Previous studies have determined that teachers with strong subject backgrounds in math or science have a positive effect on student achievement. Using data from the American Community Surveys, I find that nation-wide, teachers who studied math or science in their undergraduate degrees receive a roughly 1% increase in salary over teachers that studied other subjects. I find that private schools do not reward teachers with a math or science background more than public schools do, but that medium-poor states as a group reward teachers with math or science backgrounds while richer states do not.

This dissertation contains three chapters that examine the effect of price in higher education. The first chapter considers the effect of community college tuition on college enrollment using a natural experiment in Texas where discounts for community college tuition were expanded over time and across geography. Additionally, the long-term effects of community college are examined including transfer to universities and graduation with a bachelor's degree. This chapter uses Texas administrative data from 1994-2012 on the universe of high school graduates and their college enrollment and graduation. For high school graduates, community college enrollment in the first year after high school increased by 7.1 percentage points for a \$1,000 decrease in tuition. Lower tuition also increased transfer from community colleges to universities. There is also marginally statistically significant evidence that attending a community college increased the probability of earning a bachelors degree within eight years of high school graduation by 23 percentage points. The second chapter examines whether students respond to immediate financial incentives when choosing their college major. From 2006-07 to 2010-11, low-income students in technical or foreign language majors could receive up to \$8,000 in Federal Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grants. Since income-eligibility was determined using a strict threshold, this chapter determines the causal impact of the grant on student major with a regression discontinuity design. Using administrative data from public universities in Texas, it is estimated that income-eligible students were 3.2 percentage points more likely than their ineligible peers to major in targeted fields. Brigham Young University had a larger impact of 10.1 percentage points. The third chapter considers the effect of financial aid arising from students being declared financially independent on educational outcomes including reenrollment, credits attempted, and graduation. Students who are 24 at the end of the calender year cannot be declared dependent while students who are 23 at the end of the year can be. This sharp change in eligibility is leveraged to compare dependent students to independent students in a regression discontinuity framework. The analysis uses administrative data from from all public universities and colleges in Texas from 2003-04 to 2013-14. Financial independence is associated with modest changes in educational outcomes. / text

This dissertation comprises three chapters. The first chapter estimates the crowd-out effect of Social Security on private retirement saving. In a quasi-experimental research design, I analyze the effect of the 1990 federal mandate of Social Security coverage for all state and local government employees who were not covered by an equivalent state pension. Using a sample of more than 12 million employer-employee observations on earnings and contributions to retirement plans, I find that Social Security coverage induces approximately 16% of those affected who had previously saved in private retirement plans to stop contributing. For those who continue contributing, Social Security coverage crowds out about 23% of pre-reform contributions.

This thesis contains four essays. The first paper, "Real or Evasion Responses to the Wealth Tax? Theory and Evidence from Sweden", addresses the behavioral effects of an annual wealth tax. I use Swedish tax records over the period 1999-2006 and two sources of variation in the tax rate to estimate the elasticity of taxable net wealth at about 0.3. I decompose the effects into reporting and savings responses and find that an increase in the tax is likely to stimulate evasion. Using military enlistment records on cognitive ability, I find that high-skilled individuals respond more to the tax. The second paper, "Job Displacement and Labor Market Outcomes by Skill Level", uses previously unexplored administrative data on all displaced workers in Sweden 2002-2004 to estimate how the incidence and effects of job loss depend on cognitive and noncognitive skills. I find that workers with low ability are significantly more likely to be displaced but the recovery rates upon job loss show no significant differences across skill groups. The third paper, "Complementary Roles of Connections and Performance in Political Selection in China", analyzes who becomes a top politician in China. It focuses on the promotions of provincial leaders and estimates how performance - measured by provincial economic growth – and connections with top politicians – measured by having worked together in the past – influence promotions. Using data for the period 1993-2009, we find a positive correlation between promotion and growth that is stronger for connected leaders. The fourth paper, "Does the Demand for Redistribution Rise or Fall with Cognitive Ability?", uses data from enlistment and a tailor-made survey that elicits redistributional preferences. On a scale of 0 to 100 percent redistribution, a one standard deviation increase in cognitive ability lowers demand by 6 percentage points, also when controlling for past, current and future expected income.

