<p>Education has become increasingly important in today’s society. In the three essays of this dissertation, I analyze the impacts of government education policies on elementary and high school students in Ontario.</p> <p>The first two essays measure the costs and benefits of programs that allow students to choose from a wider range of high schools. Theoretically, increased choice could benefit students since schools might compete for students by improving their productivity. The third essay of this dissertation, coauthored with Jean Eid and Christine Neill, examines the impacts on students of a switch from half-day to full-day kindergarten.</p> <p>In the first essay (Chapter 2), I document that students living in areas with more choice are more likely to apply to university. These outcomes seem to be due to competition between Public and Catholic school boards. I find that students attending public schools are more likely to apply to university when they are surrounded by more Catholic schools (and vice versa).</p> <p>In Chapter 3, I examine a potentially negative outcome of increased choice. I find that it is the brightest students (as measured by their standardized test scores) who are the most likely to take up the choice and opt in to a different school. These bright students move to what are perceived to be the better schools, leaving behind weaker students at poorer schools. If peer effects are important, this has the potential to be harmful for weaker students.</p> <p>In Chapter 4, my coauthors and I measure the impact of full-day kindergarten on standardized test scores once the students are in grades 3 and 6. We find that this universal program had no effect on the overall likelihood that a student passes these standard tests; however, we do observe some small improvements for students living in low-income and low-education neighbourhoods.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The decline in private sector wages in the aftermath of the Great Recession reopened a longstanding debate about whether public sector employees make more than private sector employees. However, much of this debate has only focused on the difference in wages over the past few years. This paper uses the Current Population Survey from 1995-2013 to examine how the federal-private wage differential has evolved over time. Wage regressions are estimated by year for federal and private sector workers. I then use these estimates to calculate the federal-private wage differential. This is augmented with selectivity bias corrections for each year. Probit estimates of the probability of receiving employer-provided health insurance and a pension plan are also estimated for each year. The findings suggest that the federal pay differential is invariably positive, but fell during the 1990s, began to rise in the early 2000s, and has continued to rise to the end of the sample period. In this paper, I also examine the difference in wage and fringe benefit between state/local government employees and private sector employees. For the analysis, this paper uses the American Community Survey from 2012-2014 to examine how the state/local-private wage gaps vary by state. Probit estimates of the probability of receiving employer-sponsored health insurance are also estimated. The findings present a wide range of the wage differentials between state/local government employees and private sector counterparts. On the other hand, public employees enjoy higher probability of receiving health insurance through a current employer.

Labor economists have persistently observed a gender gap in both wages and employment within the STEM fields. The prevalence of sexism and the lack of female representation within the technology industry, in particular, has recently been the subject of much media attention. This study seeks to determine the extent of the wage and employment gender gap in this field by examining the labor market outcomes of people who graduated college with a degree in computer science. Using data from the American Community Survey (2009-2011), I compare the aforementioned gender gaps among people with a computer science degree to those among people with a male-dominated, female-dominated, or gender-mixed degree. I also attempt to ascertain if there is an age cohort effect on these gender gaps. I find that, for almost all labor market outcomes, the gender gap among those with a computer science degree is smaller than the gender gap among those with another degree. Furthermore, I find that the gender disparity for those with a computer science degree improves across age cohorts. I thus conclude that women who choose to pursue a degree in computer science actually experience greater equality in terms of wages and employment relative to women who choose to pursue a degree in another area of study. This may be attributed to the high workplace flexibility offered to those working in computer science occupations.

This thesis investigates the relationship between gender and institutions within the context of Nepal’s labor migration. Labor migration is an important issue for Nepal’s economy as nearly 10% of the population works abroad (Sijapati, 2012). However, only 10% of these migrants are women, creating a gender imbalance. One reason for the large disparity between the number of female migrants and male migrants is explained by legal restraints and institutional factors. A potentially more potent reason for the lack of female migrants working abroad can be credited to gender roles and cultural values in Nepali society (Thieme, 2005). This thesis analyzes institutions’ role in labor migration and the relationship between institutions and female migrants.

