Quantitative Analysis of Education and Health Policy.
详细信息
文摘
Each of the three chapters of this dissertation provides a quantitative analysis on a different policy issue in health or education. The first chapter addresses the impact of birth timing manipulation on newborn health. The second and third chapters examine issues in education policy---the impact of school start times on academic achievement and the determinants of higher educational attainment,respectively. Chapter 1: "What a Difference a Day Makes: Quantifying the Effects of Birth Timing Manipulation on Infant Health" joint with Lisa Schulkind. Scheduling births for non-medical reasons has become an increasingly common practice in the United States and around the world. We exploit a natural experiment created by child tax benefits to better understand the full costs of elective c-sections and inductions done for the personal gain of the parents. Because the full annual tax savings associated with a birth are realized as long as the birth takes place before 12:00 a.m. on January 1st of the next year,those expecting a child around the beginning of the year have an incentive to time the birth at the end of December rather than the beginning of January. Using data on the universe of all births in the United States from 1990 to 2000,we find that a $1,000 increase in child tax benefits leads to a 1.6 percentage point increase in the percentage of births that occur in December relative to January. This is qualitatively similar to previous findings. However,our data allows us to broaden the analysis and assess the mechanisms through which women are altering their births,and to explore the effects of birth timing manipulation on the health of the newborn. Most of the manipulation appears to be a result of changes in the timing of c-sections,which leads to a statistically significant increase in the likelihood of the baby being born of low birthweight. Chapter 2: "As from Zzzzs? The Causal Effect of School Start Time on the Academic Achievement of Adolescents" joint with Scott Carrell and James West. Recent sleep research finds that many adolescents are sleep-deprived because of both early school start times and changing sleep patterns during the teen years. This study identifies the causal effect of school start time on academic achievement by using two policy changes in the daily schedule at the US Air Force Academy along with the randomized placement of freshman students to courses and instructors. Results show that starting the school day 50 minutes later has a significant positive effect on student achievement,which is roughly equivalent to raising teacher quality by one standard deviation. Chapter 3: "Availability of Higher Education and Educational Outcomes: Quantifying the Impacts of College Openings and Cohort Size." Research has established the benefits of higher education and the importance of affordability,however less is known about how the availability of higher education affects educational attainment. By constructing a comprehensive dataset on college openings in the U.S. from 1969 to 1991,I show that exogenous variation in two-year and four-year college availability,caused by changed birth cohort sizes and local college openings,substantially affects educational attainment. New four-year colleges increase the likelihood of obtaining a Bachelors degree,while new two-year colleges only affect Associates degree attainment. Additionally,results show that students from larger cohorts are crowded out of four-year colleges. This crowd-out results in lower lifetime educational attainment by pushing students to two-year colleges.