Essays in education policy and labor economics

Abstract

This dissertation contains three essays focused on understanding issues at the intersection of education policy and labor economics. The first essay seeks to understand how Finland's first national childcare policy shaped the long-term outcomes of the first cohorts of children exposed to the policy. The second paper, also situated in Finland, focuses on the dynamics of the labor market returns to attending academic versus vocational high school. The third paper uses data from North Carolina and studies how informal social interactions amongst students affect their academic and behavioral outcomes. Common to all three papers is the idea that education can affect the development of skills across multiple dimensions, each with potentially distinct returns in the labor market. The results from the first paper suggest that the active ingredient of childcare may be its effects on social competence. The results from the second paper suggest that vocational -- rather than academic -- training in high school can be valuable for students unlikely to continue to higher education. The third paper zooms in to the role of informal social interactions in shaping educational outcomes -- and finds that informal social interactions between students outside the classroom have consequences for both academic performance as well as behavior in school. While using different data-sets, all three papers take advantage of high-quality administrative data-sets. And, methodologically, all three papers attempt to establish grounds for credible inferences regarding the causal effects of the issues they study.