I first evaluate the effects of attending a CEC school on ICFES test scores. Instrumental variables results indicate that CEC students exhibit important and significant gains in test scores on the ICFES test. That is, the two-stage least squares estimates obtained indicate that CEC students score 0.6 and 0.2 standard deviations higher in math and verbal tests, respectively, relative to TPS students. I provide evidence that the positive test score results of CEC attendance are not driven by unintended strategic responses by CEC schools such as excluding low-performing students from the pool of test-takers or via test specialization in the curriculum, or by significant differences in education inputs such as teachers' education, student-teacher ratios, or expenditures per student. I also provide suggestive auxiliary evidence that the estimated results are a consequence of an institutional arrangement that makes CEC schools accountable for the academic performance of their students. I also evaluate whether attending a CEC school translates into longer-run gains in potentially more meaningful outcomes such as increasing the probability of investing in post-secondary schooling, attending a more selective tertiary institution, or being admitted in high-return academic programs. The results on college attendance indicate that CEC students exhibit a significantly higher probability of attending a higher education institution and to attend a vocational program relative to TPS students. Moreover, CEC students have a slightly higher probability of attending a selective public institution and are not more likely to drop out from college relative to TPS students. The overall results provide compelling evidence that the contractual arrangement that defines the operation of CEC schools are successful at improving the academic performance of their students relative to TPS.