UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation contains three chapters in applied economics. Chapter 1 discusses the abolition fo rate bills for public schools in the United States during the 19th century and the resulting impact on primary school attendance. Until the late 19th century, families in some municipalities paid small user fees, called rate bills, for their children to attend public schools. Urban school districts gradually repealed these fees and funded public education through local taxes. States eventually abolished rate bills, forcing rural areas to provide public education without tuition requirements. Using United States Census data and a staggered adoption difference-in-differences approach, I show that state-level rate bill abolition increased rural primary school attendance by 7.2 percentage points. These results suggest that small costs can be an obstacle to school attendance and inhibit the diffusion of education.

Chapter 2 discusses the effect of urbanicity on fertility. Fertility rates are significantly lower in urban areas than in rural areas. Using data from the 2016 Canadian Census, I exploit the exogenous placement of refugees to decompose the direct (causal) and indirect (compositional) effects of urbanicity on fertility. I find that these differences persist for refugee women, suggesting that causal factors are primarily responsible for rural-urban differences in fertility.

Chapter 3 discusses the effect of fans on home field advantage in European soccer. We exploit exogenous variation in the level of fan attendance driven by COVID-19 mitigation policies and find that the home field advantage, as measured by home minus away (expected) goals, is reduced by more than 50\% across the English Premier League, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A, and Spanish La Liga. This leads to a decrease in probability for a home win, indicating that these goals are pivotal with respect to match outcomes. These results are robust to controlling for factors potentially correlated with the no-fans policies, such as changes in weather and COVID-19 prevalence by region.