Essays in economics of education [electronic resource]

\noindent This dissertation explores various topics in the economics of education and scientific knowledge diffusion. The first chapter studies teachers' labor markets. A careful study of teachers' labor demand and supply, while extremely relevant for policy, is challenging due to a lack of variation in pay, as teacher salaries are usually set using steps-and-lanes schedules based entirely on seniority and academic credentials. This chapter exploits the passage of Act 10 in Wisconsin in 2011, which changed the scope of collective bargaining on teacher salaries, to study the effects of changes in pay on teachers' labor market, and on the composition of the teaching workforce. As a result of this law some districts started to individually negotiate salaries with each teacher, whereas other districts continued setting salaries using seniority-based schedules. I first document an increase in salary dispersion in individual-salaries districts, and show that it is correlated with teacher value-added. Teachers responded to changes in pay by sorting across districts or by exiting: I find a 34 percent increase in quality of teachers moving from salary-schedule to individual-salary districts, and a 17 percent decrease in quality of teachers exiting individual-salary districts. Building from this reduced-form evidence, I estimate the parameters of teachers' labor supply and demand using a two-sided choice model. Simulating the model on different salary schemes shows that an increase in the quality component of salaries in one district is associated with an improvement in average quality of the teaching workforce, driven by both in-movements of higher-quality teachers and out-movements and exits of lower-quality teachers. An increase in all districts is, however, associated with a smaller improvement, entirely attributable to exits of lower-quality teachers. The second chapter studies the effects of school finance equalization reforms on intergenerational income mobility in the US. School finance reforms have been implemented across US states in the past 40 years to equalize expenditure across school districts. This paper exploits such changes to examine the effects of inequality in school expenditure on intergenerational income mobility of students. I use the slope coefficient of per-capita income on per-pupil expenditure across school districts within each commuting zone as a measure of inequality in expenditure. I address issues of omitted variable bias and endogeneity of expenditure using the parameters of the financing formulas to generate simulated instruments for expenditure. OLS and 2SLS estimates show that school finance equalization substantially improves intergenerational mobility of children born in low-income families, and does not hurt mobility of richer children. The effect of equalization is largest during primary school years, and smallest during middle school years. These results suggest that equalization of expenditure across districts is important to guarantee equal long-run opportunities of children. The final chapter is co-authored with Petra Moser, and studies the effects of copyrights on science. With the digitization of content, copyrights have become a critical mechanism to encourage creativity and innovation. Yet economic analyses continue to be rare, primarily due to a lack of experimental variation in copyright policies. To address this issue we exploit a change in copyrights as a result of World War II, when the US Book Republication Program (BRP) allowed American publishers to re-print exact copies of German-owned science books. Using two alternative identification strategies, we find that the BRP triggered a large increase in scientific output, measured by citations. An analysis of potential mechanisms shows that this change was driven by reductions in the price of science books. Book-level data on library holdings indicate that lower access costs helped to distribute BRP books more evenly across US libraries. Author-level geographic data show that citations increased most for locations that gained access to BRP books. These results are confirmed by two alternative measures of scientific output, new PhDs and patents.

Keywords: Economics.
Advisor: Hoxby Caroline Minter primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Chetty Rajendra advisor. Thesis advisor
Moser Petra advisor. Thesis advisor
Pistaferri Luigi advisor. Thesis advisor