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This dissertation consists of three essays in the fields of labor economics and education economics. The first chapter examines the effect of residential segregation on neighbor-based informal hiring. Existing works in the neighborhood effects literature have documented mixed evidence of community characteristics on employment and earnings. Yet most studies are silent on or unable to pinpoint the exact mechanisms that drive their results, making it hard to reconcile the conflicting findings. As a departure, in the first chapter, I start with a specific mechanism—job search via neighbor networks—and explore how segregation at the place of residence affects employment through this channel. In the remaining essays, I turn to the economics of education. The second chapter homes in on a specific unintended consequence of standardized testing: cheating between students on exams. While outright cheating is a common tactic to cope with grade pressure, it has received little attention from economists. My second chapter thus contributes to the sparse literature on how inordinate emphasis on exams can distort student behavior even to the test day. Finally, the third chapter revisits the popular belief that education necessarily improves cognitive skills. Insofar as one of the primary goals of school is to develop student intellect, are all years of schooling created equal? Along these lines, I question the value of the first year of high school to Chinese students in the context of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an educational initiative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). To briefly recap, the first chapter studies how residential segregation by race and by education affects job search via neighbor networks. Using confidential data from the US Census Bureau, I measure segregation for each characteristic at both the individual level and the neighborhood level. Causality is achieved by interweaving a spatial framework with a mover-stayer design. The spatial component entails comparison between individuals across different hyperlocal neighborhoods (blocks) within the same reference area (block group). The focus of the comparison is existing residents on a block (stayers) with respect to newcomers (movers). Specifically, I ask: what is the likelihood that an incumbent resident—conditional on changing jobs—will join a firm that has employed a new neighbor on their block? How is this probability mediated by residential segregation? My answers to these questions are manifold. At the individual level, I find that future coworkership with new block neighbors is less likely among segregated stayers than among integrated stayers, irrespective of races and levels of schooling. The impacts are heterogeneous in magnitude, being most adverse for the most socioeconomically disadvantaged demographics: Blacks and those without a high school education. At the block level, however, higher segregation along either dimension raises the likelihood of “any” future coworkership with new block neighbors for all racial or educational “groups.” My hybrid identification strategy, capitalizing on data granularity, allows a causal interpretation of these results. Together, they point to the coexistence of homophily and in-group competition for job opportunities in linking residential segregation to neighbor-based informal hiring. My subtle findings have important implications for policy-making. The second chapter is an investigation of student cheating on high-stakes exams, a relatively understudied topic in the economics of education. The setting is Vietnam, the relevant assessment is the country’s national high school exit exams, and the (mis)behavior of interest is cheating between non-elite students and elite students who happen to sit in the same test room on test day. To quantify the pervasiveness of this misconduct, I exploit the quasi-random assignment of students from schools of varying quality into test rooms. Using micro-data from a large Vietnamese province, I find that the fraction of elite students in the same room has significantly positive effects on non-elite students’ scores when the tests are non-competitive (2007-2013). The effects are concentrated in the multiple-choice/quantitative subject tests and absent in the essay/qualitative subject tests. The average gains due to same-room elite density vary across subjects and can be as large as one point on a 0-10 grading scale. However, these effects disappear after an exam redesign in 2015 raises the stakes of the assessment (2018-2019). Similar patterns emerge when instead of quantity, the quality of the elite students in the same room is the main explanatory variable. Backed by institutional details, these findings provide credible evidence that discreet interpersonal cheating is present pre-reform, but vanishes as the reform reshuffles student incentives. The third and last chapter explores the implications for cognitive skills of increased absolute schooling at an important juncture in a student’s academic career: transition between junior high school (or middle school) and senior high school (or high school). In particular, I ask if the first year of senior secondary school (Grade 10) affects 15-year-old Chinese students’ performance on the PISA 2015. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that on average, this additional year of schooling has no discernible effects on Science, Math, and Reading test scores. However, there is evidence that in the PISA 2015, Chinese tenth graders have fewer hours of in-school class time in these subjects and enjoy Science and peer cooperation less than comparable Chinese ninth graders. These observations add to the disappointment left by the lack of effects on test scores, even when they are insufficient to explain it away.

Research on reward allocations has consistently found differences in the manner in which men and women allocate rewards between themselves and others (Kahn, O'Leary, Krulewitz, & Lamm, 1980; Major & Adams, 1984; Major & Deaux, 1982). Overall, the research seems to suggest that when asked to divide a reward between themselves and a partner, men tend to use the equity norm to allocate rewards; whereas, women tend to use the equality norm to allocate rewards. However, a number of studies have been conducted which seem to demonstrate that a variety of situational g factors mediate the gender of allocator effects such as input level of the allocator and his/her co-workers, gender of the co-worker, expectancy of future interaction with the co-worker, and type of reward allocation. The purpose of the present research was two-fold: (1) to examine individual differences influencing an allocator's choice of an allocation strategy, such as how anticipation of future interaction with the recipients of an allocation decision would influence an allocator's reward allocation; and (2) whether a person‘s self-esteem level might impact on how an individual might allocate a reward. In general, the results of the current research suggest that previously observed differences between men's and women's allocations may not reflect true underlying differences between the gender; in terms of their preferences for allocation strategies. Allocation strategies appeared to vary as a function of the gender and input levels of the recipients of the reward and whether the type of allocation decision was a joint or independent situation. Both men and women tended to allocate rewards either equitably or using a compromise between equity and equality. Self-esteem was also found to influence the amount of the reward men and women allocated to the high performer and to themselves. Unfortunately, disclosure of allocation was not found to have a major effect upon how subjects allocated rewards. Several alternative explanations for these results are discussed. / Ph. D.

Sexual harassment has serious implications for both the individual and the organization. However, there appears to be confusion among different groups of people as to what behaviors constitute sexual harassment. The present study was designed as an aid in defining sexual harassment and an attempt to discover any differences which may exist between groups in what is considered to be sexual harassment. Perceiving certain behaviors as being sexual harassment appears to be related to several factors, among them gender, job status or power. This study consisted of a 2 (Gender) x 4 (Salary) design. The subjects for the study were 250 non-academic employees of a large state university. The investigator examined differences between groups using a four-part anonymous questionnaire. / Master of Science

The dissertation explores the labor market effects of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from practicing wage discrimination and employment dis- crimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin or color. A theoretical model of the equal wage and the equal employment provisions of Title Vll is developed and applied to the labor input decisions of a discriminating firm. The enforcement model is then extended to consider the market-wide wage and employment effects of Title Vll. The analysis raises questions as to whether Title Vll, as it is enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, can in fact increase the market wages and improve the market employment opportunities of the workers who face discrimination in the labor market. The labor market wage and employment effects of Title VII under alternate enforcement strategies are also examined. / Ph. D.