Three Essays in the Economics of Education and Labor Economics

Abstract

In the first chapter of this dissertation, I examine the role of persistent effects of past labor market conditions in explaining trends in the college-high school wage gap in the US. I show that changes in the shape of age profiles in the wage gap across birth cohorts led to increases in the college-high school wage gap since the late 1990s. I find that higher unemployment at the age of high school graduation leads to higher college-high school wage gaps through age 30 in the birth cohort. The fade out of persistent effects of initial unemployment rates with age can account for over a third of the unexplained increase in the wage gap for older workers, and nearly all of the increase for younger workers.

The second chapter, written jointly with Brian Jacob, examines the relationship between the formal ratings that principals give teachers and a variety of observable teacher characteristics, including proxies for productivity. We consider formal ratings from a setting in which the stakes are reasonably high. We find that the ratings are correlated with an array of teacher qualities including experience for young teachers, education credentials, and teacher absenteeism.

In the third chapter, I ask whether the benefits of pre-school participation can account for the magnitude of the effects of school entry policies on student outcomes usually attributed to the student's age of entry into school. Differences in the rate of participation in pre-kindergarten activities between students assigned to enter school at different ages could lead to bias in prior estimates of effects of entry policies. I find that students assigned more time out of school are more likely to attend pre-kindergarten, and, accounting for pre-kindergarten participation, I find larger effects of time in school on math scores than in prior work. Using variation in the response to and compliance with school entry policies across states and time, I find evidence of large effects of pre-kindegarten attendance on math scores.