College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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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 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 Three Essays in Applied Public Economics: Applications to Vulnerable Populations(2022) Perez-Zetune, Victoria; Kearney, Melissa S; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I study the effects of state and federal programs and policies aimed to help vulnerable populations. In the second chapter, I estimate the effect of immigration enforcement on prenatal safety net programs and birth outcomes. I compare participation in prenatal WIC and Medicaid between likely undocumented mothers and US born non-Latina mothers. I find an increase in immigration enforcement lowers participation in Medicaid but has a null effect on WIC participation. Because undocumented people are ineligible for Medicaid except in special circumstances, using Medicaid to pay for the delivery of a newborn may signal a person's immigration status. WIC eligibility does not have any restrictions regarding a person's citizenship or legal status. This may explain the chilling effect observed in Medicaid but not in WIC. I find that undocumented mothers reduce their prenatal care. There are also improvements in infant birth weight and a decline in undocumented women's birth rate. This suggests positive selection into birth when immigration enforcement intensifies. Chapter three examines the effect of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on living arrangements. DACA provides temporary relief from deportation for undocumented immigrants who arrived to the United States as children. DACA recipients receive a social security number, work permit, and may obtain a driver's license in their home state. Previous studies have found that DACA improves beneficiaries' economic well-being. Since housing decisions are closely linked to economic security, I compare DACA eligible and ineligible immigrants to estimate changes in living arrangements. I find DACA increases the incidence of living with a parent in a rented home by 1.9 percentage points and lowers the incidence of living with other family members by 2.4 percentage points. The economic benefits and mobility that DACA provides along with the lowered fear of deportation may change beneficiaries' living arrangements but does not increase the likelihood of moving into a home without a family member. In chapter four, I re-examine the effect of Naloxone Access Laws on opioid mortality. In response to the opioid crisis, states adopted laws increasing the availability of Naloxone, an overdose reversal drug. The theoretical effect of these policies is ambiguous due to the potential for moral hazard. The current literature contains mixed results when using a difference-in-differences model to estimate the effect of Naloxone Access Laws on mortality. I revisit these studies and establish that the discrepancies in the findings stem from both different time periods studied and the policy definitions used. I then make a methodological correction by adjusting for the staggered policy adoption and find that Naloxone Access Laws increase opioid mortality by 39%. Finally, I discuss the validity of the results. A sharp rise in opioid mortality preceded the adoption of Naloxone Access Laws. Therefore the estimated results from a difference-in-differences model will not be causal. I propose using a contiguous county-border model to establish the causal effect of Naloxone Access Laws. The findings from this chapter emphasize the challenges of establishing causal estimates when evaluating public policies that inherently are not exogenous.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 Taking Perspective: A Theory of Prejudice Reduction and Political Attitudes(2021) Safarpour, Alauna C.; Hanmer, Michael; Banks, Antoine; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops and tests Engagement, Perspective-Taking, and Re-calibration (EPR), a theory of how to reduce prejudice and its consequences on political attitudes. I theorize that an intervention that uses engagement to encourage perspective-taking reduces prejudice and re-calibrates the subject’s attribution of blame for America’s racial problems. This last step, “re-calibration,” shifts the target of blame from out-group members to the forces of racism and discrimination which alters political attitudes rooted in prejudice. I employ my theory of EPR to develop interventions to reduce anti-Black prejudice among U.S. citizens using online perspective-taking tasks. The interventions encourage participants to adopt the perspective of an African American individual who experiences racial prejudice and make choices regarding how to respond to the bias they encounter. Interventions designed according to EPR theory were evaluated in three randomized experiments in which participants completed either the perspective-taking treatment or a placebo task. I find that participation in the perspective-taking task significantly reduces multiple forms of racial prejudice including racial resentment, negative affect, and belief in anti-Black stereotypes. The largest effects were among those with the highest levels of baseline prejudice. These studies also show that reducing prejudice increases support for policies that would help African Americans, including government assistance to Blacks, additional changes to ensure racial equality, affirmative action, and reparations for slavery. Similarly, reducing prejudice increases support for the belief that Blacks are not treated fairly in American society, increases support for policing reforms, and increases support for the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence. My results demonstrate that a substantial amount of opposition to racial policies is rooted in racial animus. But neither animus nor opposition to racial policies are immutable, reducing prejudice through my technique increases support for policies to redress racial inequities. This dissertation offers two empirically evaluated interventions that may be used as low-cost bias reduction trainings to combat the rising hate-related incidents in the United States. More broadly, my results provide insight into the nature of racial prejudice and its impact on political attitudes.