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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.
I find that conflict induces men to delay first marriage and first birth, but there are no significant impacts on the timing of these activities for women. Both men and women who are exposed to the war have fewer children, and women also desire fewer children overall. Additionally, women who were exposed to the war have a smaller age difference from their husbands and are less likely to be married to men who have other wives. They are also less likely to experience domestic violence, on average. War exposure has no effect on the education difference between spouses, but women's educational attainment increases, on average, while that of men decreases. Finally, I find no effects of war exposure on women's relational empowerment, in terms of their attitudes to domestic violence and intra-household decision-making, but they are less likely to be engaged in paid work. This study contributes new evidence on the long-term impact of armed conflict on family formation in sub-Saharan Africa and shows how these impacts vary by gender and the age and duration of war exposure.
The final chapter is "The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects." A continuum of ages exists at school entry due to the use of a single school cut-off date--making the "oldest" children approximately twenty percent older than the "youngest" children. We provide substantial evidence that these initial maturity differences have long lasting effects on student performance across OECD countries. In particular, the youngest members of each cohort score 4-12 percentiles lower than the oldest members in grade four and 2-9 percentiles lower in grade eight. In fact, data from Canada and the United States shows that the youngest members of each cohort are even less likely to attend university.
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.
Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, my dissertation investigates several key issues in family economics. The first chapter studies the role of family relocation on children's schooling and youth behavior problems. By exploiting the variation in sibling's age at the time of family relocation, we find no detectable negative effects of family relocation on various children's outcomes. We extend our discussion to the context of school mobility and child outcomes. In the second chapter, we use individual school change history from the NLSY 97 and control for sibling fixed effects to estimate how the variation in children's age at school change would affect a set of outcome variables. We find school change made at age 16-18 would significantly reduce children's education achievement by age 20 and increase their possibility for repeating grade in school. In the third chapter, we examine the impact of family size on maternal health outcomes by exploiting the exogenous change in family size using contraceptive failure as instrument variable. This result indicates that mothers' mental health at age 40 is negatively affected by having additional child while their physical health stays intact.
I study three separate questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I examine how information frictions between parents and their children affect human capital investment, and how much reducing those friction can improve student effort and achievement. I find that providing additional information to parents regarding missing assignments is a potentially cost-effective strategy to increase parental investments and improve student achievement. In Chapter 2, we measure the impact of high-quality charter schools on teen fertility using admission lotteries to several Los Angeles charter schools as a natural experiment. We find evidence that admission to high-quality charter schools can substantially reduce teen pregnancies. In Chapter 3, we semi-parametrically estimate teacher effects on student test scores using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District. We document that there is significantly more within-teacher variation in teachers' effects than across teacher variation. We find that interacting the teacher indicator variables with a function of the students' lagged test scores captures most of the nonlinearities, preserves the heterogeneity of teacher effects, and provides more accurate estimates.