Essays in Development Economics and Econometrics.

Abstract

Chapter 1 studies students' relative academic performance when they are tracked or randomly assigned to university dormitories. This shows how peer effects differ under different group assignment rules, speaking to the policy-relevant problem of how changes in group assignment policies can change aggregate outcomes. I find that mean GPA is lower under tracking than random assignment; low-scoring students have substantially lower GPAs under tracking but high-scoring students' GPAs are approximately equal under the two policies. These patterns are not explained by differences in students' baseline observed or unobserved characteristics or by dormitory characteristics. I then estimate a flexible education production function using random variation in dormitory peer groups. I find that this approach does not predict the magnitude of the treatment effect of tracking. This may reflect out of sample prediction problems or students' behavioral responses to the changed group assignment policy.

Chapter 2 explores the price sensitivity of demand for school enrollment. I study a nationwide policy of primary and secondary school fee eliminations in South Africa, identifying the demand curves using controlled variation in the timing of fee elimination. Fee elimination has a very small effect on enrollment and grade attainment. These results are robust to accounting for variation in school-level characteristics, pre-treatment time trends between fee-eliminating and fee-charging schools, and student transfers between schools. The price insensitive demand is not explained by ceiling effects on enrollment, capacity constraints in schools, or negative effects of fee elimination on school resources. I argue that the pattern of results may reflect low valuation of additional years of education in fee-eliminating schools.

Chapter 3 develops a framework for studying intertemporal economic mobility in terms of treatment effects. I define ``mobility treatment effects'' and establish sufficient conditions for assigning a causal interpretation to inter-group differences in mobility measures such as intergenerational income mobility. Even when causal interpretation is inappropriate, my framework decomposes mobility differences into the relative role of each observed characteristic. I show how estimation and inference use existing econometric results. I illustrate the methodology by analyzing mobility treatment effects from a classroom tracking experiment in Kenyan primary schools.