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This dissertation consists of three distinct essays in the economics of education, children and family. The first essay evaluates the effectiveness of carbonated beverage bans in schools by investigating their impact on household carbonated beverage consumption. I match households in Nielsen Homescan Data to their school district's carbonated beverage policies over the last 10 years. I find that when high schools ban the sale of carbonated beverages to students, households with a high school student experiencing the ban increase their consumption of non-diet carbonated beverages by roughly the equivalent of 3.5 cans per month. I present evidence that the average high school student consumes roughly 4.5 cans of non-diet soda per month in school, when carbonated beverages are available. Thus, the results suggest that the drop in student school consumption is substantially offset by increased household consumption. The second essay explores the effectiveness of motivating students to improve their academic performance through conditioning various privileges. I show that conditioning the privilege of going off campus during the school day on certain academic (GPA, test scores, etc.) or behavioral (absences, probation, etc.) criteria improves high school students' test scores and decreases their dropout rates. These results shed light on student incentive programs intended to increase academic performance. The third essay asks how conditioning a monetary benefit on individuals' family status can create distortions, even in individuals' seemingly personal decisions, such as the birth of a child. I exploit a 21-month lag between announcing California's introduction of the first paid parental leave program in the United States and its scheduled implementation to evaluate whether women timed their pregnancies in order to be eligible for the expected benefit. Using natality data, documenting all births in the United States, I show that the distribution of California births in 2004 significantly shifted from the first half of the year to the second half of the year, immediately after the program's implementation. While the effect is present for all population segments of new mothers, it is largest for disadvantaged mothers - with lower education levels, of Hispanic origin, younger, and not married.
This dissertation examines various economic factors that influence student academic performance. In the first essay, I explore the role of behavioral factors in educational performance by testing whether time-management tools can improve academic outcomes for online students. I design three software tools including (1) a commitment device that allows students to pre-commit to time limits on distracting Internet activities, (2) a reminder tool that is triggered by time spent on distracting websites, and (3) a focusing tool that allows students to block distracting sites when they go to the course website. I test the impact of these tools in a large-scale randomized experiment (n=657) conducted in a massive open online course (MOOC) hosted by Stanford University. Relative to students in the control group, students in the commitment device treatment spend 24% more time working on the course, receive course grades that are 0.29 standard deviations higher, and are 40% more likely to complete the course. In contrast, outcomes for students in the reminder and focusing treatments are not statistically distinguishable from the control. These results suggest that tools designed to address procrastination can have a significant impact on online student performance. In the second essay, I examine whether trends in parenting time could help explain the black-white test score gap. I use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to examine the patterns in the time black and white children receive from mothers at each age between birth and age 14 and compare these patterns to corresponding test-score gaps documented in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K). I observe that black children spend significantly less time with their mothers than white children in the first years of life and that differences are concentrated in activities that may be especially important during these years. Differences in parenting time, however, rapidly decline with age. Contrastingly, when socioeconomic variables are controlled, black-white test score gaps are small in kindergarten, but then grow over time. The results of this study suggest that contemporaneous differences in parent time are unlikely to be a significant factor in black-white test score trends. In the third essay, coauthored with Jordan Matsudaira, I study whether charter school unionization impacts student academic outcomes. We use administrative school-level data coupled with data on the timing of union recognition collected via our own public records requests (PRR) and records of unionization from the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to construct difference-in-difference estimates the of the impact of teacher unionization on student outcomes. We find that unionization has a positive and statically significant impact on student math performance and a positive but only marginally significant impact on english performance. In our preferred estimates, we find that unions increase average grade-level math test scores by 0.17-0.21 standard deviations (SD) and English scores by 0.06-0.08 SD. These estimates allow us to rule out even modest negative effects of unionization on student academic outcomes.
Contributed papers at a seminar.
This dissertation includes three essays in the field of economics of education. The first chapter (joint with Dong Woo Hahm) explores the impact of public school assignment reforms by building a households' school choice model with two key features---(1) endogenous residential location choice and (2) opt-out to outside schooling options. Households decide where to live taking into account that locations determine access to schools---admissions probabilities and commuting distances to schools. Households are heterogeneous both in observed and unobserved characteristics. We estimate the model using administrative data from New York City's middle school choice system. Variation from a boundary discontinuity design separately identifies access-to-school preferences from other location amenities. Residential sorting based on access-to-school preference explains 30\% of the gap in test scores of schools attended by minority students versus their peers. If households' residential locations were fixed, a reform that introduces purely lottery-based admissions to schools in lower- and mid-Manhattan would reduce the cross-racial gap by 7\%. However, households' endogenous location choices dampen the effect by half. The second chapter (joint with Dong Woo Hahm) explores how students' previously attended schools influence their subsequent school choices and how this relationship affects school segregation. Using administrative data from New York City, we document the causal effects of the middle school a student attends on her high school application/assignment. Motivated by this finding, we estimate a dynamic model of middle and high school choices. We find that the middle schools' effects mainly operate by changing how students rank high schools rather than how high schools rank their applications. Counterfactual analysis shows that policymakers can design more effective policies by exploiting the dynamic relationship of school choices. The third chapter (joint with Lois Miller) studies how colleges' ``sticker price'' and institutional financial aid change during and after tuition caps and freezes using a modified event study design. While tuition regulations lower sticker prices, colleges recoup losses by lowering financial aid or rapidly increasing tuition after regulations end. At four-year colleges, regulations lower sticker price by 6.3 percentage points while simultaneously reducing aid by nearly twice as much (11.3 percentage points). At two-year colleges, while regulations lower tuition by 9.3 percentage points, the effect disappears within three years of the end of the regulation. Changes in net tuition vary widely; focusing on four-year colleges, while some students receive discounts up to 5.9 percentage points, others pay 3.8 percentage points more than they would have without these regulations. Students who receive financial aid, enter college right after the regulation is lifted, or attend colleges that are more dependent on tuition benefit less.
This dissertation analyzes the ways that college applicants and college students navigate through higher education with a focus on ways to improve their experience. In the first chapter, I examine the ways that college applicants change their application and enrollment decisions when using the Common Application. In the second chapter, I highlight the behavioral biases that college applicants reveal in response to navigating the college applications process online. In the third chapter, I examine the ways that instructor feedback to college students affects their performance in introductory courses.