Since the mid-1990s, public education provision in Turkey has been in constant transformation, a result of modernization efforts connected to the political determination of governments to complete Turkey's accession to the European Union. During this period two nation-wide reforms stand out due to their dramatic impact on children, students, teachers and the education system as a whole. First, the Compulsory Education Law enacted in 1997 required that all the children enrolled in grade 4 or lower must stay in school until the completion of the eighth grade. Second, in 2002, the Ministry of National Education (MONE) abandoned recruiting teachers based on lottery and started to use teachers' test scores instead. Following new legislation, the Center of Measurement, Selection and Placement (ÖSYM) launched a central examination process which is known as the Public Servant Selection Examination (KPSS). This dissertation provides an econometric evaluation of the impact of these interventions on education outcomes in Turkey. The dissertation seeks to establish a causal link between the enactment of KPSS and student achievement. It presents evidence indicating that teacher recruitment via a meritocratic, test-based assessment instead of a lottery may have a positive impact on student achievement. The research also shows that the increase in the average student achievement displayed by Turkey in international assessments such as PISA (Programme of International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) may be partially explained by the inception of KPSS. The identification strategy for this assessment is based on the fact that the TIMMS data includes information on teachers and test scores for each student sampled in Turkey in both1999 and 2007, that is, before and after KPSS was enacted in 2002. This allows the estimation of a difference-in-differences model with student fixed effects. The findings highlight that students whose teachers were recruited after the enactment of KPSS perform 0.2 standard deviations higher than their counterparts whose teachers were recruited before the enactment of KPSS. This finding remains stable in several sensitivity and robustness checks.The dissertation then turns to analyzing an earlier intervention, the Compulsory Education Law of 1997. The research estimates the impact of the Compulsory Education Law on the years of schooling of women aged between 18 and 29. For this purpose, the dissertation uses the Turkey Demographic Health Survey 2003 and 2008. The identification strategy is based on the fact that, first, cohorts born after 1986 (children enrolled in grade 4 in the1996-1997 school year and later) were subject to the Compulsory Education Law and earlier cohorts were not, and, second, the intensity of the intervention varied between regions. Hence the investigation exploited the between-cohort and between-region variation in intensity of the intervention to estimate the causal impact of the Compulsory Education Law on years of schooling. The findings suggest that the Compulsory Education Law led to a 34 percentage point increase in the probability of completing eight years of schooling and an additional 1.5 years of schooling. Also, the econometric results indicate that the Compulsory Education Law affected high school completion rates, i.e. eleven years of schooling. The analysis of the impact of the Compulsory Education Law is extended to a two-stage least-squares (TSLS) estimation of the impact of completing eight years of schooling/additional years of schooling on teenage marriage and fertility. The between-cohort and between-region variation in intensity of the intervention are used to instrument completing eight years of schooling and additional years of schooling. However, in contrast with the existing research on this issue in Turkey, these TSLS estimations did not supply any evidence in favor of the presence of a causal link between completing eight years of schooling/additional years of schooling and teenage marriage and fertility.

