Economics
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Item Essays on Mental Health, Education, and Parental Labor Force Participation(2024) Nesbit, Rachel; Kuersteiner, Guido; Pope, Nolan; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation consists of three chapters in empirical microeconomics. The first chapterfocuses on mental health in the criminal justice system. I show that mandated mental health treatment during probation decreases future recidivism and further that paying for these probationers to receive treatment would be a very cost-effective program. The second chapter focuses on the labor supply of same-sex couples. My coauthors and I document the earnings patterns in same-sex couples after the entrance of their first child and contrast them with the earnings patterns in opposite-sex couples. The third chapter evaluates state-level policies to offer a college admissions exam (either the SAT or ACT) free to all high school students. I estimate precise null effects of the policies on future college attendance. The three chapters are described in further detail below. Chapter 1. Mental health disorders are particularly prevalent among those in the criminaljustice system and may be a contributing factor in recidivism. Using North Carolina court cases from 1994 to 2009, this chapter evaluates how mandated mental health treatment as a term of probation impacts the likelihood that individuals return to the criminal justice system. I use random variation in judge assignment to compare those who were required to seek weekly mental health counseling to those who were not. The main findings are that being assigned to seek mental health treatment decreases the likelihood of three-year recidivism by about 12 percentage points, or 36 percent. This effect persists over time, and is similar among various types of individuals on probation. In addition, I show that mental health treatment operates distinctly from drug addiction interventions in a multiple-treatment framework. I provide evidence that mental health treatment’s longer-term effectiveness is strongest among more financially advantaged probationers, consistent with this setting, in which the cost of mandated treatment is shouldered by offenders. Finally, conservative calculations result in a 5:1 benefit-to-cost ratio which suggests that the treatment-induced decrease in future crime would be more than sufficient to offset the costs of treatment. Chapter 2. Existing work has shown that the entry of a child into a household results in alarge and sustained increase in the earnings gap between male and female partners in oppositesex couples. Potential reasons for this include work-life preferences, comparative advantage over earnings, and gender norms. We expand this analysis of the child penalty to examine earnings of individuals in same-sex couples in the U.S. around the time their first child enters the household. Using linked survey and administrative data and event-study methodology, we confirm earlier work finding a child penalty for women in opposite-sex couples. We find this is true even when the female partner is the primary earner pre-parenthood, lending support to the importance of gender norms in opposite-sex couples. By contrast, in both female and male same-sex couples, earnings changes associated with child entry differ by the relative pre-parenthood earnings of the partners: secondary earners see an increase in earnings, while on average the earnings of primary and equal earners remain relatively constant. While this finding seems supportive of a norm related to equality within same-sex couples, transition analysis suggests a more complicated story. Chapter 3. Since 2001, more than half of US states have implemented policies that requireall public high schools to administer either the ACT or SAT to juniors during the school day free of charge, making that aspect of the college application process less costly in both time and money. I evaluate these policies using American Community Surveys (ACS) from 2000 to 2019. I augment ACS data with the Census Master Address File to precisely identify the state in which individuals took the exam. Exploiting variation in policy implementation across state and time, I find across all specifications that increased access to standardized college entrance exams has no effect on subsequent college attendance. It also does not shift students between public and private colleges or between two- and four-year programs. The results of this chapter suggest that, to the extent that these policies were introduced to encourage college-going among marginal students, they did not accomplish their goal. This provides evidence about the kinds of support necessary to influence educational outcomes for students from disadvantaged families.Item Essays on the Economics of Education(2007-05-31) Imberman, Scott Andrew; Duggan, Mark G; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Part I: Charter schools are publicly funded schools that, in exchange for expanded accountability, receive more autonomy and experience fewer regulations than traditional public schools. Previous work has found mixed evidence on the impacts of charter schools on both charter and non-charter students. However, these studies focus almost exclusively on test scores and may not fully account for endogenous movements of students and location of schools. Using data from an anonymous large urban school district, I investigate how charter schools affect both charter and non-charter students. In the first chapter I look at the effects of charter schools on charter students. I find that charter schools generate improvements in student behavior and attendance but the effects on test scores differ by subject. These results change little after correcting for selection based on changes in outcomes, endogenous attrition, or persistence. In the second chapter I investigate whether charters affect