Select Works on the Economics of Education

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three essays in the field of economics of education. The first essay studies the short and long-run effects of Head Start, a federally funded early childhood education program that targets children from low-income families. This research replicates and extends previous evaluations of Head Start's impact on life cycle skill formation. My co-authors and I find primarily negative impacts of Head Start for more recent birth cohorts and null impacts of Head Start on school-age and early adulthood outcomes for all birth cohorts. Unpacking these results, we show that factors unrelated to Head Start, such as the mother's age at their child's birth, likely play an important role in mediating Head Start impacts across time. The second essay explores the association between historic neighborhood inequality and modern-day educational outcomes. In this research, my co-author and I link 1935-1940 Home Owners' Loan Corporation A-D security ratings to present-day public schools and districts to determine whether educational institutions located in historically “D” neighborhoods have worse modern-day outcomes than those located in “A,” “B,” or “C” neighborhoods. In doing so, we find that schools and districts in “D” neighborhoods have, on average, less overall funding, student diversity, and worse academic performance than their “A,” “B,” and “C” peers. The third essay evaluates the impact of the New York City Department of Education's cellphone ban on school discipline and school culture. Overall, I find that NYCDOE’s removal of their districtwide ban reduced school suspensions but also worsened student perceptions of school culture across various dimensions, including respect, student behavior, and school safety. These results show that while the removal of the New York City Department of Education's cellphone ban led to less punitive disciplinary measures in schools, it came at the cost of impaired student perceptions of school culture.