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.Item Context and future potential for strategic afforestation and reforestation to meet state climate mitigation goals(2021) Lamb, Rachel Loraine; Hurtt, George C; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The development of greenhouse gas reduction plans, climate initiatives, and other international efforts, such as the Bonn Challenge, has driven demand for improved carbon accounting practices in the land-use sector. Recent projects advanced by the NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) and the NASA Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) Mission provide critical information on present and future forest carbon stocks through high-resolution remote sensing and ecosystem modeling technologies. A key remaining geospatial and computational challenge is to identify and map strategic land areas for reforestation, which move decision-makers from considering wall-to-wall carbon sequestration potentials to priority implementation. This research seeks to address this challenge at the U.S. state scale by situating and demonstrating the unique capability of high-resolution NASA CMS forest carbon products to inform strategic reforestation in support of multiple policy goals. This work began with a review of the broader science and policy context for integrating forest carbon estimates into state climate mitigation planning across eleven states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) domain (USA). Next, two specific and linked applications of CMS products were advanced in Maryland (USA) in support of state reforestation goals. First, a forest carbon rental model was developed and applied to determine whether and where potential revenues from reforestation would outcompete existing cropland profit at the hectare scale. Second, two reforestation scenarios that jointly maximized remaining carbon sequestration potential and unprotected biodiversity conservation areas were mapped and evaluated under several socio-economic factors. These results show that while most states in the region do not yet including forest carbon estimates within their climate mitigation planning, high-resolution CMS forest carbon products can be combined with socio-economic data to advance strategic reforestation in support of climate mitigation, as well as landowner livelihoods and expanded biodiversity protection. This research provides a framework for other states interested in strategic climate mitigation planning with high-resolution forest carbon products. Furthermore, the results directly advance carbon monitoring science applications to ecosystem management, environmental policy, and land-use planning, and address relevant issues in public and private sector decision-making, such as uncertainty, valuation, implications, costs, and benefits.Item The Effects of Marijuana Legalization on Adolescent Alcohol Consumption(2019) Montano, Ashley Nicole; Dugan, Laura; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Among researchers, there has been a long-standing debate on the issue of whether alcohol and marijuana are used as substitutes or complements of one another. In other words, does the increased usage of one decrease the usage of the other (substitution) or does usage of both substances simultaneously increase (complements)? The primary purpose of this study is to identify whether a suggested substitution or complementary effect exists among adolescent drinking patterns following the recent emergences of increased marijuana legalization. To explore these effects, data is used from 38 different states included in the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System between the years 1995 and 2017. The primary analysis finds limited support for a substitution effect and no evidence of a complementary effect among adolescents. This study also includes a supplementary analysis providing implications for the direction of future research on the apparent relationship between alcohol and marijuana usage patterns.Item HEALTHCARE PROVIDER AND LOCAL ECONOMY RESPONSES TO PRO-EMPLOYMENT POLICIES(2019) Hegland, Thomas Allen; Abraham, Katharine; Hellerstein, Judith; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Understanding the responses of businesses and local economies to pro-employment policies is of critical economic and public policy interest. Better understanding of these policies not only can improve our ability to achieve major social goals, but also can shed light on more fundamental aspects of how local economies work and of how firms respond to incentives. This dissertation focuses on two specific cases of pro-employment policies: payroll subsidies for nursing homes and fiscal stimulus during the Great Recession. For the first policy, I study the effect of payroll subsidies offered by state Medicaid programs to nursing homes on nursing home employment and wages. I identify the effect of subsidies using within-state, across-nursing home variation in subsidy rates and find that the subsidies were very effective at inducing nursing homes to increase nurse and nursing assistant employment and wages. Subsidy effect estimates are consistent with 100% pass-through to labor, with an implied elasticity of employment to subsidies on top of average Medicaid payments of 4.5. Beyond these baseline findings, I also investigate how the effectiveness of subsidies varies by nursing home market competitiveness and across for-profit and not-for-profit nursing homes. Cumulatively, my findings indicate that nursing home payroll subsidies are substantially more effective than previously thought, suggesting that revisiting the efficacy of other payroll subsidies using firm-level subsidy variation would be valuable as well. For the second policy, in work joint with coauthors, I examine the employment effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009's stimulus expenditure during the Great Recession. We use across-county, within-state variation in stimulus to identify local fiscal multipliers, with a focus on identifying how multipliers vary by how severely a place was affected by the Great Recession. We find that the employment multiplier is more than twice as large in the half of counties most negatively affected by the recession than in the least affected half of counties. These findings demonstrate that the fiscal multiplier varies spatially across local labor markets as a function of exposure to employment reductions. They also imply that an employment-maximizing stimulus package targeted to high excess capacity counties would have created nearly twice as many jobs as were actually created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
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