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.

This dissertation consists of three empirical essays focused on understanding how informational and behavioral barriers influence human capital investments in developing countries. In particular, I study two key actors in education production – teachers and parents, and how their beliefs shape investments in child human capital with implications for student learning and inequality. Chapter 1 uses a field experiment with teachers in India to investigate the role and malleability of teachers’ beliefs. In many developing countries, teachers often perceive only a weak mapping between their effort and what students learn. I conduct an experimental evaluation of a psychosocial intervention in India that targets teachers’ beliefs about perceived control – self-beliefs about one’s ability to influence outcomes. I study the extent to which this intervention affects teachers’ beliefs, their effort in class, and their students’ academic performance. I devise a novel experimental task to elicit beliefs through revealed preference, about the relationship between their teaching effort and the performance of students in their classroom. I find that the intervention induced a 14% increase in teachers’ beliefs about their ability to increase learning, as measured by the revealed preference task. Treated teachers exert greater effort at the intensive margin, scoring higher on an index of classroom effort. They also spend more time grading student work and provide more detailed feedback to students. Finally, students taught by teachers in the treatment group learn more, scoring 0.09 SD higher in the end-of-year exams. These findings suggest that teacher beliefs can serve as a powerful lever for changing teaching practice and raising learning levels in developing countries. Chapter 2 studies the relationship between parental perceptions about children’s performance and parental investment in children’s human capital, and how this relationship evolves over the course of schooling. Using rich longitudinal data on investments, test scores, and parental assessments, I implement alternative specifications for the parental investment function that allow investment to depend on the entire history of lagged investment and inputs, account for past parental beliefs to circumvent reverse causality, and use household fixed effects to account for fixed characteristics at the household level. I find that compared to children with poor perceived performance, children with better perceived performance are up to 16 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in private as opposed to public schools, and receive up to 40% higher investment in schooling. This relationship intensifies as children progress from primary to secondary school. Results are robust across specifications, with evidence of complementarity between perceived ability and schooling. Within a household, parents’ behavior is reinforcing, with more spent on the child believed to be the better performer. These findings inform our understanding of parental investment response and intra-household allocation of human capital investment decisions. Chapter 3 (co-authored with Daniel Chen, Sultan Mehmood, and Shaheen Naseer) uses a field experiment to evaluate the impact of providing information about teacher value-added to public school teachers in Pakistan. We show that growth mindset training shifts teachers’ beliefs about the malleability of intelligence, and reduces stereotypes against first-generation learners and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In contrast, exposure to narrative or empirical evidence about teacher value-added did not have statistically significant effects. We document patterns of teachers’beliefs in a resource-constrained setting and show that perceived returns to effort are increasing in parental education and past performance of students, indicating that teachers view these as complementary inputs for teaching.

The importance of public education in rural development has received increasing attention by local and state policy makers as competition for new industry has intensified throughout rural America. Uncertainty about the relationships of public and private inputs to education output, however, presents problems to state and local officials and parents interested in improving the quality and quantity of the public education system. This research examines the education process in a production function framework to identify the relationships of education inputs to education output. A theoretical model that combines public l and household decision making into an education production process is used as the basis for the empirical model that is developed. The estimated model includes input measures for school, family, volunteer and student inputs to education production and is estimated with cross·sectional data for Virginia counties. The expenditure measure used in the model is specified as a polynomial lag. The model also is specified as a joint-product production process. The results of the analysis provide evidence of the importance of expenditures in education production and indicate that the impact of changes in expenditures occurs over time. The number of and educational levels of teachers also is associated with education output. Household and student inputs also are associated with education output. Volunteer input measures are not statistically significant in the estimated equations, a reflection of the difficulty of specifying and measuring specific volunteer inputs into the education production process. The empirical results do not support a joint production hypothesis between outputs as measured by achievement test scores and the school continuation rate. / Ph. D.

The objective of this study was to determine vocational education's potential contribution to the future economic development of Belize. To achieve this objective, a panel of experts was involved in the formulation of statements and the determination of each statement's value as a contributor to future economic development. The design of the study included use of the Delphi technique. A panel of experts was chosen with four selected from each of four groups: (a) government (public service), (b) non-governmental organizations, (c) entrepreneurship and small business development, and (d) manufacturing and export-oriented production. Each of the experts was asked to identify statements that vocational education should emphasize in the future so that it would contribute to future economic development in Belize. Frequency distribution, mean, and variance were calculated for each statement. The criterion to determine whether consensus was achieved was defined as item variance being equal to or less than 0.75 on a 4-point scale. Panel members identified a list of 85 statements of which 71 met the criterion for consensus. The 71 statements on which the panel of experts reached consensus were rank ordered according to their means. The statements on which consensus were not achieved did not fall below the important category; however, the group ratings were widely dispersed. A content analysis of the ranked statements revealed that some statements clustered around common themes. These themes included planning, productivity, linkages, values and work ethics, and program and institutional development. / Ed. D.

Many large urban school districts in the United States have suffered from fiscal stress, while others have not. Fiscal stress often has led to program cutbacks, layoffs, and decline in the quality of educational services. The purpose of this research study was to examine the predictors of fiscal stress in large urban school districts and to develop a method for predicting fiscal stress. A variety of demographic, economic, financial, governance, and geographic variables were used. The study found a number of variables that were significantly related to large urban school district fiscal stress and produced a model for predicting fiscal stress. / Ed. D.

