Essays in the Economics of Education

Investments in human capital can have large and long-lasting impacts on students. This dissertation studies the relationship between early education and long-run outcomes of students, with a particular focus on future criminal behavior, and examines how teacher quality and school choice influence these future gains./nMy first chapter, which is joint work with Evan K. Rose and Yotam Shem-Tov, investigates the impact of teacher quality on future criminal behavior. Using a unique data set linking the universe of public school records to administrative criminal justice records for the state of North Carolina, we demonstrate strong associations between future criminal activity and early life education outcomes including test scores, attendance, and disciplinary records. We estimate value-added models measuring the causal impacts of teachers on short-run cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes in a multivariate random effects framework, and link these short-run effects to teacher effects on adult crime. We find that teachers primarily influence future crime through a non-cognitive channel, and that their cognitive and non-cognitive impacts are orthogonal. This result implies that test score-based measures miss an important component of the social value of teacher quality, suggesting scope for improved teacher assessment systems that also account for non-cognitive gains./nI build on the relationship between early life education and crime in my second chapter, which studies the explanatory power of educational achievement on the black-white gap in criminal offending rates. We document strong relationships between test scores and future criminality. We show that observable differences between blacks and whites in early grades, including neighborhoods, schools, and other demographic information, can explain the differences in their relative rates of being charged with any offense in early adulthood, and that test score differences can explain between a quarter to a half of this gap. This difference in offending is akin to the "skill gap" described by Neal and Johnson (1996) that explains a large fraction of the raw black-white gap in wages. We also document two important nuances to this story. First, while observable differences can explain nearly the entire gap in charge rates for any offense, we still are unable to explain about a quarter of the difference in felony offending rates. Second, we show that blacks experience a much greater return to skill than white students in the form of reduced crime, and that these differential returns explain a substantial fraction - between 10% and 20% - of the raw crime gap. This difference in returns to higher achievement is particularly relevant for more severe offenses, and plays a larger role in explaining the differences in offending rates between black and white men from worse economic backgrounds./nMy third chapter is based on joint work with Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and Christopher Walters, and studies how school choice affects parents' educational investments for their children. We study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to New York City's centralized high school assignment mechanism. We use applicants' rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores, high school graduation, college attendance, and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. Preferences are unrelated to school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality.

Advisor: Walters, Christopher