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School Choice and Neighborhood Change in Post-Katrina New Orleans
by Rosalind Fei Yang
Abstract
As school choice policies weaken the traditional link between neighborhoods and schools, traditional housing patterns previously governed by school zoning are changing. This paper examines the connection between school choice reform, specifically an increase in charter schools, and changes in neighborhood composition, focusing on New Orleans over time. I use data from the American Community Survey, the National Center of Education Statistics, and the Louisiana Department of Education. The goal is to understand how school choice policies influence residential dynamics, with a specific focus on their role in gentrification patterns.
Professor Patrick Bayer, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: H75, I21, I28
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
Technological Impacts on Return to Education in Brazil
by Yirui Zhao
Abstract
The wage return to education has been studied for a long time. Acemoglu and Autor (2010) connect the decrease of medium-level job opportunities in the U.S. with technological advances. Their theoretical model predicts that if technology replaces routine jobs, workers with medium-level skills will experience decreases in wages relative to both high-skill workers (who become more productive with the improved technology) and low-skill workers (who can less easily be replaced since their work is not routine). Moreover, their theoretical model predicts that if medium-skill workers are closer substitutes for low-skill workers than they are for high-skill workers, the relative return of high-skill workers to low-skill workers should increase. Using education as proxy of skill (Acemoglu & Autor, 2012), this paper checks if these three predictions about relative wage returns to education also hold in Brazil. This paper finds that the impact of technological change on the Brazilian formal labor market between 1986 and 2010 is consistent with predicted changes in the return to education for medium-skill workers relative to both low and high skill workers. The impact is consistent with predicted changes in the return to education for high-skill workers relative to low-skill workers when Lula’s presidency is considered in the model.
Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Faculty Advisor
Daniel Xu, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: J24; J31; O33
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
Long-term Benefits of Breastfeeding: Impact on Education in Indonesia
by Natalie Gulrajani
Abstract
Healthy breastfeeding behaviors have been shown to produce many long-term health benefits including improved cognition. This study uses data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) to assess the longitudinal impact of exclusive breastfeeding duration and early life breastfeeding practices on education. Though a positive correlation was found between breastfeeding duration and years of schooling in naïve regressions, the significance and magnitude of this effect decreased when household fixed effects were added. A stronger correlation was found between early life breastfeeding and schooling, with income-stratified results demonstrating that poorer households are potentially subject to greater benefits.
Professor Erica Field, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I0; I12; I21
Bridging the Persistence Gap: An Investigation of the Underrepresentation of Female and Minority Students in STEM Fields
By Aaditya Jain and Bailey Kaston
Prior literature on mismatch theory has concentrated primarily on minority students, whose lower average levels of pre-enrollment preparedness tend to discourage them from persisting in STEM fields as often as their non-minority counterparts at selective universities. Our study shifts the focus to the persistence gap between men and women, invoking social cognitive career theory to investigate how factors beyond preparedness – such as self-confidence – cause women to switch out of selective STEM programs at higher rates than men. Using the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we investigate the drivers of STEM persistence for all students and arrive at two main conclusions. First, higher levels of STEM preparedness are more beneficial to STEM persistence at selective universities, confirming mismatch theory in the sample. We then simulate the counterfactual scenario and find that 33% of students at selective schools would have been more likely to persist in STEM had they attended less selective schools, a figure that reaches 50% for underconfident female students. This observation ties to our second conclusion – that underconfidence in math relative to one’s true performance decreases the likelihood of STEM persistence for all students at selective universities, and that female students at selective schools are more likely to be underconfident than their male counterparts. Our findings suggest that the appropriate policy solution to reduce STEM attrition rates among women should then become a two-pronged approach: (1) more selective universities should better support the STEM self-confidence levels of female students, and (2) home environments should ideally cultivate that self-confidence long before women even reach college. In our final set of analyses, we thus explore the factors that drive math overconfidence in the first place, and conclude that both student and parental biases against female STEM ability are detrimental to the STEM self-confidence of female students.
