UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation consists of three essays that investigate human capital accumulation, a crucial topic in the field of labor economics, and gender differences in the complex human capital accumulation process in school.

The first chapter, based on joint work with Le Kang, Yang Song and Peng Zhang, documents gender differences in reactions to failure in the National College Entrance Exam, an extremely high-stakes exam that solely determines college admission outcomes for almost all teenagers in China. Using unique administrative data in Ningxia Province and a regression-discontinuity design, we find that students who score just below the tier-2 university cutoff have an eight percentage point higher probability of retaking the exam in the next year, and that retaking improves exam performance substantially. However, the increase in retake probability when confronting the failure of scoring just below the cutoff is more pronounced for men than for women (11 percentage points vs. 5.5 percentage points). The gender disparity in the tendency to retake has important implications for exam performance, college enrollment, and labor market outcomes.

The second chapter, based on joint work with Shelly Lundberg, is motivated by the fact that the growing gender gap in educational attainment between men and women has raised concerns that the skill development of boys may be more sensitive to family disadvantage than that of girls. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) data we find, as do previous studies, that boys are more likely to experience increased problems in school relative to girls, including suspensions and reduced educational aspirations, when they are in poor quality schools, less-educated neighborhoods, and father-absent households. Following these cohorts into young adulthood, however, we find no evidence that adolescent disadvantage has stronger negative impacts on long-run economic outcomes such as college graduation, employment, or income for men, relative to women. We do find that father absence is more strongly associated with men's marriage and childbearing and weak support for greater male vulnerability to disadvantage in rates of high school graduation. An investigation of adult outcomes for another recent cohort from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 produces a similar pattern of results. We conclude that focusing on gender differences in behavior in school may not lead to valid inferences about the effects of disadvantage on adult skills.

The third chapter investigates the short-run and long-run effects of exposure to peers from disrupted families in adolescence. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) data, I find that girls are mostly unaffected by peers from disrupted families, while boys exposed to more peers from disrupted families exhibit more school problems in adolescence and higher arrest probabilities, less stable jobs and higher probabilities of suffering from financial stress as young adults. These results suggest negative effects on non-cognitive skills but no effect on cognitive skills, as measured by academic performance. The dramatic increase in family disruption in the United States should thus receive more attention, as the intergenerational mobility and inequality consequences could be larger than anticipated as a result of classroom spillovers.