In the first chapter, I contribute to the literature that studies academic impacts of disruptions due to weather or natural disasters. Such studies so far have mostly focused on younger children and evidence for older students is still limited. Furthermore, the wildfire landscape in California is characterized by frequent fires that burn close to the state's residential areas and their schools. I combine locations of the entire population of in-state wildfires with administrative school-level data to document the detrimental effects of wildfire exposure for older student academic achievement on standardized exams in public schools in California. I provide novel results for older students and I estimate implications of the physical presence of local wildfires, rather than smoke attributable to all wildfires in the U.S. as wildfire literature has done in the past. I find that local presence of large wildfires reduced mean test scores of boys by 0.05 standard deviations across all schools and by up to 0.15 standard deviations in rural socio-economically disadvantaged schools.

In the second chapter, we provide evidence to the discussion about the effect out-of-state university students have on potential in-state students. Despite paying a premium to attend state universities, researchers argue that out-of-state students may come at a cost to in-state students by negatively affecting academic quality or by crowding out in-state students. To study this relationship, we examine the effect of a 2016 policy at a highly ranked state flagship university that removed the limit on how many out-of-state students it could enroll. We find the policy caused an increase in out-of-state enrollment by around 29 percent and increased tuition revenue collected by the university by 47 percent. We argue that this revenue was used to fund increases in financial aid disbursed at the university, particularly to students from low-income households, indicating that out-of-state students cross-subsidize lower income students. We also fail to find evidence that this increase in out-of-state students had any effect on several measures of academic quality.

In the final chapter, we consider the early-1990s land protections covering tens of millions of acres of old-growth forest in the Northern Spotted Owl habitat in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and Northern California. In the intervening period, wildfire regimes in this region have become significantly more frequent, larger, and more severe. We find that these restrictions on timber harvesting lead to two outcomes. First, they caused an increase in the share of low-intensity wildfire ignitions by enhancing the natural shady and cool conditions of old-growth forests and their extensive tree canopies. At the same time, they ultimately greatly increased areas of wildfire perimeters that burned at high-severity in the protected forests---almost certainly because the logging restrictions encouraged accumulation of vegetation fuels. Severe wildfires often greatly harm affected ecosystems, and impose substantial economic costs on humans. We argue that qualified logging operations could serve a beneficial, complementary role to prescribed burns in forest management plans that aim to reduce wildfire severity.

In this dissertation, I discuss three papers. The first two, “Fixing the Leaky Pipeline: The Role of Beliefs About Ability in STEM Major Choice” and “Knowing What it Takes: The Effect of Information About Returns to Studying on Study Effort and Achievement”, use field experiments to influence student beliefs to study student decision making. These papers demonstrate both the need to focus on students’ mental models of decision characteristics when creating education policy, as well as the potential for thoughtful information interventions to influence student behavior. The third paper, “The Economic Impacts of Hurricane Maria”, studies how a sudden influx of workers into a labor market influences the local economy. We find that these new workers grow the economy overall, with heterogeneous effects by sector. These three papers each show how rigorous research designs and econometric techniques can help us study complex social phenomenon.

In chapter 1, this dissertation investigates how promotion policies impact advanced education attainment on employees throughout a career. Using administrative data from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), I leverage a natural experiment where academic credentials were permanently masked from promotion consideration. I show the policy influenced the premium of a graduate degree for career advancement opportunities. I then exploit an event study and difference-in-differences design to find employees are 14 percentage points less likely to complete a master's degree when education credentials are no longer considered for promotion. I also show attendance at for-profit institutions declined substantially after the policy reform.

In chapter 2, I examine workplace peer effects on advanced education attainment. Using administrative data from the DoD and conditional exogeneous assignment of employees to workplace, I provide empirical evidence that coworkers’ education investment behavior increases the likelihood of using Employer-Provided Educational Assistance (EPEA) benefits to start and eventually complete a graduate degree.

In chapter 3, I analyze trainees' ordinal rank across cognitive and physical ability within an initial job training program. Using administrative data from the DoD and conditional random assignment of trainees to peer groups, I test whether rank effects vary across contemporaneous training and long-term career outcomes. I find cognitive ordinal rank, measured by an individual's score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), has a meaningful impact on completing initial training into the U.S. Air Force (USAF). I also show physical ordinal rank, measured by an individual's initial fitness score, also affects initial job training performance. Both sets of ranking effects impact follow-on disciplinary outcomes and vary by gender.

This dissertation consists of three papers on public economics and school finance. Each focuses on school districts in California, exploring how they manage their finances. Given the structure of the California’s school funding system, districts in the state uniquely situated compared to school districts elsewhere and other types of local governments more broadly. The results of the analyses, however, are instructive and could be relevant in other contexts.

In the first chapter, I explore categorical funding programs—additional funds available to applying districts that are targeted to specific purposes or student groups. These are the most significant of the limited options for California school districts to raise revenues. The use of these funds is restricted, however, and districts often face a choice between altering their educational program and forgoing the new revenues. This paper analyzes the impacts of the availability of categorical funds on school district decision-making. Using detailed school district financial data and focusing on results for four major programs, I use a difference-in-difference research design by exploiting the timing of each program’s introduction or elimination and find that district spending decisions are significantly influenced by these categorical programs, as participating districts react by shifting their spending patterns to accord with program goals. The influence of categorical funding on district spending patterns is accompanied by mixed results for student outcomes. Suggestive evidence shows that some programs have benefits for students in participating districts while other programs have minimal impacts on student achievement.

The second chapter examines school district savings. In any given year, California school districts hold a significant portion of their revenues in reserves. While some amount of saving is fiscally prudent, such high savings raise a question of whether this reserve behavior is appropriate. Revenues held in reserve are not spent on services for the students that generated them and research in other contexts has raised concerns about agency issues—the self-interested use of savings on the part of managers potentially at the expense of the broader organization. In this paper, we explore the determinants of reserves in California school districts. With estimates of these determinants, we then identify districts that hold significant excess reserves and examine whether these districts exhibit agency issues. We find that revenue volatility, total enrollments, and declines in enrollment are key determinants of district reserves. District that hold substantial excess reserves also spend more on administrative expenses relative to other districts, indicating some potential for agency issues. However, further analysis finds that these high-saving districts also have higher average student achievement, suggesting that their reserves behavior and the associated administrative spending may actually reflect a premium paid for higher quality management.

The third chapter is on the volatility of revenues. California school districts have little control over their revenues—most rely heavily on state aid for the bulk of funding. This funding fluctuates from year to year, and in the case of recessions, can be subject to substantial reductions. Typically, income or revenue volatility suggests a need to smooth consumption in order to avoid disruptions when shortfalls occur. Using nearly 30 years of detailed financial data, we explore how districts manage this variation and the associated uncertainty. We find that, on average, California districts spend nearly all new revenues, responding myopically to annual changes. There is, however, substantial variation between districts in the management of revenue volatility. These differences in management are related to district characteristics like region or grades served, as well as student demographics and the level of available resources. We continue our examination and find that differences in management are related to student achievement and class sizes.