students who remain in non-charter schools. I find little evidence of charter school impacts on non-charter students. However I also find evidence that regressions using school fixed-effects may be biased. Changes in peer characteristics do not appear to play a large role in the charter impacts. Part II: Strains on the Federal budget have created worries that Federal funding of aid for higher education will fall in the future. If this happens, state governments will need to try to re-allocate their higher education spending more efficiently. One possible way to do this would be to shift funding away from public provision towards demand-side subsidies so that more students could attend private colleges. However, this will only work if private colleges provide benefits to students over public. In order to answer this question, I use highly detailed and rich data sets to assess whether there are benefits to attending private colleges over public ones. For males the wage return is small and statistically insignificant during their twenties but statistically significant at around 11 percentage points by their mid-thirties. For females the wage returns are negative and statistically insignificant. Both males and females exhibit increases in the likelihood of finishing a bachelor's degree.Item Affecting Children and the Effect of Children(2006-04-27) Cristia, Julian Pedro; Evans, William N; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the first half of my dissertation, I estimate the causal effect of a first child on female labor supply. This is a difficult task given the endogeneity of the fertility decision. Ideally, this question could be answered by running a social experiment where women are randomly assigned children or not. Using field data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), I mimic this hypothetic experiment by focusing on a sample of women that sought help to become pregnant. After a certain period since they started receiving help, only some of these women are successful. In this instance, fertility appears to be exogenous to labor supply in that pre-treatment labor supply is uncorrelated with subsequent fertility. Using this strategy, I estimate that having a first child younger than a year old reduces female labor supply by 26.3 percentage points. These estimates are close to OLS and fixed-effects estimates obtained from a panel data constructed from the NSFG. They are also close to OLS estimates obtained using similarly defined samples from the 1980 and 1990 Censuses. The second part of my dissertation explores the problem of an educational authority who decides his revelation policy about students' educational attainments in order to maximize mean educational achievement. Incentives in an educational context are different from those in the marketplace. Schools cannot pay students to motivate them to attain higher levels of education. However, there is still a role for incentives. Since students care about which signal they can get from the school (pass/fail, GPA), the school has a tool to influence students' behavior. Using a theoretical model, I explore the optimal way to use this tool, i.e., the optimal way to reveal educational achievements. I find that this optimal revelation policy is dependent on the distribution of students with respect to ability. I show that this optimal scheme could be: a) classify individuals in two groups and just reveal this information, b) reveal all information, c) set a critical standard and group all individuals together below this level and provide full information about students' productivity above it.Item The Role of Capital-Skill Complementarities in Child Labor & Schooling(2004-06-18) Chamarbagwala, Rubiana Merwan; Betancourt, Roger R; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)We explore complementarities between parents' investment in their children's human capital and firms' investment in physical capital as a determinant of child labor and schooling in developing economies. In the first essay, we develop a theoretical model where human and physical capital investments are shown to be decreasing in firms' cost of investing in skill-biased capital, increasing in the quality of education, and decreasing in the cost of education. Our contribution is two-fold. First, when there is a unique equilibrium, there is an unambiguous improvement in the welfare of all agents in response to policies that improve the quality of education or lower the cost of education or skill-biased capital. Second, this welfare improvement can be achieved by policies that target only a proportion of workers or firms. In the second essay, we test the theoretical proposition that human capital investments respond to changes in the returns to education in India. Using National Sample Survey data, we first estimate the rates of return to primary, middle, high school, and college education for males and females in each Indian state for four separate years - 1983, 1988, 1993, and 1999. The response of children's participation in child labor and schooling to the rates of return to primary and middle school is then examined. We find that child labor amongst both boys and girls, falls in response to higher rates of return to education. However, only boys' participation in school increases in response to higher rates of return to education. In the third essay, we first examine changes in relative wages and returns to education in India from 1983 to 1999, which coincides with India's liberalization of trade and investment. We then conduct a simple demand and supply analysis using the non-parametric method proposed by Katz & Murphy (1992) to examine alternative explanations for changes in relative wages in India. We find that relative demand changes contributed significantly to changes in relative wages and that international trade in manufactures predicts increases in the relative demand for both high-skilled men and women.