This dissertation poses a set of questions about the political impacts of the rapid and large-scale deployment of HIV programs (HIV "scale-up") in Lesotho. As HIV and global health initiatives have expanded over the past decade, they have had sociopolitical, as well as epidemiological, impacts. In particular, HIV scale-up elicited and demanded new political processes that continue to change how policy is crafted, how citizens are represented, and which values drive new health initiatives. More fundamentally, HIV initiatives have altered the ways that citizens, patients, and communities perceive themselves, the state, and their political worlds. Utilizing multi-sited ethnographic methods, this project observes how citizens in Lesotho are coping with these dramatic changes in their political worlds. The research reveals HIV scale-up's considerable and far-reaching impacts on citizen faith in democracy, perceptions of rights, access to key social protections, and feelings of belonging. In contrast to work on the impacts of social movements, activism, and political will on HIV policies, this dissertation inverts the causal direction of inquiry regarding health and politics. In doing so, it recognizes new global health movements as drivers of political change, mobilizing actors and resources in deploying programs in ways that are altering political worlds and subjectivities. A rich recent literature on biological and therapeutic citizenship in the time of AIDS has begun recognizing these trends and their impacts on patient subjectivity. This research expands the frame of inquiry to examine how public health interventions can also alter citizen subjectivity, expectations of democracy, and the structures of associational life. The dissertation also contributes data towards better understandings of recipient populations' perspectives on accountability, good governance, public-private partnerships, transparency, and participation—approaches currently touted as solutions to poor project outcomes. For citizens in Lesotho, these initiatives still look very much like anti-democratic enterprises. Field research was undertaken in two sites surrounding different clinical care models: the first was a government-run primary care clinic, and the second was a factory-based clinic in the country's garment industry, where a public-private partnership provided HIV services to workers. In both sites, research extended far beyond the clinic. In the former site, this meant working with: peri-urban communities served by the clinic; two support groups struggling to build partnerships with NGOs; local government institutions tasked with managing the HIV response; and traditional healers, community health workers, and patients giving and seeking care outside the clinic. In the second site, this meant exploring dynamics of discipline, productivity and "ethical" production in a transnationally-linked industry, as well as the social lives of workers outside their work. Though largely unforeseen by most global health actors, HIV policy has become an extremely effective delivery mechanism for specific political ideologies and ways of practicing politics in poor countries. Research conducted in these sites demonstrates that the expansive, far-reaching scale-up of HIV programs has fundamentally changed ideas about what citizens deserve, who is deserving, how decisions will be made about services, and who takes responsibility for services, and ultimately, the survival of citizens. The predominant experience of politics for most citizens in post-scale-up Lesotho is a feeling of abandonment, of not being heard. The research thus raises significant normative as well as pragmatic questions about the role and responsibility of global health projects in already fragile political systems, and the potential impacts of the political changes described here on patterns of health seeking and ill health in countries like Lesotho.

The objective of this dissertation is to present empirical evidence and analysis of three key issues in the Mexican education system: 1) school accountability, as reflected in a particular state innovation pursued by the state of Colima in 2009 to identify and address the problems of low-performing schools, 2) age delay and the effects of a national reform introduced in 2006-2007 that modified the first grade entry-age across all Mexican states, and 3) the educational disadvantages of indigenous peoples in México and their consequences, as determined from recent data which allows identification of this population. First, the dissertation evaluates the impact of a targeted state-sponsored intervention program known as Programa de Atención Específica para la Mejora del Logro Educativo (PAE) designed to provide low-performing schools with remedial resources in Colima, México. The research analyzes the effect of this compensatory program in terms of standardized test scores among 108 participating schools having the lowest learning outcomes in 2009. The results of this "natural experiment" confirm that intervention in the form of the PAE program had a positive impact on average test scores in poorly performing Colima schools. By exploiting PAE's eligibility rules, a regression discontinuity method is used to estimate the impact on subsequent learning outcomes. Schools that participated in the program and a valid comparison group were followed for three years in order to compare their performance. The fact that the program was halted after only one year meant that the only realized interventions were those related to the program's preparation, which revolved around notifying schools as low-performing, identifying a school's main academic problems and devising a development plan to address those challenges. Yet, after only one year, test scores in PAE schools increased by 0.13 standard deviations vis-à-vis non-PAE schools and in fact, after three years, differences between the two groups of schools were no longer significant. Second, the dissertation explores the impact of exogenous variation in the age at which students enter school on education outcomes. Prior to the 2006-2007 school year, the cut-off day for school entry in Mexico had been September 1st. Since then, however, pupils aged 6 by as late as December 31 could start public school. Data related to this cut-off transition are reviewed and analyzed using a regression discontinuity method so as to estimate the causal effect of delayed school enrollment on math test scores. A two-stage least square (TSLS) estimator is used wherein the source of identification is the variation in 1st grade entry ages which resulted solely from differences in dates of birth. The results indicate that older students scored higher than younger students. The reform impacted the discrepancy between those regulated by the new cut-off dates and those regulated by the old cut-off date(s) by 0.30 s.d. (comparing the 1998-1999 cohort which entered school before the reform with the 2002-2003 cohort, which entered afterwards). The results also suggest age effects on education outcomes that are stronger for recent generations than for generations entering first grade prior to the reform. Because math scores have increased by 0.95 s.d. since the first administration of ENLACE in 2006, this result suggests that, at a minimum, moving the cut-off date by four months to December 31 did not have an adverse effect on mean math test scores. Finally, a sobering analysis of the educational outcomes of indigenous populations is conducted using data from Encuesta Nacional Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares, ENIGH) which, for the first time in 2008 and then 2010 identified indigenous populations. The research finds that although the percentage of families in extreme poverty residing in municipalities where indigenous populations are concentrated dropped between 1992 and 2010, the gap in poverty rates between the municipalities where indigenous people concentrate and others remains huge, with extreme poverty in the former equal to 51.9% in 2010 and in the latter 16.9%. Because rates of return to education are estimated in this dissertation to be high in Mexico (around 10%, including those for indigenous populations), education is found to be essential in reducing the gulf in poverty levels by ethnicity. But the study shows that gaps in educational outcomes between indigenous and non-indigenous populations remain wide, whether in terms of average educational attainment, participation in Kindergarten, the percentage of students who are overage, and the average student achievement as measured by a variety of tests.

