Effects of Neighborhoods on Children’s Educational Outcomes in Indonesia
by Audrey Liu
Abstract
There is considerable observed geographic variable in outcomes across space. Neighborhood effects attempt to explain to what extent the place in which an individual grows up impacts their future outcomes. This paper focuses on neighborhood effects on children in Indonesia where there is a large disparity in public and private amenities between different regions. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether and to what extent neighborhoods impact a child’s education outcomes and whether there exists a critical age where intervention is most crucial. By restricting my dataset to movers and taking advantage of variation within a family in terms of exposure to different neighborhoods, I find evidence that the duration of time an individual spends in a given neighborhoods impacts their outcomes. I also find evidence of a critical age that produces better outcomes, implying that the age at which a child moves matters as well.
Professor Erica Field, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I25; H4; H75
Code on file
Impact of Medicare Advantage Supplemental Benefit Expansion on Startup Funding
by Judy Tianhong Zhong
Abstract
In 2018, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that they would expand the supplemental benefits that can be included in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans. The goal was to encourage insurers to innovate and test new benefit offerings that could improve health outcomes and reduce healthcare spending. A key player in this transformation is the MA vendor that provides supplemental benefit offerings to insurance plans, but this market is rather underdeveloped. To assess the implementation of this supplemental benefit expansion, this study examines the flow of funding into the emerging market of MA vendors. This paper uses a longitudinal approach and Crunchbase data on funding for 79,004 firms from 2014 to 2018 to determine whether there is a significant jump in funding toward MA vendors with supplemental benefit services following the policy change. The results show that both the average amount of funding per deal and the number of deals a MA vendor firm receives significantly increased following the expansion when compared with all other firms. This suggests that the policy may have been successful in promoting the development of the MA vendors market and the innovation of benefit offerings as more funding goes towards these companies.
Kate Bundorf, Faculty Advisor
David Ridley, Faculty Advisor
Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I1; I11; I18
Student Effort and Parent Attitude on Education Attainment: Evidence from Multi-year Survey in Gansu, China
by Ridge Zhong-yuan Ren
Abstract
This paper explores whether student effort and parent attitudes have varying effects at different stages of a student’s life in terms of educational attainment and job outcomes. With survey data in Gansu, China, a largely rural province in Northwest China that lags behind the rest of China in education, this paper employs a multivariate regression model. This method allows me to measure the achievement or outcome of the child between each successive wave of surveys and estimate which factors held the strongest effect on the next wave. Student achievement in early waves is measured by the student’s score on assessments in math and Chinese, and the later outcome is measured by the student’s income and the highest level of education achieved. This paper finds that effort in Math and math achievement have a positive association with better education attainment and career outcomes later in life. In addition, I find that parental education levels also have a positive association with child outcomes.
Professor Pengpeng Xiao, Faculty Advisor
Professor Kent P. Kimbrough, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I25, I26
An Analysis of the Labor Market Returns to Community College and Vocational Training
by Eli Levine
Abstract
Education and training are fundamentally linked with labor market performance. There is a significant body of work analyzing the role of education in wages with an emphasis on a comparison between a college degree and a high school diploma. However, as states have begun to shift their education policies to make community college and trade school more accessible, it is important to understand the expected labor market returns to these forms of education. In this paper, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth’s cohort that began in 1997, the returns for different levels of education using the Mincer equation are found. While there was a data limitation surrounding trade school, it was possible to analyze the impact of adding a vocational license or a training certificate to a high school diploma. When controlling for experience in three different ways, specifically by age, time at highest training and labor market experience, it was found that returns to a training certificate relative to high school are between 18.7% and 36.3% higher than a high school diploma. Furthermore for community college, the wage returns are between 26.4% and 45.8% higher relative to a high school diploma. These findings highlight that additional training and certification can be an effective tool for increasing labor market returns for high school graduates even without a bachelor’s degree.
Professor V. Joseph Hotz, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I2, I26, J31
To What Extent Does Relative Maturity Affect Test Scores Between Tracked and Untracked Education Systems? Evidence From TIMSS 2019
by Qi Xuan Khoo
Abstract
Most education systems enforce a cutoff birth date for school entry, and some group students based on their perceived ability—a practice known as tracking. While the former policy leads to maturity gaps among early learners, the concomitant performance gaps may or may not be exacerbated by the latter. Analyzing the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2019 dataset to study how relative maturity affects test scores with tracking, this paper finds that older students outperform their younger peers. This relative maturity test score premium is accentuated by tracking, and these effects are found to be more significant in mathematics than in science.
Robert Garlick, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I2, I24, I28
Impact of Language Access Laws on LEP Infant Mortality Rates
by Andrew Ryan Griffin
Abstract
Starting with Executive Order 13166 in 2000, the United States federal government began to address the language disparity issues in health care. Around the same time, several states have begun to pass language access (LA) legislation mandating translation and interpretation services at hospitals for limited English proficient (LEP) individuals. This study uses these multiple discontinuities to evaluate the effect of language access laws on infant mortality rates, adequacy of care, Apgar scores, and the number of prenatal visits from the years 1995 to 2004 for limited English proficient families. I find ambiguous results of language access laws positively impacting infant mortality rates or Apgar scores, but I find clear positive impacts on the adequacy of care and the number of prenatal visits. These findings suggest that language access laws have a clear effect on reducing barriers for limited English proficient mothers, and improving the care mothers receive. Furthermore, there is limited evidence that it improves infant health or outcomes, but the increase of prenatal visits and adequacy of care likely indirectly leads to improving infant mortality rates and Apgar scores. More research is needed into discovering how those mechanisms work and the costs of language services.
