Three Essays on Investments in Children and Families

Abstract

This dissertation examines how investing in children at different stages of their childhood shapes their life trajectories. The first two essays study investments in guiding children through the transition from high school to college, leveraging administrative data from North Carolina public schools. These essays are unified by a universal college admissions testing environment, in which all students take a state-mandated ACT test, allowing me to study how school investments interact with students’ educational decisions to shape their postsecondary outcomes. The third essay studies investments in family stability during children’s first years of life, leveraging data from a large-scale U.S.-based randomized controlled trial to examine the causal effects of a monthly unconditional cash transfer to mothers with low income.The first essay studies the role of high school teachers in preparing students for a successful transition to college. First, I estimate high school teacher value added on ACT scores. I then evaluate how exposure to teachers with high ACT score value added impacts college enrollment and performance. I find that ACT score value added varies substantially across math and English teachers, indicating that some generate larger gains in ACT performance. Exposure to teachers with high ACT score value added increases on-time 4-year college enrollment and enrollment in selective 4-year colleges, decreases 2-year college enrollment, and improves 4-year college performance.The second essay studies the decision to take the SAT in the presence of universal ACT testing. I find that low-income students are less likely than their peers to take the SAT in addition to the state-mandated ACT, and that they improve upon their initial ACT scores by less when doing so. Taken together, these disparities decrease low-income students’ rankings in the test score distribution when evaluating students on their maximum score rather than their initial ACT score. Income gaps in SAT taking are partially driven by differential responses to the ability signal sent by a student’s initial ACT score. The third essay studies the impacts of a monthly unconditional cash transfer on marriage and family stability. My coauthors and I find that the cash transfer increased marriage with children’s biological fathers within a year after birth, had no destabilizing effects on new or existing marriages, and did not increase single parenthood. Marriage did not result in additional contributions of income from the spouse, despite hypotheses that marriage will benefit children through increased household resources.