This research asks how universality of ridership is maintained in New York City’s transit system given that it is gated by the fare. Transportation planning scholarship presumes transit is affordable because the fare has a relatively low price and ridership among the poor is high. The transit agency addresses universality by maintaining a fare structure that keeps the single ride fare relatively low. Its method is based on empirical evidence that low-income riders “prefer” cheaper fare products over those with lower average fares but that require higher initial cash outlays. Transportation scholarship observes that low-income riders are inelastic and presumes, based on economic theory, that riders will forego more elastic goods to ride transit. Critical planning scholars have contested the tenets of the modernist planning project which utilize predict-and-provide empiricism and neoclassical economic models such as these. While urban planning has turned toward direct collaboration or at least participation with affected communities, transportation planning has not fully made this turn. There is thus little transit-related research that is informed directly by riders, especially low-income riders, suggesting the conventional approaches to understanding how riders afford the fare are incomplete. To fill this void, this research engages with low-income transit riders to elaborate and challenge the explanations for universality of ridership. It finds that although the fare price is low, it is not necessarily affordable. The “preference” for single ride fares is in most cases the result of constraints. Single fare rides are often combined with fare evasion and exploitation of free transfers, while unlimited fare cards are highly sought and widely shared. Low-income riders are more likely to undertake compensating behaviors than to forego goods. On the occasions when they do forego goods, they compromise necessities such as food, telephone service, rent and laundry. Finally, agents of the welfare state distribute fares to low-income individuals to promote rehabilitation and labor force attachment. Together these findings suggest that universality of ridership is tenuous. It depends on fragmented systems of generosity, compromise and welfare of which transit advocates and planners are largely unaware. Fare evasion enforcement, pricing structures and fare payment methods can pose challenges to riders who rely on these fragmented systems. By explicitly acknowledging transit affordability, and incorporating knowledge on the role that welfare plays in enabling low-income ridership, planners can expand access to transit for low-income riders.

This dissertation examines how legislators learn about policy proposals. It focuses on three common sources of policy information --- staff briefings, cues, and group deliberations --- to show the causal effect of information on legislators' policy positions. It uses a new approach, field experiments, that allows me to answer questions about information, institutions, and outcomes that heretofore have been difficult to study quantitatively. Results from the three studies I conducted are largely consistent with theories of legislating under imperfect information. All three studies find that information affects position-taking. On average, information increases support by reducing legislators' uncertainty. Information is most influential on bills that legislators are ideologically predisposed to support. In some respects, findings extend or challenge existing theories. Legislators appear responsive to repeated messaging. Cues and briefings interact to make legislators even more supportive of bills than we would expect from their separate effects. Cues determine a far greater proportion of positions than prior studies suggested. Finally, group deliberation appears to reduce partisan polarization in bill coalitions. All together, the studies illustrate that imperfect information constrains position-taking, that legislative staff, cue-taking, and deliberation can effectively communicate information, and that legislative institutions influence individual positions by providing policy-relevant information.

