The paper measures the impact of high school resources on women's educational attainment and earnings. No link emerges between education and school resources - as measured by the pupil-teacher ratio, spending per pupil, teachers' starting salaries or books per student. For white women, no significant connection between school resources and wages is found. But school inputs are in several cases significantly and positively related to black women's wages. Wage elasticities with respect to school inputs are uniformly larger for black women. Finally, the impact of school resources on earnings remains constant or in some cases weakens as workers grow older.

The paper studies whether immigration affects the probability of high school graduation of American-born minorities. Since both the costs and the benefits of education are likely to rise due to immigration, the direction of the impact is ambiguous. The paper uses pooled 1980 and 1990 Census data to test for a link. State fixed effect estimates suggest a negative and significant impact of immigrants on the probability of completing high school for native-born blacks and Hispanics. The results are robust to use of metropolitan fixed effects, controlling for the pupil-teacher ratio in the state, and removing those who have recently moved. The results for blacks are also robust to removal of observations from California. However, the results for Hispanic natives depend crucially on the inclusion of the Californian subsample

The paper tests for a link between unionization and research and development rates (research and development expenditures divided by output) in thirteen aggregate Canadian industries. A balanced panel of thirteen industries covering 1968 to 1986 reveals a negative relationship between industry unionization rates and research and development. The results hold when using a number of techniques to control for unobserved industry heterogeneity and non-linear responses to unionization. In an industry that moves from the 25th to the 75th percentile of unionization, research and development is predicted to fall by about 40%.

The paper considers theoretical and empirical evidence on the impact of standards-based school reform. Our theoretical synthesis distinguishes between sorting and incentive effects of high standards, and spells out the potential tradeoffs and complementarities between enhancing efficiency and equity in student achievement. Differentiated credentials can be helpful in ameliorating tradeoffs, provided that distinct signals are clearly understood, especially between cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The paper reviews trends in state-level school accountability systems, and examines empirical evidence on the impact of increased standards and expectations on student achievement. Finally, the paper reviews some of the practical challenges facing the standards movement.

Using 1990 Census microdata, we explore ethnic, racial and immigrant differences in private school attendance. We find high rates of private school attendance among white natives, white immigrants, and Asian natives. In contrast, we find low private school rates among black and Hispanic natives and immigrants, Asian immigrants, and other natives. Variations in income per capita and especially parental education account for over 70% of the gap in private school attendance rates between white natives and all other groups. We discuss ramifications for racial, language, and socioeconomic segregation in America's schools, and possible effects of school vouchers on segregation.

We analyze the reallocations of educational expenditures required to equalize opportunities (taken to be wage income), according to the theory of Roemer (1998). Using the NLSYM data set, we find that implementing an equal-opportunity policy across men of different races, by using educational finance as the instrument, and ensuring that no race received less than the average observed nationally, would require spending nine times as much on black students, per capita, as on white students. Even the lower bound of bootstrapped confidence intervals for the policy estimates suggests large reallocations between races. The equal-opportunity policy across men from different socio-economic backgrounds that ignores race does almost nothing to equalize wages across races. For inter-racial allocations, we find evidence of a tradeoff between equity and total product, with reallocation lowering the wage bill by about 5%. In contrast, for reallocations based on parental education, equalization increases the wage bill by about 2% because the impact of school spending appears to be slightly higher for those with less highly educated parents.

This dissertation focuses on barriers to access in education for individuals from underrepresented or underserved populations.

Chapter 1 examines whether increased access to mental health services impacts adolescent mental health and behavior. I study school-based health centers, full-service clinics operating within K-12 schools. These centers aim to bridge the gap in healthcare access in low-income communities by offering physical, mental, and reproductive health services at low to no cost. Using a staggered difference-in-differences approach and a propensity-score matched control group, I find that the opening of a new school-based health center decreases suspension rates by around 1.1 percentage points (27% of the baseline rate). These effects are primarily driven by decreases in suspensions from "disruptive behavior", a known symptom of untreated behavioral issues in adolescents.

