Browsing by Author "Sanders, Seth Gary"
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Item Open Access Essays in Economics of Immigration(2014) Rho, Deborah TammyThis dissertation consists of two related essays on the economics of immigration. The first chapter presents new evidence on whether the earnings of foreign-born workers grow faster than that of similarly educated natives. We compare cross-sectional and panel analyses of assimilation in the U.S. context. The panel data allow us to control for fixed unobserved heterogeneity in earnings. As others have found for earlier entry cohorts, we find that immigrants with less than a college education start at an earnings disadvantage but converge toward native earnings with time in the U.S. in the cross-section. Lower earning immigrants selectively leave on-the-books jobs. We also find substantial selection among low earnings natives who also tend to work less and leave the labor force earlier. Both groups display selection and the net result is that controlling for fixed unobserved heterogeneity has little effect on the relative earnings growth of low-skilled immigrants.
We find very different results for high-skilled workers. In the cross-sectional analysis, immigrants whose highest level of education is a bachelor's degree exhibit a decline in relative earnings with time in the U.S. However, for these immigrants, the inclusion of an individual fixed effect reveals faster earnings growth relative to natives. Among both immigrants and natives, lower earners selectively leave the covered sector. However, because low earning immigrants who remain in the sample become more likely to work with time in the U.S., the net result is that the average earnings of immigrants diminish. These results indicate that controlling for individual heterogeneity is important in estimating the economic assimilation of immigrants.
The second chapter examines the role of the workplace in earnings assimilation. Using an earnings panel much like in the first chapter, we consider whether job characteristics such as firm size, industry, and firm specific tenure can account for earnings differences between native and foreign-born workers. We focus on workers with less than a college education and find that the job characteristics considered account for almost all of the faster earnings growth of high school dropouts and half of the faster earnings growth of high school graduate immigrants. Rising relative job tenure of immigrants is the most important factor.
Item Open Access Essays in Education and Politics(2013) Duch, Katherine H.This dissertation explores three topics relating to education and politics. The first chapter examines gender gaps in test scores among top-scoring students. Recent research by Pope and Sydnor (2010) and Nosek et al. (2008) suggests that regions where individuals hold traditional gender stereotypes may have greater gender gaps. To explore this possibility, the current study examines whether five proxy variables for traditional gender stereotypes are correlated with greater gender gaps on math, science, and reading assessments. Using data from North Carolina, the results suggest that gender gaps on 5th and 8th grade state tests are strongly associated with the proportion of voters who supported a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. A one standard deviation increase in support for the amendment is associated with a 26 percent standard deviation increase in the 5th grade gender gap and a 31 percent standard deviation increase in the 8th grade gender gap. Other proxy variables for traditional gender stereotypes, such as the proportion of voters who supported the Republican Presidential candidate in 2012 and the proportion of religious adherents who are Evangelical, are not statistically significantly related to gender gaps.
The second chapter evaluates a one-to-one laptop program implemented by a North Carolina school district. The Digital Conversion Initiative provides all 4th through 12th grade students in the Mooresville Graded School District with a laptop for use at school and at home. Using administrative data on students in North Carolina, this paper analyzes the effect of the program on 4th through 8th grade reading and math assessments. The results suggest that the effect of the laptop program varies substantially depending on the grade in which students first received a laptop. The program had an impressive effect on test scores for students who received a laptop in 4th or 5th grades. Compared to students who were unexposed to the program, students who received a laptop in 4th grade scored 0.12 standard deviations higher on reading tests and 0.42 standard deviations higher on math tests after three years of the program. Students who received a laptop in 5th grade scored 0.22 standard deviations higher on reading tests and 0.09 standard deviations higher on math tests after three years than their unexposed peers. Meanwhile, the program had smaller effects on reading test scores and significant negative effects on math test scores for students who received a laptop in 6th or 7th grade. Compared to their unexposed peers, students who received a laptop in 6th grade scored 0.12 standard deviations lower on math tests after three years of exposure, and students who received a laptop in 7th grade scored 0.22 standard deviations lower on math tests after two years of exposure. These mixed results should serve as a warning to school districts, and to middle schools in particular, that are planning to launch one-to-one programs.
The third chapter explores whether state legislative candidates differ in their support for abortion bans and abstinence-only sex education programs based on the gender and age of their children. Previous research by Washington (2008) suggests that legislative candidates with daughters would be less likely to support abortion bans and abstinence-only sex education programs than candidates with only sons, but the present study finds that legislative candidates with daughters feel the same about abortion and abstinence-only sex education programs as their colleagues with only sons. This finding suggests that differences in legislators' views may not explain the differences in legislators' voting identified by Washington (2008). This paper also serves as a cautionary tale to researchers who may be quick to generalize the conclusions from prior work. Although the characteristics of legislators themselves produce robust differences in voting, it appears that the characteristics of legislators' children may only matter in some circumstances.
