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Title: Three Essays in the Economics of Education and Labor Economics

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2011

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Abstract: In the first chapter of this dissertation, I examine the role of persistent e ffects of past labor market conditions in explaining trends in the college-high school wage gap inthe US. I document increases in the wage gap for workers since the late 1990s, which are larger than those predicted by standard explanations and are consistent with animportant role for persistence in the wage gap. Using a semi-parametric estimation procedure, I show that the increases are caused by changes in age pro files in the wagegap across birth cohorts, rejecting the assumption of constant age profi les in prior work and providing evidence of persistence in the wage gap. I fi nd that higher unemployment at the age of high school graduation leads to higher college-high school wage gaps through age 30 in the birth cohort. I identify the persistent e ffects of initialunemployment rates controlling flexibly for unobserved transient eff ects of contemporaneous conditions. The fade out of persistent e ffects of initial unemployment rateswith age can account for over a third of the unexplained increase in the wage gap for older workers, and nearly all of the increase for younger workers. The results implythat an important component of wage inequality is driven by the luck of birth cohorts to enter the labor market when conditions are favorable. To alleviate the eff ects ofpersistent wage inequality, policy makers should consider targeted cross-generational transfers over transfers designed to alleviate only the eff ects of transitory labor market conditions.The second chapter, written jointly with Brian Jacob, examines the relationship between the formal ratings that principals give teachers and a variety of observableteacher characteristics, including proxies for productivity. Prior work has shown that principals can differentiate between more and less e ffective teachers, especially at the tails of the quality distribution, and that subjective evaluations of teachers are strongly correlated with subsequent student achievement. However, whereas prior work has relied on survey data, we consider formal ratings from a setting in which the stakes are reasonably high. We fi nd that the ratings are correlated with an array of teacher qualities including experience for young teachers, education credentials, and teacher absenteeism. Our fi nding that principals reward qualities of teachers known to be related to student productivity provides reason to be optimistic about policies that would assign more weight to principal evaluations of teachers in career decisions and compensation.In the third chapter, I ask whether the benefi ts of pre-school participation can account for the magnitude of the e ffects of school entry policies on student outcomesusually attributed to the student's age of entry into school. I develop a dynamic model of human capital accumulation, which accounts for diff erential pre-school experiences of children. Using the model, I show that differences in the rate of participation in pre-kindergarten activities between students assigned to enter school at diff erent ages could lead to upward bias in prior estimates of effects of entry age on student achievement, and downward bias in estimates of the eff ects of time in school. I fi nd that students assigned more time out of school are more likely to attend prekindergarten.Accounting for pre-kindergarten participation, I fi nd larger eff ects of time in school on math scores than in prior work. To account for all of the eff ects of entry policies usually attributed to entry age, the benefi ts of pre-kindergarten would need to be implausibly large. However, using variation in the response to and compliance with school entry policies across states and time, I fi nd evidence of large e ffects of pre-kindegarten attendance on math scores.

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Authors: Walsh, F.G.Elias

Institution: The University of Michigan

Department: Public Policy and Economics

Advisor: Professor Brian A. Jacob, Professor John Bound

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan

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Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Education, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other

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