In 1961, the average full-time student at a 4-year college in the U.S. studied about 24 hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only 14 hours a week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study times occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, overall and within every major, for students who worked and those who did not, and at 4-year colleges of every type, degree structure and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that would be most relevant to education production, and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at post-secondary institutions in the United States.

Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week. Declines were extremely broad-based, and are not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools. We conclude that there have been substantial changes over time in the quantity or manner of human capital production on college campuses.

This dissertation explores topics in the economics of higher education. Its goal is to contribute to further understanding of the factors that influence students’ major decisions in college, as well as evaluate the impact of major decisions on the gender wage gap and the types of work available in the college educated labor market.

The first chapter determines the impact of labor market conditions on student majors and, therefore, the composition of the future labor market. The empirical evidence indicates that students choose higher paying majors when they graduate during times of high unemployment. Estimates suggest that students are 2.8% more likely to choose an occupation that pays twice as much in a recession when the unemployment rate is very high but only 2.6% more likely to choose the higher paying major when the unemployment rate is very low. These effects vary by sex, with women being less sensitive to different pay by major at all levels of unemployment.

The second chapter re-examines the extent to which the gender wage gap can be explained by different major decisions made by male and female graduates. Detailed major data leads to the conclusion that inequality in the distribution of majors by sex has increased in the past decade, whereas previously utilized aggregated major data misses this trend. The result is that major can help explain approximately fourteen percent of the gender wage gap, an increase in explanatory power of thirty-five percent compared to less informative data.

The third chapter explores the labor market response to the changing sex composition of potential workers. As women make up an increasing proportion of graduates in a certain field, the average preferences of that labor market may shift for both employers and employees. The result is that, over the time period studied, a ten percent increase in female graduates in a field led to a seven percent decrease in the likelihood that a woman works part-time, and an 8.2% increase in the likelihood that a male graduate does.

This dissertation is to study the long-term impacts of the exposure to the Cultural Revolution in urban China. Following the literature on historic legacies, the first chapter provides a micro-analysis of the long-term impacts of a particular historical event: the Cultural Revolution in urban China. I use multiple datasets, construct indexes that measure the intensities of the impacts of the large-scale closure of schools as well as the forced migration, and evaluate the long-term impacts of exposure to the Cultural Revolution in urban China using synthetic cohort approach and multivariate models. Based on the theoretical framework of the life-cycle model, empirical evidence consistently shows that the Cultural Revolution produced a lasting negative effect on permanent income for the subjected birth cohorts (1946-1961) beginning in the 1990s, and this effect was amplified by around 25% to 45% from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s as the Chinese market economy increasingly evolved. Based on the approach of sequential covariate addition, evidence show that the mechanism of the impact includes channels of productivity determinants (e.g., educational attainment, work experience and health conditions), marriage, and attitudes toward the determinants of success. Interestingly, it is found that the Send-Down Movement has played a positive role in the channel of attitude which contributes to individual's annual income. These conclusions are shown to be robust to contemporaneous as well as cross-regional comparisons, and placebo tests with samples of rural-urban migrants and permanent rural residents. Also the results are robust to a variety of controls for family background, exposure to the Great Famine and various model specifications.

The second chapter is to study the spill-over effects of the exposure to the Cultural Revolution onto their next generation. Specifically, it exploits the closure of senior secondary school in China to study the intergenerational transmission of human capital using Difference-in-Difference and Instruments Variables (IV) estimations. The closure of senior secondary schools from 1966 to 1971 in China gave rise to exogenous variations in parental educational attainment both over time and across city and town residential which are not correlated with the hereditory factors and make testing the existence of causality rather than pure selection possible. Using large Census data, the estimation results consistently show that there are statistically significant causal effects from parents to children. The results also imply stronger effects of intergenerational transmission from parents to daughters. These findings are robust to examinations within different treatment and control groups, different identification strategy and different model specification.

The United States per capita health care spending is the highest in the world. This dissertation addresses the impact of additional health care spending/medical service usage on health status. First two chapters investigate the role of insurance on medical service use in understudied dental market. The third chapter examines the effectiveness of additional health care spending on infant health outcomes.

