College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item THE ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF AMERICAN INDIAN CASINOS(2006-08-07) Kim, Wooyoung; Evans, William N.; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the impact of American Indian casinos on social and economic outcomes of reservation residents using restrict-use data from 1990 and 2000 census long form. Federal legislature in 1988 allowed Indian tribes in certain states to open casinos and since then, over 400 casinos have opened, 240 of which have Las Vegas-style games. I demonstrate that casino operations increased employment rates and wages. The impact was primarily for Indians and larger for low-skilled workers among Indians. Employment rates of Indians increased by 6.0 percentage points for those with less than high school degree and by 5.5 percentage points for those with high school degree. Young Indian adults responded by dropping out of high school and not enrolling college even though many tribes had generous college tuition subsidy programs. High school enrollment rates fell by 4.8 percentage points for 18 year old Indian males, by 5.1 and 8.7 percentage points for Indian females aged 17 and 18. The high school graduation rate of those aged 20-24 fell by 9.6 percentage points and by 11.5 percentage points for Indian males and for Indian females, respectively. College entrance rate fell by 5.3 percentage points and by 8.8 percentage points for young Indian males and Indian females, respectively. Economic changes on gaming reservations also altered the incentives to marry and have children. Ever married rates of males increased by 2.6 to 5.0 percentage points for those aged 18 to 21. Ever married rates of females did not show any statistically significant changes except among 24 year old Indians. The fraction of females (aged 18 to 25) having children fell for both Indians and non-Indians by 3.4 to 3.7 percentage points.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 EMPLOYMENT AND MARRIAGE: PATHWAYS OFF OF WELFARE?(2005-02-01) Roberts, Tracy Elizabeth; Martin, Steven P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Does the way women exit welfare affect their probability of returning to welfare? Using data drawn from the 1979 - 2000 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, I examine the effect of marital and employment transitions on recidivism rates. I find that women who combine employment and marriage after exiting welfare, in that order, have significantly lower risks of recidivism than other women. Women who marry but do not enter employment have higher recidivism rates than women who combine employment and marriage, but they are less likely to return to welfare than women who are only employed. The data suggest that simply encouraging marriage or women's employment may not reduce welfare recidivism. The best policy strategy to reduce welfare dependence and encourage healthy marriages may be to strengthen work support programs and improve the circumstances of employment (and opportunities for strong marriages) for low-income men and women.