Full Citation
Title: Essays in the Economics of Education
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2007
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Abstract: This thesis consists of three essays on the economics of education.The first chapter estimates the effects of participating in the National School Lunch Program in the middle of the 20th century on educational attainment and adult health. My instrumental variables strategy exploits a change of the formula used by the federal government to allocate funding to the states that was phased in beginning in 1963. Identification is achieved by the fact that different birth cohorts were exposed to different degrees to the original formula and the new formula, along with the fact that the change of the formula affected states differentially by per capita income. Participation in the program as a child appears to have few long-run effects on health, but the effects on educational attainment are sizable. The second chapter studies the issue of racial diversity in higher education. I estimate the effects of college racial diversity on post-college earnings, civic behavior, and satisfaction with the college attended. I use the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey, which allows me to control for exposure to racial diversity prior to college. Moreover, I use two techniques from Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) to address the issue of selection on unobservables. Single-equation estimates suggest a positive effect of diversity on voting behavior and on satisfaction with the college attended, but I do not find an effect on other outcomes. Moreover, the estimates are very sensitive to the assumptions made about selection on unobservables.The third chapter studies university affirmative action bans. I use information on the timing of bans along with data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the American Community Survey (ACS) to estimate the effects of such bans on college enrollment and educational attainment.
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Authors: Hinrichs, Peter
Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department: Economics
Advisor: Joshua Angrist
Degree: Doctor of Philosophy
Publisher Location: Cambridge, MA
Pages:
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Education
Countries: United States