UCLA

These essays contribute towards our understanding of applied microeconomics. This dissertation is composed of three chapters.

Chapter 1 investigated whether granting legal status to undocumented immigrants improved infant health outcomes in the United States. To answer this question, I've used the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 that legalized about 2.7 million undocumented immigrants in the US as my historical setting. My research design is essentially an analysis on the county level using varying treatment intensities that come in the form of geographical variation in the proportion of legalized immigrants. In order to deal with endogeneity concerns that arise from immigrants' location choice, I employ the "ethnic enclave instrument" and the "distance to the US-Mexico border" instrument. As a summary my results, I found that for a 1\% increase in the proportion of the legalized immigrants in a county, I found a corresponding 2-3\% decrease in the infant mortality rate.

For Chapter 2, we turn our attention to the self-reported health measure. Self-reported health is widely used in economic models to measure general health status. Most major surveys include some form of a question, in which respondents are typically asked to rate their health on a five-point scale from excellent to poor. Despite its widespread usage, we understand little about the process individuals use to position themselves on the scale. Furthermore, the process itself may have changed over time as knowledge and perceptions about particular health conditions and their medical treatments have evolved. Using the National Health Interview Study, we show that use of the scale has changed substantially over the past 22 years. We find the change is due not only to changes in underlying health, but also to changes in the way individuals regard their health in relation to the scale.

For Chapter 3, we explored how within classroom ordinal height or income rank of elementary school students affected their future academic performance. Adolescents' perceived lower social hierarchy is associated with adverse outcomes, and we focused on these two factors that are known to shape one's self-view. We used panel data from Seoul Education Longitudinal Study 2010. We exploit the feature that two students with identical height or family income can be ranked differently based on which classroom they are in. Our results indicate that height, not ordinal height rank, is associated with better academic performance in later years, while ordinal income rank is consistently shown to have an impact on future academic performance. We look for potential mechanisms and arrive at the conclusion that income rank affects future academic performance through increased parental investment.