Since the first modern state-sponsored lottery was instituted in New Hampshire in 1964, lotteries have proliferated to 42 states and the District of Colombia. With little exception, research has shown that these lotteries are a highly regressive form of taxation. However, this body of research does not take into account a theoretical finding that the manner in which collected funds are earmarked impacts participation patterns. The goal of this dissertation is to test this finding empirically. In the first analysis, I use sales data from the Tennessee Education Lottery and scholarship data from the TEL Scholarship program to test this theory directly. I find that instant game sales are increasing in the number of scholarships awarded in a given county and that the implicit tax incidence is less regressive than in certain other states. Theory does not hold for Powerball sales. This may be due to a misconception that buying into a multi-state game does not directly subsidize programs in Tennessee. In the second analysis, I focus on the Texas Lottery, which began as a revenue stream for the state’s General Fund, but eventually became a dedicated revenue stream for K-12 education. I exploit this change to test for a structural break in the demand for two lottery games. Then, I extend an existing theory of lottery demand to take this structural break into account. I find that there is a structural break at the time the earmark is implemented, and that the lottery is less regressive after the earmark.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The papers of this thesis all look at different aspects of organisational governance and strategy. In particular these papers look at organisations that seem to be behaving in counterintuitive ways. For instance all around the world governments often spend disproportionately large amounts of money in the few months at the end of the fiscal year and in the private sector firms often advertise against their rivals even though by doing so they may face greater competition from these rival firms. In these papers I look into whether these behaviours are as a result of a strategy or perhaps reflect some form of a problem in organisational governance. I try to analyse the effects on market efficiency and what steps a government or regulator might take to improve the outcome of the market. The approach is generally theoretical but in the case of the first paper on government spending I calibrate a theoretical model to Northern Ireland spending data. In the rest of this document see non-technical abstracts for my three papers. Note that in order to avoid maths I had to simplify papers considerably so these nontechnical abstracts should not be cited.

This paper is submitted in an effort to bring into perspective the grants elements of social security which have contributed to vast economic changes and to which, paradoxically, they must also adapt.

This dissertation analyzes both the economics of the defense contracting process and the impact of total dollar obligations on the economies of U.S. states. Using various econometric techniques, I will estimate relationships across individual contracts, state level output, and income inequality. I will achieve this primarily through the use of a dataset on individual contract obligations. The first essay will catalog the distribution of contracts and isolate aspects of the process that contribute to contract dollar obligations. Accordingly, this study describes several characteristics about individual defense contracts, from 1966-2006: (i) the distribution of contract dollar obligations is extremely rightward skewed, (ii) contracts are unevenly distributed in a geographic sense across the United States, (iii) increased duration of a contract by 10 percent is associated with an increase in costs by 4 percent, (iv) competition does not seem to affect dollar obligations in a substantial way, (v) contract pre-payment financing increases the obligation of contracts from anywhere from 62 to 380 percent over non-financed contracts. The second essay will turn to an aggregate focus, and look the impact of defense spending on state economic output. The analysis in chapter two attempts to estimate the state level fiscal multiplier, deploying Difference-in-Differences estimation as an attempt to filter out potential endogeneity bias. Interstate variation in procurement spending facilitates utilization of a natural experiment scenario, focusing on the spike in relative spending in 1982. The state level relative multiplier estimate here is 1.19, and captures the short run, impact effect of the 1982 spending spike. Finally I will look at the relationship between defense contracting and income inequality. Military spending has typically been observed to have a negative relationship with income inequality. The third chapter examines the existence of this relationship, combining data on defense procurement with data on income inequality at the state level, in a longitudinal analysis across the United States. While the estimates do not suggest a significant relationship exists for the income share of the top ten percent of households, there is a significant positive relationship for the income share of top one percent households for an increase in defense procurement.

This paper seeks to evaluate the effects of peer misbehavior in the classroom on student learning outcomes--namely, if there is any truth behind the old saying that “one bad apple ruins the bunch”. Using experimental data, I show that there is a strong initial relationship between the level of misbehavior in a given classroom and performance on a mathematics evaluation; however, the inclusion of lagged peer achievement in the model causes most of that relationship to be absorbed away, suggesting that the bulk of peer effects stem more from the academic performance of other students than from their behavior.