Yam Yin Kat. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 46-49). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Data --- p.4 / Chapter 3 --- Gender and Birth Order of Children --- p.7 / Chapter 3.1 --- Hypothesis Development --- p.7 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Gender Discrimination --- p.7 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Birth Order --- p.12 / Chapter 3.2 --- Results on Gender Bias --- p.14 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Overall Results --- p.15 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Gender Bias in Rural versus Urban Area --- p.18 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Household Characteristics and Gender Bias --- p.19 / Chapter 3.3 --- Birth Order Effect --- p.22 / Chapter 4 --- Number of Children --- p.25 / Chapter 4.1 --- Hypothesis and Empirical Strategy --- p.25 / Chapter 4.2 --- Results --- p.30 / Chapter 5 --- Conclusion --- p.33 / Tables --- p.35 / References --- p.46

by Lee Chi Yung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-87). / by Lee Chi Yung. / Chapter Chapter One --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Nature of theroblem and Review of Literature --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1. --- Education Expansion and Earnings Distribution --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2. --- Economic Development and Structural Change --- p.19 / Chapter 2.3. --- Structural Change and Earnings Distribution --- p.21 / Chapter 2.4. --- Education Expansion and Economic Restructuring --- p.24 / Chapter 2.5. --- The Researchroblem --- p.26 / Chapter Chapter Three --- "Economic Restructuring, Educational Development and Income Distribution in Hong Kong" --- p.28 / Chapter 3.1. --- Economic Growth and Restructuring --- p.28 / Chapter 3.2. --- Educational Development in Hong Kong --- p.36 / Chapter 3.3. --- Income Distribution --- p.44 / Chapter Chapter Four --- Research Methodology and the Hypotheses --- p.47 / Chapter 4.1. --- Researchroblems --- p.47 / Chapter 4.2. --- Theoretical Framework and Research Methodology --- p.48 / Chapter 4.3. --- The Data Set --- p.55 / Chapter Chapter Five --- Results and Interpretations --- p.59 / Chapter 5.1 --- Changes in Variances of log Earnings --- p.59 / Chapter 5.2 --- Changes in Means of log Earnings --- p.67 / Chapter 5.3 --- Summary --- p.76 / Chapter Chapter Six --- Conclusion --- p.77 / Bibliography --- p.82

by Wong Wai-kin. / Added t.p. in Chinese. / Thesis (M.A.Ed.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references. / abstract --- p.i / acknowledgements --- p.iv / table op contents --- p.v / list op tables --- p.viii / list of illustrations --- p.xi / chapter / Chapter I. --- statement of the problem --- p.1 / Concern with Income Size Distribution --- p.1 / Income Size Distribution and Schooling --- p.4 / The Case of Hong Kong --- p.6 / The Problem of the Study --- p.8 / Chapter II. --- review op literature --- p.10 / Schooling As a Determinant of Income size Distribution: The Theories --- p.10 / Schooling As a Determinant of income size Distribution: The Evidence --- p.20 / Empirical Approaches in Several Previous Studies --- p.24 / Chapter III. --- the study --- p.44 / The Theoretical Framework --- p.44 / Schooling and Human Capital --- p.44 / Human Capital and Income size Distribution --- p.45 / Education Expansion and Cohort Differences in Schooling --- p.48 / The Hong Kong Context --- p.50 / The Research Hypotheses --- p.58 / Empirical Specification of the Model --- p.59 / The Earnings Inequality Function --- p.59 / The Variance Form of the Schooling Model --- p.66 / Data Source and Sample --- p.69 / Measurement of Variables --- p.70 / Chapter IV. --- schooling and the distribution op earnings in hong kong --- p.72 / The Aggregate Set --- p.72 / The Aggregate set Excluding Illiterates --- p.88 / The Overtaking Set --- p.93 / Observations on Age Groups --- p.102 / Chapter V. --- summary and conclusions --- p.107 / Summary and Conclusions --- p.107 / Significance and Comparison --- p.111 / Policy Implications --- p.112 / Limitations --- p.117 / references --- p.121 / appendices / Chapter A.I. --- DETERMINANTS OF INCOME SIZE DISTRIBUTION --- p.131 / Chapter A.II. --- ESTIMATION OF THE YEARS OF SCHOOLING --- p.132 / Chapter A.III. --- "MEANS, STANDARD DEVIATIONS, CORRELATIONS AND ADDITIONAL REGRESSION ESTIMATES" --- p.133

There are many ways parents can improve their offspring’s outcomes. For example, they can invest in offspring’s education or health. They can provide better social connections to obtain job information or personal references. In addition, they can exert political influence to obtain better labor market outcomes for their offspring. Understanding exactly how parents improve their offspring’s outcomes is very important for the formation of political perspectives and policy designs. However, it is very difficult to disentangle the factors, as parents of high socioeconomic status do many things to help their children succeed. This dissertation presents three quasi-experimental studies to understand the causal mechanisms of parents’ influence on children’s outcomes in the context of China and United States. Chapter two examines the implementation of court-ordered racial desegregation of schools and finds that school desegregation increases biracial births. This provides the first evidence of how an education policy that affects racial integration also has demographic implications and an intergenerational impact on social and economic opportunities. Chapter three examines the effect of school desegregation on infant health. This chapter adopts the same empirical strategy and data as chapter three. I extend the paper by examining the effect of school desegregation on infant health. I find that for black mothers, school desegregation improves infant health, as measured by preterm birth. It also increases maternal education and fertility age. These may be important pathways to improve infant health. Chapter two and chapter three add to the growing literature on the impact of school desegregation beyond academic achievement. Chapter five examines the effect of fathers’ political influence on offspring’s labor market outcomes in China. It presents a difference-in-difference approach that exploits the variation of political influence in three dimensions: parent bureaucrat occupation, retirement status instrumented by retirement policy, and offspring gender. Using cross-section data from China Household Income Survey, it finds that the retirement of a bureaucrat with political influence translates into a decrease in offspring’s income of 13 percent. Chapter six provides a summary and conclusions and discusses future research directions.

published_or_final_version / Economics / Master / Master of Social Sciences