Economic Externalities of Education Policy.

摘要

This dissertation examines the various externalities of education policy. I examine the impacts of raising high school graduation requirements as well as the impact of the World War II GI Bill on topics such as crime, teen birth outcomes, and marital matching. While it has been shown in the past that education has lasting impacts on labor market outcomes, this dissertation examines how education policies can have much broader effects.;In Chapter 1, I estimate the effect of high school graduation requirements on crime. I examine changes in the arrest rates of young people following changes to the minimum number of courses required and the implementation of exit exams. Variation comes from changes in state laws governing minimum high school graduation requirements from 1980 to 2000. By utilizing repeated cross section arrest data I am able to control for any state-by-time specific effects and only compare arrest rates of cohorts within a state and year who faced different graduation requirements. I find evidence that suggests the impact of each additional required course decreases the arrest rate by 0.7%. I also find evidence that easier to pass exit exams decrease arrest rates, but the same effect is not true for more difficult exams. These effects appear to be driven by decreases in monetary crimes. The effects are strongest in the lowest income counties where the policies are likely to have the biggest impact. Results suggest that raising graduation standards may have human capital increasing effects which lead to lower crime.;In Chapter 2, I continue to look at the effects of raising graduation requirements. In this chapter I turn to the effect of teenage pregnancy outcomes. Using Natality data, I compare the birth outcomes for states and cohorts with more difficult graduation requirements to those with less difficult requirements. I find evidence that more difficult requirements reduce teenage birth rates, where each additional required course decreases the birth rate by 1% and 0.7% for white and black mothers respectively. This effect is consistent across all ages and focused in counties with low average incomes. I do not find a significant effect of graduation requirements on other birth outcomes, such as birthweight and the fraction of premature births. These results add to the growing evidence that education policies have important spillover effects beyond their effect on earnings.;Finally, in Chapter 3 I turn to a different education policy, the World War II G.I. Bill. This is joint work with co-authors Theodore McCarthy, Jeremy Moulton, Marianne Page, and Ankur Patel. We exploit between-cohort variation in the probability of military service to investigate how World War II and the G.I. Bill altered the structure of marriage, and find that they had important spillover effects beyond their direct effect on men's educational attainment. Our analyses further motivate instruments to help identify the effect of men's education on spousal "quality." We find that the additional education received by returning veterans allowed them to "sort" into wives with comparably higher levels of education. This suggests an important mechanism by which socioeconomic status may be passed on to the next generation.