Human capital is an important predictor of economic growth. A higher initial stock of human capital boosts productivity and encourages knowledge diffusion, thereby generating higher levels of growth. Given its importance in determining growth, it is imperative to study the mechanisms through which human capital accumulation is affected. This is particularly important in the context of low-income countries that perform poorly on indicators relating to the quality and quantity of human capital accumulation. What follows are three essays that explore the topic of human capital accumulation for developing countries. The chapters explore the implications of income shocks for human capital accumulation both at the household level as well as at the school level. The first chapter surveys the literature on income shocks and its impact on human capital. The second and third chapters explore the impact of income shocks, such as aggregate income shocks and idiosyncratic income shocks, on human capital accumulation at the school and household levels in selected low-income countries. These shocks impact human capital accumulation through two main effects: the purchasing power of households and the opportunity cost of schooling. The total impact on human capital investment therefore depends on which effect dominates. In the first chapter, I find that the regional context as well as the nature of the shock can be important in determining outcomes. While in Latin America, robust analysis points towards the substitution effect dominating, in the case of Asia and Africa the evidence largely points towards the dominance of the income effect. In this chapter, the various studies reviewed are summarized, and the methodologies are critically examined. In the second chapter, I use negative rainfall shocks as a proxy for agricultural income shocks in Pakistan where negative rainfall shocks are defined as rainfall that is lower than average. I study the impact of negative rainfall shocks on enrollment in public schools across the province of Punjab. Punjab proves to be an interesting setting given its high reliance on agriculture as well as the possibility to test the heterogeneity of the impact of rainfall due to its vast irrigation network. I find that, while crop yields and enrollment are, in general, adversely affected by negative rainfall shocks, the heterogeneity of the impact indicates that income may not be the only channel at play. In the third chapter, I use panel household survey data for Uganda to explore concerns regarding human capital accumulation in the context of idiosyncratic income shocks which can impact education expenditure allocation at the household level. I find some evidence suggesting that shocks impact total consumption as well as education expenditure. While some forms of financial instruments play a role in mitigating the negative impact of shocks, others do not. Furthermore, I explore the heterogeneity of the impact of shocks by certain selected characteristics of the household. In conclusion, income shocks have important implications for low-income countries’ human capital accumulation, which in turn is a cornerstone for their development and growth prospects. Negative income shocks can have adverse effects on human capital accumulation in the long-run, where their impact in the short-term can translate into long-term negative outcomes for human capital accumulation. Therefore, if developing economies want to improve their growth prospects, they need to invest in education and provide buffers so that income shocks do not hinder the accumulation of human capital.

Given the widely-accepted finding that countries with greater income inequality also experience less income mobility across generations (Corak, 2013; Krueger, 2012), it is expected that American mobility has decreased with rising income inequality in recent decades (Aaronson & Mazumder, 2008; Corak, 2013; Mazumder, 2012). However, mobility has remained unchanged (Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, & Turner, 2014), and is unresponsive to changes in income inequality (Bloome, 2015). These findings raise questions as to why intergenerational income mobility in the U.S. has not fallen during the periods when income inequality has sharply risen. To address these questions, the dissertation focuses on two aims. The first aim is to examine the association between intergenerational income mobility and income inequality in the United States. The second aim is to examine intergenerational income mobility with respect to income inequality and government spending. The main data for this dissertation come from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). The basic sample includes 4,824 parents-children pairs. I aggregate the state-level data from several different resources such as the IRS’s Statistics of Income, U.S. Census of Governments, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state-level sample includes 220 state-year observations. Overall, the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) of income is about 0.43, and the analysis indicates that the US in reality is highly immobile, especially when looking at the extreme income groups of the bottom and the top. This study finds that rising income inequality acts to strengthen the importance of parental family income to child’s income. Particularly, the evidence that higher income inequality decreases intergenerational income mobility is clearer when migration problems are addressed. This study extends to include government spending and provides evidence that additional government spending contributes to promoting intergenerational income mobility. Moreover, government spending moderates the effects of income inequality on intergenerational income mobility. This evidence indicates that government spending plays a role in preventing the decrease in intergenerational income mobility by offsetting the consequences of income inequality on mobility. A number of sensitivity tests confirm that the main results are robust and reliable. However, these results are not uniform across the subgroups—defined by gender, race, and family structure. There are wide variations in the IGE, the effects of income inequality and government spending across the subgroups and by different income measures. The findings of this study have implications for social work policy and practice. Income inequality matters since it hinders the equal opportunity to succeed, especially for children from low-income families. This study demonstrates that government spending plays an important role in promoting intergenerational income mobility by offsetting the consequences of income inequality. Yet, this study does not claim that the effects of increased government spending for increased intergenerational mobility are limitless. Without efforts to connect low-income families to government policies and programs, economically disadvantaged children would not benefit in their human capital and skill development from increases in government spending.