Professor Michelle Conolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I10, I18, I19
The Effect of Workforce Participation and Household Income Contribution on Women’s Healthcare Empowerment in Rural Bangladesh
By Hannah Wang
Abstract
Women in Bangladesh have gained increased access to paid work in the past decade yet still experience limited choices and access to resources, which threatens their ability to exercise control over healthcare for themselves and their children. Several collective household bargaining theories hypothesize a link between women’s workforce participation and empowerment. This paper uses a cross-sectional approach and survey data collected at the end of a randomized trial field experiment in rural Bangladesh from 2007 to 2017 to examine health empowerment outcomes for 7,151 young women ages 14 to 32. The results show that women who work for income are expected to be more health empowered, specifically due to an increased ability to make their own health decisions. As a woman contributes more income to her household, her health empowerment is expected to increase, through increased abilities to make her own health decisions, purchase medicine for herself, and seek medical treatment independently. Greater mobility and stronger female-positive attitudes towards gender norms are potential mechanisms through which paid work and household income contribution can translate into health empowerment. Furthermore, higher total household income, having children, and being more educated than her husband are expected to increase a woman’s health empowerment. These results are significant while controlling for the effects of various individual and household characteristics.
Professor Erica M. Field, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle P. Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: J1; J16; I15
Peer Effects & Differential Attrition: Evidence from Tennessee’s Project STAR
by Sanjay Satish
Abstract
This paper explores the effects of attrition on student development in early education. It aims to provide evidence that student departure in elementary schools has educational impacts on the students they leave behind. Utilizing data from Tennessee’s Project STAR experiment, this paper aims to expand upon the literature of peer effects, as well as attrition, in public elementary schools. It departs from previous papers by utilizing survival analysis to determine which characteristics of students prolonged participation in the experiment. Clustering analysis is subsequently employed to group departed students to better understand the various channels of attrition present in STAR. It finds that students who left Project STAR were more likely to be of lower income and lower ability than their peers. This paper then uses these findings to estimate the peer effects of attrition on students who remained in the experiment and undertakes a discussion of potential sources of bias in this estimation and their effects on the explanatory power of peer effects estimates.
Professor Robert Garlick, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I, I21, I26, H4, J13
A perfect storm: The effect of natural disasters on child health
by Cheyenne Danielle Quijano
Abstract
Typhoons and their accompanying flooding have destructive effects, including an increase in the risk of waterborne disease in children. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, I explore the immediate to short-term effects of flooding as a result of Typhoon Labuyo on the incidence of diarrhea and acute respiratory infection in the Philippines by comparing children living in a flooded barangay (town) to children living just outside of the flooded area. I build on the existing literature by accounting for both incidence and intensity of the typhoon’s flooding in my model. I construct this new flooding measure using programming techniques and ArcGIS by manipulating data collected by the University of Maryland’s Global Flood Monitoring System. This data as well as health data from the 2013 Philippines National Demographic Health Surveys were collected the day after Typhoon Labuyo left the Philippines, providing a unique opportunity to explore the immediate impact of the typhoon on child health. Most of my results are insignificant, but subgroup analyses show that the effect of flooding on waterborne disease incidence is less impactful in the immediate term following a flood and more impactful in the medium-term. This is important, because understanding the detrimental health effects of flooding is of utmost importance, especially because climate change will only increase the frequency and intensity of natural disasters.
Professor Erica M. Field, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle P. Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I150, O120, O130, Q540
Revisiting California Proposition 209: Changes in Science Persistence Rates and Overall Graduation Rates
by Anh-Huy Nguyen
Abstract
California Proposition 209 outlawed race-based affirmative action in the University of California (UC) system in 1998. However, the UC system subsequently shifted towards race-blind affirmative action by also reweighing factors other than race in the admissions process. To evaluate the hypothetical changes in the science persistence rate and graduation rate of all applicants if racial preferences had been removed entirely, I estimate baseline and counterfactual admissions models using data from between 1995-1997. Using a general equilibrium framework to fix the total number of admits and enrollees, I find that the removal of racial preferences leads to a cascade of minority enrollees into less selective campuses and a surge of non-minority enrollees into more selective campuses. The improved matching between students and campuses results in higher science persistence rates and graduation rates across the pool of all applicants. In particular, the gains are driven by minority students who were admitted under racial preferences, because the gains from better matching across UC campuses outweigh the losses from potentially being pushed outside the UC system. Non-minority students who are originally rejected under racial preferences also benefit, as some are induced into the system in the counterfactual, where they are more likely to graduate. I also investigate claims that applicants may have strategically gamed during the admissions process by misrepresenting their interest in the sciences in order to maximize their admissions probability. While there exist incentives to apply in different majors across the campuses, I find evidence that applicants often fail to game optimally, suggesting that they may not be fully informed of their relative admissions probabilities in the sciences and non-sciences.
Professor Peter Arcidiacono, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I23, I28, J24, H75