The first chapter estimates the causal relationship between adult Medicaid dental benefits and dental service usage for low-income adults by using difference-in-differences technique exploiting the state-level variation in adult Medicaid dental benefit. The results suggest that adult Medicaid dental benefit increases the possibility of dental visit by 16.4 - 22 percent. The evidence that the increased dental service use improves dental health among low-income people is also presented. The second chapter investigates the relationship between dental insurance and dental service use among older populations. Between ages of 61 and 68, 24 percent of people with at least high school diploma lose dental insurance. The decrease in dental coverage is primarily driven by the loss of employer provided dental benefit with retirement. Utilizing this rapid drop in the number of people with dental insurance at around age 65, I find that there is no evidence of a decrease in dental service usage among older populations.

The third chapter, which is co-authored with Marks, addresses the benefit of additional health care spending for newborns. We use the number of infants born on a given day in a given location as an identifying variable to generate exogenous variation in health care spending. Using detailed information on every hospital birth in California from 2002 to 2006, we find that hospital stays are less intensive when the hospitalization region is more crowded. The second stage analysis suggests that the additional health care spending on infants born on less crowded days does not improve infant health status measured by mortality rate and readmission rate.

The following chapters present an examination of the causes and effects of labor market discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The first chapter examines customer-based discrimination, which occurs when prejudice leads individuals to prefer commercial interactions with certain groups of workers to others. Under customer-based discrimination, otherwise identical employees across different classes of workers are not perfect substitutes, as race, gender or sexual orientation becomes a component of workplace productivity.

This is the first paper to identify customer discrimination against gay and lesbian workers. I exploit geographic variation in attitudes towards homosexuality to see if occupational sorting choices vary amongst gay workers in less prejudiced parts of the country versus more prejudiced parts of the country. To this end, I construct a novel state-level index of attitudes towards homosexuality using individual survey responses to questions about taste. Multiple specifications provide evidence that gay men sort away from customer service jobs in areas of the country with strong levels of distaste for homosexuality. I do not, however, find evidence that this occupational sorting exists amongst lesbian women.

The second chapter explores whether firms that partake in taste-based discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation will face a profit penalty, consistent with the Becker model of discrimination. Prior research on discrimination against gay workers has established other aspects of the Becker model, however, the profit penalty is less established in the literature. This paper improves upon existing estimates of the relationship between profits and discriminatory policies by introducing fixed effects to isolate the effect of changes in corporate policy. Additionally, this paper introduces discrete levels of discrimination as explanatory variables to assist in framing the identified effect in the context of the Becker model.

Under multiple specifications, evidence of a relationship between CEI score and profit rate is detected robust to the inclusion of firm fixed effects. These estimates suggest profit rates are improved when firms move from high levels of discrimination to low levels. Consistent with the Becker model, there appears to be no profit increase when low-discriminating firms further advance non-discriminatory policies.

This dissertation is composed of two essays focusing on some key emerging issues of health economics in developing countries. In the first chapter, I examine the role of the largest public works program in the world- the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) - in buffering the negative effects of early childhood exposure to rainfall shocks on long-term health outcomes. Collecting very detailed administrative records of rainfall shocks and policy coverage, I integrate it with a rich household level panel data from the Young Lives Survey, that follows children from year 2002 to 2010. Using three waves of the panel data spanning over eight years, the study employs individual-fixed effects estimation to analyze the extent of catch-up in height for age for the rural sample exploiting the phase wise variation in roll out of the policy across households. We find while the program does not help correct long term past health deficiencies, it is useful in buffering recent drought shocks. Interestingly, we find the extent of this mitigation varies by policy relevant subgroups, where we find it benefits significantly the poor households from lower caste and lower educational background. We find early drought exposure decreases the height for age score by .4 standard deviations and increases average stunting rate by 8%. For individuals exposed to drought, we find an increase in one standard deviation in average program days increases height-for-age by around .26 standard deviations, which is about half the rural-urban gap in terms of magnitude. The findings indicate while there is long-run impact of early-life conditions on health several years later, access to the program helps to partially mitigate recent shocks but not correct for longer-term past deficiencies. Since there is little scope of remediation in correcting past deficiencies, the study highlights the key role that a social protection policy can play in safe-guarding households against such negative shocks.

