Essays in Labor Economics and Industrial Organization

Abstract

Chapter 1 studies how the interaction of student information with constraints dictated by market design determines higher education choices and outcomes. I study strategic application incentives in imperfect implementations of centralized assignment mechanisms in higher education. I ask whether, in markets with both a central match for public colleges and a broader private market, choices on the match are affected by the availability good private outside options. I assemble data from the college match in Albania and utilize a policy change that incorporated all private colleges in the centralized platform to generate insight.

I find that ambitiousness in public college applications declines after policy implementation, and more for private high school students, supporting the hypothesis of non-truthful application behavior that is responsive to market structure. I then build a model of applications and enrollment behavior that accommodates strategic behavior and can disentangle the effects of heterogeneous beliefs, preferences, and outside options on choice to evaluate the distributional consequences of the interaction between non-truthful applications and market partitioning. The application behavior induced by a single match for all schools with list size restrictions worsens outcomes on average, especially for private school students. The main channel is list size restrictions becoming more binding with more options on the match, but some of the effect is due to outside options becoming less good. The relative worsening of outcomes for higher-SES students may be redistributive, but better outcomes can be achieved for both groups under a single match by slightly extending application lists.

In Chapter 2, joint with Martha J. Bailey, Vanessa Wanner Lang, Alexa Prettyman, Lea J. Bart, Daniel Eisenberg, Paula Fomby, Jennifer Barber, and Vanessa Dalton, we study the consequences of costliness in fertility regulation in the current US policy environment, which leaves 1.4 million uninsured Title-X clients with substantial cost-sharing for contraception and reproductive health. We experimentally vary contraceptive subsidies to women in Planned Parenthood clinics of Michigan and find a substantial response to contraceptive cost, in particular for high-fixed cost methods. Mothers are the most financially constrained, but all groups increase their take-up. Our take-up estimates imply that a U.S. policy eliminating out-of-pocket costs for all Title X patients would reduce pregnancies by 5.3%, birth rates by 3.9%, and abortions by 8.3%.

Finally, Chapter 3 studies the role of information and beliefs that supervisors have in determining individuals’ education and career trajectories. In it, I investigate whether academic supervisors have differential information quality about their male and female students. I assemble new archival data on all participants of the Putnam Mathematical Competition over a decade to make progress on the above questions. The setting allows me to observe an objective measure of talent in the scores achieved by each student and the supervisors’ prediction about the talent ordering of students they supervise. I find that ex-ante, for women and men with the same ex-post competition scores, supervisors expect women to do worse than their male peers from that college. Women are less likely than men to have been predicted to be in the top three performers of their school even when they obtain a score that places them in the top three. I find evidence that supervisors learn about individual women, but little evidence of supervisor learning about the group.