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Title: ESSAYS ON THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION POLICY AND TAX POLICY ON LABOR MARKET AND OTHER OUTCOMES
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2018
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Abstract: This dissertation is composed of three essays. First chapter. The Impact of Bilingual Edu- cation on Economic and Social Assimilation: Evidence from California’s Proposition 227. Bilingual education is one of the main educational programs schools in the U.S. use to help limited En- glish proficient students, yet very little evidence exists about the causal impacts of bilingual education on adulthood outcomes. I use a triple-differences strategy, in which I compare the outcomes of foreign-born Hispanics to US-born Hispanics who attended elementary school before and after the policy change in California, and address the potential issue of differen- tial cohort trend between foreign-born and US-born using Hispanics from Texas. This paper exploits the 1998 ban on bilingual education in California to identify the causal impact of exposure to bilingual education on the social and labor market outcomes of young adults. Using data from the 2005-2016 American Community Survey on Hispanics aged 19-24, I find that banning bilingual education decreases the likelihood of being married and of having a child for women, but there are no significant impacts for men. The point estimates suggest a positive impact on women’s work hours and wages, but they are not significant, and the la- bor market impacts for men are closer to zero and not significant. I investigate two potential mechanisms for these effects: language skills and education. Reducing exposure to bilingual education increases the likelihood of Speaking Only English (as opposed to being bilingual in English and Spanish), but did not increase educational attainment. Taken together, these findings are consistent with bilingual education playing a role in shaping cultural prefer- ences; women who are less exposed to bilingual education are shedding traditional gender norms about work, marriage and fertility and adopting U.S norms more rapidly. Second chapter. The Impact of Bilingual Education on Long-run Outcomes: Evidence from Ari- zona’s Proposition 203. In this chapter, I investigate the causal impact of exposure to bilingual education on different outcomes of young adults exploiting the ban on bilingual education in Arizona resulting from a voter referendum in 2000. I use a triple-differences strategy, in which I compare the outcomes of foreign-born Hispanics to US-born Hispanics who at- tended elementary school before and after the policy change in Arizona, and address the potential issue of differential cohort trend between foreign-born and US-born using Hispan- ics. Using data from the 2005-2016 American Community Survey on Hispanics aged 18-21, I find that banning bilingual education does not have significant impacts on schooling and language outcomes for both men and women. Third chapter. The Effects of Marginal Tax Rate on Self-employment Entry. This chapter in- vestigates the effects of marginal tax rates on the decision to become self-employed. An individual’s marginal tax rate is a function of family income, but income and employment are jointly determined. Moreover, even lagged income could reflect unobserved individual characteristics that are correlated with both marginal tax rate and employment. I address the endogeneity of marginal tax rates by using an instrumental variables strategy. Specifically, I use panel data from The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and construct simulated tax rates from TAXSIM model along the lines of Powell and Shan (2011) as instruments. I find that while the marginal tax rate does not have a significant effect on self-employment entry on average, there is heterogeneity in effect by gender. An increase in the marginal tax rate significantly increases the likelihood that women enter self-employment, and this appears largely driven by women who held previous jobs in the service sector.
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Authors: Nguyen, Tung
Institution: University of Houston
Department: Economics
Advisor: Aimee Chin
Degree: Doctor of Philosophy
Publisher Location:
Pages: 88
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Education, Other
Countries: United States