Chapter 2 studies whether low-touch information provision can overcome barriers to entry in the undergraduate Economics major that may disparately impact underrepresented minority (URM) students. I run two waves of a large-scale field experiment in an introductory undergraduate Economics course to test an email intervention containing information on research topics, careers, expected income, and diversity in Economics. For URM students, the intervention increases the probability of enrolling a subsequent Economics course by 9.9 percentage points and induces lower-performing students to enroll. Student survey responses suggest that the intervention has the strongest effects on URM students' beliefs about the breadth of research topics studied by Economics.

Chapter 3 aims to assess the relationship between GPA signals, gender, and persistence in STEM fields. Using nationally-representative panel data on college students we find that given the same GPA signals, women are more likely to switch majors and more likely to switch out of STEM entirely than men. This differential response is strongest at low average GPAs in STEM courses. Controlling for selection into initial fields, we find no quasi-experimental effect of low GPA for women in STEM; however, we continue to find differential responses to low GPA between men and women initially in STEM fields. This suggests that gendered responses to the same ability signals may explain part of the gender gap in STEM degrees.

This dissertation is composed of three chapters on distinct topics within applied microeconomics. Each chapter uses econometric methods to analyze data from administrative sources, aiming to establish causal relationships between variables of interest.

In chapter 1, I study whether social interactions with residential neighbors in very close geographical proximity influence students' educational outcomes. In a cross-sectional analysis, I show that close neighbors have more similar levels of English achievement than pairs of students living in the same neighborhood but farther away. In a longitudinal analysis, I show that in the case of both English and behavior, close neighbors’ outcomes are positively associated with own outcomes. I also show that pairs of close neighbors are more likely to attend the same school, compared to those living in the same neighborhood but farther away.

In chapter 2, we study how extreme weather and natural disasters affect political outcomes such as campaign contributions and elections. We suggest that these weather events increase the salience of climate change and also lead some individuals to update their beliefs about it. In a short-run analysis, we find that the number of contributions to the Democratic Party increases in response to weekly average temperature, and the effect is stronger in counties with more anti-environment incumbent politicians. In a medium-run analysis, we find suggestive evidence that, following a natural disaster, the level of competition of elections rises, as measured by the probability of a challenger entering the race, the number of donors, and total funds raised.

In chapter 3, I study the effects of increased unemployment insurance benefit duration on individuals' short and long term labor market outcomes, using a regression discontinuity design. In the short term, I show that for a subset of workers, receiving 60 additional days of UI benefits induces them to spend 21 more days on UI and 14 more days in nonemployment. In the long term, a similar sample of workers spends 7 additional days on UI as a result of extended benefits, compared to the short term. Furthermore, I find suggestive evidence that the effect on days spent in nonemployment in the long term is lower than in the short term, which is consistent with increased post-unemployment job stability.

This dissertation consists of three papers on the economics of education. All pertain to the notion of higher- or lower-achieving schools, in some way.

Chapter 1 estimates the magnitude by which the achievement level of a student’s high school affects college admissions once students make the decision to apply. Using administrative data from the University of California, I find a significant negative association between a school’s overall achievement level and the probability of admission at 5 out of 8 UC campuses between 2001–2006, including 5 of the 6 most selective. The average magnitude across all UC campuses is about -0.8 percentage points for a one-decile increase in school-average achievement.

Chapter 2 uses lottery data from San Diego Unified School District to study the long-term effects of school choice on students’ postsecondary outcomes. This paper contributes to the school choice literature by being among the first to focus on postsecondary enrollment and graduation, rather than nearer-term outcomes such as standardized test scores in the immediate years following the lottery.

Despite large effects on what secondary schools students attend, we find mostly insignificant effects on postsecondary enrollment and graduation outcomes from winning a school choice lottery.

Chapter 3 examines the sensitivity of school value-added estimates to the methodology used. Education scholars frequently use “value-added” models to assess schools’ effectiveness. Yet there are many variations of the model that scholars sometimes use, which may affect corresponding results. Using a menu of three model classes and three control specifications each—for a total of 9 specifications—we find a relatively modest sensitivity to the control specification, and a somewhat greater sensitivity to the class of value-added model. Precision appears sensitive to the inclusion of school-level controls and whether researchers use panel instrument techniques to address dynamic panel bias. We also observe a moderate positive correlation between value-added estimates and schools’ average levels of test scores.