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Advisors: Professor Peter Arcidiacono, Professor Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: I2, I24, I26
Cashing Out the Benefits: The Spillover Impact of Cash Transfers on Household Educational Investment
By Mitchell Garrett Ochse and Matheus Dias
Using electricity price, generation, installed capacity, and carbon price data from the European Union from January 2015 to December 2018, this study finds that the carbon pricing in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) incentivizes electricity sector carbon emission reductions through renewable energy deployment only for economically advanced EU members. Transitional economies show a weak to modest carbon emission increase despite a common carbon price. This study estimates an electricity supply curve, or merit order, for 24 EU ETS members using a Tobit regression model and analyzes changes in this curve using a linear bspline. These shifts provide insight into how carbon pricing affected energy generation, price, and CO2 emissions for two distinct categories of EU member states. The advanced category as a whole saw a strong electricity sector decrease in carbon emissions, both over time and from carbon pricing, while the transitional category as a whole saw a weak increase. This indicates that advanced EU members in Northern, Western, and Central Europe likely sold permits to transitional ones in Southern and Eastern Europe. While these findings may initially reflect the gains from trade of carbon emissions, permits inherent in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme’s design, the implications of how these two distinct groups have changed electricity generation present challenges to the ultimate long-term goal of EU-wide carbon neutrality by 2050, particularly in transitional economies’ electricity sectors.
Advisors: Professor Xiao Yu Wang, Professor Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: C93; I21; I24
The Impact of Violence in Mexico on Education and Labor Outcomes: Do Conditional Cash Transfers Have a Mitigating Effect?
By Hayley Jordan Barton
This research explores the potential mitigating effect of Mexico’s conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on the education and labor impacts of increased homicide rates. Panel data models are combined with a difference-in-differences approach to compare children and young adults who receive cash transfers with those who do not. Results are very sensitive to specification, but Oportunidades participation is shown to be positively associated with educational attainment regardless of homicide increases. Homicides are associated with decreases in likelihood of school enrollment and compulsory education completion; however, they also correspond with increases in educational attainment, with a larger effect for Oportunidades non-recipients.
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Advisors: Professor Charles Becker, and Professor Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: C23; D15; I20; I38; J24
Analyzing Student and Family-Level Effects on a Family’s Contributions to Fund a College Education
By Justin T. Rosenblum and John H. Zipf
We investigate the efficiency of the current financial aid system for prospective college students. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form reviews a family’s financial information and universities review a student’s academic prowess, but neither fully examines students and their family’s qualitative factors such as parents’ highest education level or intended major. Using the National Center for Education Statistics’ National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, we investigate academic, financial, and familial characteristics to determine if they impact a student’s level of private loans relative to their total cost of attendance. We find that students with parents who did not receive a college degree are adversely affected by the current financial aid system. In particular, these students take out a greater amount of private loans relative to their total cost of attendance all else equal. Our finding has wider policy implications; changing the current financial aid system to assist disadvantaged students could help reduce intergenerational education inequalities. In addition, colleges could reach a broader range of students by helping
the students that currently struggle the most to pay tuition.
Advisors: Michelle Connolly, Hugh Macartney, and Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: I2, I22, I23
Measuring the Long-term Effects of Orphanhood
By Nicholas Thomas Gardner
This paper works towards developing the narrative of orphans whose parent or parents died from natural disaster. By taking advantage of the unanticipated nature of death from the 2004
Indonesian tsunami, orphanhood can be treated as much closer to random than similar literature using data centered on HIV/AIDS related deaths. We use a community level fixed effects model to attempt to derive a causal relationship between orphanhood and both education and log wages. Our models suggest that orphaned males aged 14 and older at baseline complete 1-2 fewer years of education than their cohorts. The adverse effects persist in the long-term, as these orphans earn 26% less than non-orphan cohorts.
Advisors: Duncan Thomas and Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: I24, I25, I31, J24, J31
