UC Davis

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.