Item Open Access Essays in the Economics of Education(2017) Shi, YingThis dissertation comprises three essays in the economics of education. I begin with a paper that evaluates the effectiveness of selective secondary schools. An unique admissions context permits identifying the causal benefits of such institutions for a more heterogeneous sample of students than previous US-based studies. The second essay examines the causes of female under-representation in STEM fields, with a focus on engineering. I decompose the gender gap into explanatory accounts such as academic preparation, ability beliefs, and preferences for prosocial values and professional goals. The final essay investigates the roles of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in explaining high school graduation gaps at the three-way intersection of race, gender, and income. A finding of particular interest is the lagging performance of disadvantaged white students relative to African American peers, even after accounting for skill disparities using a sequential model of educational attainment.
Item Open Access The Impact of a Mother's Wellbeing During Pregnancy on the Human Capital Endowment and Long Term Economic Outcomes of the In Utero Child(2014) Brown, RyanThe focus of this dissertation is to help explore, disentangle, and mechanize the role of the social and physical environment during gestation on the in utero child's later life outcomes. Specifically this work uses theoretical underpinnings adopted from the medical and epidemiological literature to inform the use of various applied econometric techniques on population representative data to rigorously examine the impact of a mother's mental and physical wellbeing during pregnancy on the human capital endowment and long-term economic outcomes of the in utero child. After a brief introduction, the second chapter reexamines the pioneering work by Douglas Almond (2006), which is thought to establish that in utero exposure to an adverse disease environment has a large, negative impact on health and socioeconomic prosperity that reaches well into adulthood. The analysis in this section casts doubt on the identification strategy used in that seminal work, and suggests that conclusions about the deleterious impact of in utero exposure to the influenza pandemic on socioeconomic prosperity in adulthood are, at best, premature. The third and fourth chapters delve into the topic of the impact of a mother's mental health during pregnancy on the birth outcomes of the in utero child. Utilizing two traumatic and unanticipated events, the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the surge in Mexican Drug War violence, these chapters provide strong evidence that exposure to increased maternal anxiety has a significant negative impact on the early-life health of the in utero child.
Item Open Access Three Essays on Gender, Population Studies, and Labor Economics(2015) Gorsuch, Marina MileoIn this dissertation, I examine three questions on gender and labor economics. The first two questions are inspired by a broad literature in social psychology which has established that respondents react negatively when women engage in traditionally masculine actions in the workplace (Heilman and Chen 2005; Heilman, Wallen, Fuchs, and Tamkins 2004; Rudman and Glick 1999; Rudman 1998; Rudman and Glick 2001; Bowles, Babcock, and Lai 2006; Amanatullah and Morris 2010). This negative reaction is described as a "backlash effect" (Bowles, Babcock, and Lai 2006).
I test two hypotheses related to this literature. First, I examine if resumes that use masculine adjectives inspire backlash against female job applicants in a laboratory setting and if this backlash varies by the sexual orientation of the applicant. Second, I take the question of backlash outside of a laboratory environment to see if real employers have the same response as respondents in a laboratory to traditionally masculine actions. In a laboratory setting, I replicate the backlash effect and also show that it only affects perceived-heterosexual women. In a resume audit study, I find the reverse of a backlash effect: employers call back women who use traditionally masculine adjectives more than when they use traditionally feminine adjectives.
The third question examines the time men spent on childcare during the recession of 2007-2009. The recession provides a sudden change in the employment opportunities of men relative to women in the United States. Using the American Time Use Survey and the linked Current Population Survey, I show that this lopsided shock to employment opportunities was accompanied by an increase in the average amount of time men spent on childcare. In particular, men's average time on physical care for children increased during the recession; this is an element of childcare that men perform less than women. I decompose the total change in average time on childcare into behavioral, compositional, and between group change. A behavioral change among employed men accounted for the majority of the total increase in the average time spent on childcare; among men who are out of the labor force, the increase is entirely due to compositional changes.
Item Open Access Three Essays on Population Studies(2019) Zang, XiaoluThis dissertation comprises three essays on population studies. I begin with a paper that is the first to investigate the short- and long-term effects of a recent change in Chinese divorce laws on married women’s and men’s well-being. The 2011 Chinese divorce reform transfers ownership of the family home to the registered buyer, most often the husband, in the event of a divorce. Prior to this legal change, the family home was considered joint property. Adopting a quasi-experimental study design and using data from the China Family Panel Studies, I found that this legal change led to gendered consequences. For a typical Chinese household where only the husband’s name is on the deed of the family home, it decreased women’s well-being while men’s well-being did not change.
In the second study, I have examined the effect of the husband’s retirement on the wife’s health in China. The large increase in the probability of retirement at the legal retirement age for Chinese workers in the formal sectors enables me to exploit this discontinuity as a source of exogenous variation in retirement. Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey, I implement a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to compare the health outcomes of wives whose husbands just retired with those of wives whose husbands are about to retire. Results show that the husband’s retirement significantly improves the wife’s health.
In the third study coauthored with Scott M. Lynch, we develop an extension of the Bayesian approach to making multistate life tables (MSLTs) introduced in Lynch and Brown (2005). Among all extant methods, the Bayesian approach developed by Lynch and Brown (2005) offers several key advantages over other approaches, including the ability to incorporate prior information, direct and probabilistic interpretations of estimates, and the flexibility to incorporate model changes to handle idiosyncratic data. However, this approach has been limited to only two states, such as “healthy” vs. “unhealthy”, and cannot handle partially absorbing states. The main contribution of our method is to allow high dimensional state spaces with partially absorbing states.