Essays on the economics of education.

Essays on the economics of education.

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Tannenbaum, Daniel Isaac.
Imprint:	2014.
Description:	123 p.
Language:	English
Format:	E-Resource Dissertations
Local Note:	School code: 0330.
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10168708

Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:	University of Chicago.
ISBN:	9781321034004
Notes:	Advisor: Marianne Bertrand. Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, Division of the Social Sciences, Department of Economics, 2014. Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-11(E), Section: A.
Summary:	This dissertation consists of three essays on the economics of education. The first essay considers the dismantling of school desegregation plans, and its effect on the inequality of schools and household welfare. Between 1990 and 2010, more than 200 school districts dismantled their desegregation-based assignment plans, many of them redistricting their assignment zones. This essay addresses the question: who are the winners and losers of redistricting, and how does redistricting affect equilibrium student sorting and house prices? First, I show that redistricting itself can be exploited to estimate parents' willingness to pay (WTP) for access to good schools. This approach uses newly destroyed assignment boundaries to estimate the house price premium across these boundaries while they are in effect, and then again, after they have been destroyed and the school quality differences have vanished. I also exploit newly created boundaries, to estimate the house price premium before the boundaries are announced to test for preexisting housing and neighborhood differences. This approach improves upon the literature by explicitly testing for endogeneity and placing bounds on WTP estimates. I show that traditional estimates using geographic border discontinuities are biased upwards by roughly 50 percent, and demonstrate that this is due to two reasons: (1) district lines are drawn to separate neighborhoods that differ in preexisting unobserved amenities, and (2) homeowners invest more in housing attributes when their assigned school is higher quality. Second, I build an economic framework to show how redistricting affects the correlation between school quality and neighborhood amenities, which affects equilibrium student sorting and house prices. I estimate the gains and losses due to redistricting and find that Charlotte-Mecklenburg's 2001 reform increased the inequality of public schools and that housing values in the richest-quartile neighborhoods increased by approximately 2.5%, while the poorest-quartile neighborhoods experienced similar losses. The second essay studies the complementarity of home and school inputs in the production of skills. Many studies have examined the impact of schooling inputs on student outcomes, but have ignored that parents might change their behavior at home - their time or goods investments in their child - when the quality of the child's schooling environment changes. Using the ECLS-K data, a longitudinal study with detailed data on the home and school environments, I am able to examine how parents respond to an increase in the child's school inputs. I find that parents scale down home inputs in response to an increase in school inputs and that there is substantial heterogeneity in parental response, with low-skilled parents having a much larger negative response than high-skilled parents. Heterogeneity among parents means that any policy aimed to increase the quality of the school environment will have an effect on the distribution of skills, operating through this parental response mechanism. In the third essay, I ask whether males and females differ in their willingness to guess, and whether this difference affects the gender gap in SAT scores. On the SAT, students are penalized with a fraction of a point deduction for incorrect answers but are not penalized for leaving questions blank. Although the expected return to answering is weakly greater than zero, students leave questions blank, and females leave more questions blank on average than males. Using data from the Fall 2001 SAT, I use variation in the guessing penalty across questions as an exclusion restriction to estimate what the gender gap on the SAT would be if males and females had the same willingness to guess. I show that gender differences in willingness to guess explain roughly 40 percent of the observed gender gap in performance on the SAT.