Essays in Education and Labor Economics.

Abstract

The first chapter of the dissertation investigates how poor households in developing countries respond to adverse income developments. I use nationally representative longitudinal data to investigate behavioral responses to the loss of an Old Age Pensioner in South Africa. I find that household composition adjusts, with an outflow of school aged children and an inflow of middle-aged females and older adults. The household, on aggregate, also has more people employed. Conditional on compositional stability within demographic groups, I find large and significant increases in both labor supply and employment. Policy makers might be concerned with the impact of cash transfers on the labor supply of non-recipients.

The second chapter examines the effect of the Old Age Pension on retirement behavior of elderly South Africans. I make use of the rules on age eligibility to measure changes in various dimensions of labor supply that occur when people reach the pensionable age. I find significant decreases in employment rates and labor supply. Those who remain employed beyond the pensionable age are more likely to work in jobs with flexible hours of work, and work even fewer hours than people in similar jobs who are not pension age-eligible.

The final chapter investigates the impact of changes in the probability of being admitted into a selective college on students' SAT score sending behavior. We capture this using a student's class rank combined with the Texas Top Ten Percent Rule. In response to dwindling minority enrollment rates, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M College Station embarked on targeted recruitment programs at previously under-represented high schools. We evaluate the effectiveness of these programs using individual level SAT data. We find that score sending is affected by the legal change, and that both targeted recruitment programs were successful in attracting scores. In each case, the effects were manifest most strongly amongst the students in the top decile of the class. This suggests that students from poor schools face multiple barriers to obtaining postsecondary schooling at selective colleges.