Essays on Labor and Public Economics

This dissertation examines how three government programs targeted to disadvantaged populations — minimum wages, free school meals, and full-day schooling — affect labor market, education, and health outcomes. While each program examined here serves a different population, they all aim to improve the well-being of low-income groups. Moreover, each program is broad in its reach: more than 18 million workers would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour (Congressional Budget Office, 2019), one-quarter of students attend a school offering schoolwide free meals, and an entire generation of students received 30 percent more instructional time in the full-day schooling reform we study. Yet the existing empirical work does not examine the full range of benefits each program offers. This dissertation aims to broaden our understanding how income assistance programs and educational interventions shape well-being over the lifecycle by examining factors that have received little attention to date./nThe first chapter, Worker Earnings, Service Quality, and Firm Profits: Evidence from Nursing Homes and Minimum Wage Reforms, examines whether higher wages paid to low-income workers affects the quality of services they provide to consumers. To answer this question, I construct a novel dataset of administrative data on employment composition and patient health and safety for the near-universe of nursing homes spanning a twenty-five year period, and link this information with wage variation for direct care staff in driven by minimum wage reforms. My empirical framework builds upon existing approaches that isolate wage variation within narrow geographic areas, thereby accounting for local labor market conditions and demographic shifts./nI find that a ten percent increase in the minimum wage raises low-skilled nursing home workers' earnings one to two percent, reduces separations, and increases stable hires. These earnings gains and increases in firm-specific human capital translate into marked improvements in patient health and safety. A ten percent increase in the minimum wage would prevent at least 15,000 deaths, lower the number of inspection violations by one to two percent, and reduce the cost of preventable care. Firms fully pass higher labor costs through to consumers by attracting patients with a greater ability to pay and increasing prices for these residents, resulting in no change in profitability. Considering costs elsewhere in the health system, savings from pressure ulcer treatment alone offsets up to half of the increased wage bill, and if the social value of increased longevity for nursing home residents is at least $21,000, well below existing estimates, higher wages in this sector are fully offset by improvements in care./nThe second chapter, Universal Access to Free School Meals and Student Achievement and based on work forthcoming at the Journal of Human Resources, examines how providing schoolwide free meals affects school meal consumption and student academic performance. The school meals program is the largest nutritional assistance program for school-aged children and has undergone substantial changes in the past several years. Whereas program eligibility was historically determined by family income, recent reforms allow schools to offer/nfree meals to all students. This paper evaluates the effect of the Community Eligibility Provision, the largest schoolwide free meals program, on academic performance. I leverage within- and across-state variation in the timing of CEP participation and find universal free meals increases breakfast and lunch participation by 38 and 12 percent, respectively. Math performance improves in districts with baseline low free meal eligibility, particularly for younger students and among racial/ethnic groups with low income-based participation rates. In contrast, there is no improvement in reading performance or significant changes among demographic groups with high participation rates under the traditional program./nThe third chapter, Long-Term Gains from Longer School Days, based on joint work with Patricio Dominguez and revised and resubmitted to the Journal of Human Resources, examines another large-scale educational intervention — extending the time that children spent in school — on long-term economic well-being. Within the past 30 years, many emerging economies and middle-income countries have shifted their education systems away from a half-day model, where elementary and secondary students attended school for 4-5 hours a day, to a model where students attend school for 6-7 hours a day. While a large literature has focused on the contemporaneous effects of these programs on maternal employment and children's academic performance, little is known whether additional time in school confers lasting benefits as students enter the workforce./nWe explore one of the first and largest such reforms. Between 1997 and 2010, Chile gradually increased the school day 30 percent for all elementary and secondary students in publicly-funded schools under the Jornada Escolar Completa (JEC) reform. Importantly, this reform required a large infrastructure investment and was rolled out over a fourteen-year period, providing variation in access to longer school days by both birth cohort and city of residence. We link administrative school enrollment data to household survey information on labor market outcomes based on survey respondents' age and city of birth and compare economic well-being between students with different access to JEC who were born in the same geographic region. We find important benefits to additional time in school: full-day schooling increases educational attainment, delays childbearing, and increases earnings in young adulthood. The nature of these benefits is consistent with more time in school facilitating human capital accumulation, and our results show that large-scale investments in public education can generate long-term improvements in economic well-being./nCombined, these works quantify important benefits of educational and workplace investments that have received little attention in the previous literature. Each chapter also explores how benefits vary across socioeconomic and demographic groups, highlighting that the effects of policy reforms depend on individuals' resources and interactions with other existing programs.

Advisor: Hoynes, Hilary