Essays in the Economics of Education

Abstract

This dissertation is comprised of three essays, each studying a different aspect related to topics in the economics of education. These pieces each study how education production is impacted by different economic forces. In Chapter 1, I study the effect of racial segregation on academic achievement, college preparation, and postsecondary attainment in a large, urban school district. To achieve racial balance in its oversubscribed magnet schools, this district conducted separate admissions lotteries for black and non-black students. Because the student body was predominantly black, administrators set aside disproportionately more seats for the non-black lottery. In 2003, the federal Office of Civil Rights forced this district to instead use a race-blind lottery procedure that dramatically increased racial segregation for incoming magnet school cohorts. In an instrumental variables framework that exploits both randomized lottery offers and this unanticipated shock to racial makeup, I test whether student racial composition is a meaningful input in the education production function. As a baseline, I use admissions lotteries to estimate the effect of enrolling in a magnet middle school on student outcomes. In general, enrollment returns are comparable between magnet and traditional schools, but I estimate heterogeneous magnet school effects across student subgroups. Education production is sensitive to school racial composition in that segregation has a deleterious impact on student outcomes. I find that increasing the share of black peers in a cohort decreases student achievement in math, science, and writing for black students with losses primarily driven by high-aptitude black students. Further, racial segregation erodes high school graduation rates and also decreases college attendance by reducing enrollment at 2-year institutions among female black students. These findings suggest that policies aimed at achieving racial balance in schools will likely increase aggregate educational achievement. Chapter 2 examines the impact of competition due to charter school entry on the level and composition of expenditures within traditional public school districts (TPSDs). I leverage policy changes affecting the location and timing of charter entry to account for endogenous charter competition. TPSDs respond to competition by allocating resources away from instructional and other expenditures towards new capital construction. Using teacher contracts, I show the declines in instructional spending are partially due to decreases in collectively bargained salaries. Competition depresses appraised housing valuations, in turn causing TPSDs to lose property tax revenues resulting in a decline in overall spending. In Chapter 3, which is joint work with Richard Mansfield, we use administrative panel data to decompose worker performance into components relating to general talent, task-specific talent, general experience, and task-specific experience. We consider the context of high school teachers, in which tasks consist of teaching particular subjects in particular tracks. Using the timing of changes in the subjects and difficulty levels to which teachers are assigned to provide identifying variation, we show that a substantial part of the productivity gains to teacher experience are actually subject-specific. Similarly, while three-quarters of the variance in the permanent component of productivity among teachers is portable across subjects and levels, there exist non-trivial subject-specific and level-specific components. Counterfactual simulations suggest that maximizing the test-score contribution of task-specific experience and task-specific talent can increase student performance by as much as .04 test score standard deviations relative to random assignment of teachers to classrooms.