The second chapter examines the extent of reporting biases in self-reported health response across demographic sub-groups using the unique nationally representative data collected by the World Health Survey-SAGE survey from India, that has self-reported assessments of health linked to anchoring vignettes as well as objective measures like body mass index and performance tests on a range of different domains of health. Analysis of the vignettes responses reveals a systematic under-reporting of worse health among the individuals from less developed states in India, which is statistically significant across various health domains. While males and urban residents were found to systematically under-report ill-health, individuals over 60 years were found to over-report ill health. Utilizing a battery of objective health measures, we introduce a methodology to implicitly test the assumption of `response consistency' in vignettes and confirm its validity by identifying similar systematic bias in self-reported health responses across covariates. Further examination of reporting bias by exploiting the individual fixed effects reveals that substantial variation in self-reported health remains unexplained even after controlling for the usual covariates. The results seem to suggest that systematic differences in self-reported health response, even within a country, needs to be accounted for while making inter group comparisons valid and lends support to the use of the vignette technique for identifying this bias.

This dissertation is comprised of three essays on institutional reforms surrounding marital dissolution, domestic violence and education in Mexico. It is well accepted that a country's economic growth is greatly determined by its ability to innovate and to increase productivity. Understanding the role of family and education policy becomes relevant since there is evidence that domestic violence, divorce and education are linked to labor productivity and other socioeconomic outcomes such as health.

Using a difference-in-differences methodology, the second chapter exploits the variation in law adoption across states to estimate the impact of liberalized divorce laws on divorce rates. The findings do not support the claim that greater access to divorce has led to increasing divorce rates. In addition to the divorce laws examined in the second chapter, the third chapter estimates the impact of legal reforms that make domestic violence a punishable offense and that provide assistance programs to victims of domestic violence. In intra-household bargaining models, these laws potentially redistribute bargaining power to the victims of domestic violence, which they can use to bargain for less violence. I find that improving the bargaining position through prevention programs and counseling decreases homicides, suicides and bodily injury crimes. Policies which may leave the victim without recourse if separated from the spouse seem to be less effective.

The final chapter exploits a quasi-experimental setting to estimate the impact of more instructional days on student performance. The sources of variation arise from state-mandated changes in test-administration and the start of the school calendar year. Using an unbalanced panel of all public elementary schools and controlling for a set of school quality measures, the analysis provides evidence to support increasing the number of schools days. The results also suggest that the effects are non-linear and that in impoverished schools, having more days of instruction may be beneficial to the extent that there are other school resources that assist in the production of learning.

Chapter one examines the long-term impact of the state prohibitions of alcohol in the United States. Between 1851 and 1920, thirty-four states enacted statewide prohibitions of alcohol at different times. Making use of the variation in state prohibition as a natural experiment, the long-term labor market outcomes of cohorts exposed to state prohibition during the critical early development period is examined. Female cohorts exposed to alcohol-reduced environments during the critical interval from the prenatal period and up to three years of age are shown to have increased labor force participation and increased income in 1960. The results are mainly driven by exposure in the prenatal period. No results were found for male cohorts, which might be explained by the selective prenatal mortality of the frailest male cohort members unexposed to state prohibition. Chapter two provides an impact evaluation of the Brazilian National Land Credit Program. Making use of a panel dataset and a pipeline control group, the chapter evaluates the impact of the program on the outcome variables of agricultural production and earned income, using both difference in differences and individual fixed effects models. Because beneficiaries acquired land at different times, the heterogeneous effect of additional years of land ownership is investigated. The findings suggest that the program is successful in increasing beneficiaries' agricultural production and earned income, but only after four years of land ownership. Once the repayment of the loan is taken into consideration, however, the benefits of the program largely go to making debt payments and improving the net worth of the beneficiaries rather than to raising current household expenditures. Chapter three evaluates the impact of the Brazilian National Land Credit Program on the heights of beneficiary children. Making use of a family fixed effects model, the program is shown to significantly increase the height for age z-scores of beneficiary children exposed to parents' land ownership in the second, third or fourth year of life. The increases in height for age z-scores are likely attained through the mechanism of increased nutritional security with the acquisition of land through the program.