Univ., Diss.--Toulouse.

Despite a growing consensus that teacher quality is central to student learning, teacher evaluation systems have long been focused on compliance, rather than implemented in service of improved instruction and/or accountability for performance. In recent years, in response to a growing sense that evaluation policy failed to meet the needs of teachers or the communities they serve, a variety of stakeholders successfully advocated for dramatic changes to teacher evaluation policies in states and districts across the United States. These reforms largely focused on greater standardization, the use of data to draw conclusions about teacher performance, and increased accountability for student learning. My study focuses on the beliefs of teachers at the nexus of change to teacher evaluation policy in their districts. Using data from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project and a sample of 696 teachers, this project explores teachers’ beliefs about evaluation and related practices, and examines the relationships between teacher beliefs and measures of teacher quality. Findings suggest that teacher beliefs vary based on teacher-, classroom- and school-level factors. Results about the links between teacher beliefs and measures of teacher quality are inconclusive, though the current analyses do reveal several interesting patterns that are promising for further exploration in future research.

For most formerly incarcerated people, the transition from prison to free society is fraught with challenges and constraints, some of which can persist for years, even decades, after one is released. Difficulty finding work, housing, and earning enough to make ends meet are essentially par for the course, among myriad other disadvantages. Child support debt can then make what is already a complicated situation far worse, not least of all because failure to pay brings about punitive legal sanctions. Arrearages at once constitute a collateral consequence of conviction and a barrier to reintegration. Incarceration can lead to the establishment of a child support order and the accumulation of debt, since most obligors can neither provide for their families nor effectively pursue order modifications while serving time. Then, once they are released, they face substantial obligations, dim financial prospects, and potential wage garnishment rates amounting to nearly two-thirds of their income—and that is assuming the individual manages to secure employment. Revenue that Child Support Enforcement (CSE) collects from these obligors often does not even go toward their families. Indeed, a significant share of arrears held by low-income and incarcerated fathers, sometimes with compound interest, is owed to the state for reimbursement of public benefits provided to the custodial family. By extracting formerly incarcerated fathers’ scarce financial resources on behalf of the state, CSE may actually be diverting potential informal support away from low-income families. Moreover, noncompliance can precipitate an array of consequences, some of which directly jeopardize the freedom of obligors involved in the criminal legal system. Dual entanglements in the carceral and child support systems comprise an issue that has gone largely unexamined in the empirical literature, at least until recently. This dissertation contributes to this emerging corpus of research by examining the dynamics of child support obligations, and especially debt, in the context of short- and long-term reintegration. Based on 31 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the study examines formerly incarcerated, indebted fathers’ instrumental and symbolic understandings of child support. Findings include an inductively-constructed tripartite framework for obligors’ functional comprehension and interpretive frames, while highlighting major gaps in debtor knowledge and institutional provision of information. The dissertation also explores the ways in which obligors respond to child support obligations after prison, from engagement and compliance on one end to “off the grid” avoidance on the other. The analysis then addresses the various disruptive roles that child support arrears play throughout a series of transitional, though not necessarily sequential stages of post-prison reintegration. Implications for child support and criminal legal policy, and policy recommendations, are discussed.