The recent proliferation of administrative data sources has made it possible to examine numerous longstanding questions related to labor market functions. I make use of these data sources to provide new insights into three such questions; the extent of firms' market power in labor markets, the nature of gains from workers' skill specialization, and the role of job search networks in the locational choices of immigrants. In Chapter 1, I examine labor market monopsony, the extent to which markets deviate from perfect competition. Prior literature suggests two methods to estimate the extent of monopsony: studying the degree to which firms adjust wages in response to desired changes in employment growth, and measuring the degree to which workers' voluntary separations are sensitive to their own wages. Existing studies have found widely varying answers to these two questions in different contexts. I leverage unique features of Brazilian administrative data to demonstrate that these approaches provide very different results even on the same sample of employees, and I rule out a variety of alternative empirical explanations. These results suggest that labor market monopsony is primarily a function of workers' attachment to their current employers. In Chapter 2, I study the wage premium associated with skill specialization. While standard models predict that more technologically-advanced firms will hire more specialized workers, I show that higher-ability individuals may actually sort into less specialized occupations within firms. I test these predictions by constructing occupation-level measures of skill specialization from the U.S. O*NET database, matched to Brazilian administrative data. While I find that specialization among production skills is associated both with higher wages and with employment at higher-wage firms, I find no evidence of specialization premia in cognitive skills. Finally, in Chapter 3 I study the extent to which job search networks influence new immigrants' decisions to locate in ethnic enclaves. Using detailed data from the New Immigrant Survey, I show that immigrants to the U.S. who arrive without job offers are significantly more likely to locate in enclaves, even after accounting for a wide range of pre-migration and time-invariant characteristics.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar os diferenciais existentes na estrutura das aposentadorias entre diversas ocupações. Espera-se mostrar em que grau ocupações relativamente semelhantes possuem tratamentos diferenciados no que se refere à estrutura dos benefícios de aposentadoria, por estarem em regimes diferentes. Serão analisados os diferentes tratamentos aos quais estão sujeitas estas ocupações, levando-se em conta parâmetros como a Dívida Previdenciária Implícita, a Alíquota Necessária e a Taxa de Reposição dos Benefícios. / The main goal of this paper is to analyse the differences in the structure of pension schemes between several occupations. It is expected to show in what degree similar occupations have different treatments regarding their pension structure, depending under wich pension scheme they are. The parameters used in this analysis are the Implicit Pension Debt, the Balanced Payroll Rate and the Reposition Rate of Pensions.

This study ascertains the effects of private tutoring and other factors on student performance in the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) in China, using first hand data collected in a typical Chinese city in 2010. Three identification strategies including the instrumental variable model, the 3-level hierarchical linear model, and the Heckman two-stage method are applied in order to account respectively for the endogeneity of private tutoring participation, hierarchical data structure, and non-random high school selection bias. The quantile regression and the analysis of the urban and rural subsamples identify heterogeneous effects of various education factors on student performance. The study finds that the High School Entrance Exam (HSEE) score, good study habits and ability, parents caring about study and respecting the child, key class, the HSEE admission line, rich school activities, and the administrative style of high authority and accountability are significant and positive determinants of the NCEE score across subjects and models. Socioeconomic status has a significant and positive effects on the NCEE English score and total score, but the effect size is relatively small. Female students perform better than male students in Chinese and English, and there is no gender gap in math or in the total score. Private tutoring generally has no effect on the NCEE score for the whole sample, but may have a positive effect on low performing urban students and a negative effect on rural students who are not at the top. Rural students may face limited access to high quality private tutoring compared with their urban counterparts. Lower HSEE score, a higher SES, and more school level educational inputs are positive predictors of private tutoring participation. By using primary data, this study is the first to provide a comprehensive investigation of the effects of three levels (individual, class, and school) of factors on the NCEE performance in China. It includes factors such as the parental styles of educating their child and the school administrative styles that were seldom considered in previous studies in China. This also is the first to investigate the effect of private tutoring on student performance in China. Detailed information on the private tutoring industry is documented for the first time. The findings of this study have significant implications for education decision making by public policymakers and parents.

What are the socioeconomic implications of the time allocation decisions made by low-income adolescents? The way adolescents allocate their time between schooling, labor and leisure has important implications for their education attainment, college aspirations, job opportunities and future earnings. This study focuses on adolescents and young adults in urban areas of Brazil that, due to household income constraints, family or peer pressures enter the labor market at an early age, stop studying, and/or start engaging into risky behaviors, such as drug use or sexual activities. The key policy question in this context is then: what incentives could prove an efficient tool to change the time allocation patterns and behaviors that make adolescents drop out of school, fall pregnant (or impregnate) or consume drugs? This dissertation uses data from the Young Agent Project (YAP) a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) Program targeting exclusively adolescents in Brazil to examine this issue. This program targets adolescents aged 15 to 17 and its goals are to improve the socioeconomic and educational outcomes of youth in Brazil. The research in the dissertation seeks to determine whether the program has indeed influenced or not the time allocation decisions of low-income youth in Brazil, thus improving their socioeconomic and educational outcomes. The research addresses this issue in three different levels of analysis: 1) whether the YAP has affected schooling outcomes, youth labor decisions and risky behaviors, by gender, ethnicity or region, 2) whether transferring cash directly to the adolescent is more efficient than transferring to the parents, on improving schooling, labor and risky behavior outcomes, and 3) Whether the number of hours per week dedicated to the YAP's after school program is a strong predictor of better outcomes. The data used is the 2006 Projeto Agente Jovem dataset, which is a matched non-experimental, with a treatment group and a constructed control group. This dataset is representative of the recipients of the YAP across regions, states, genders and racial composition, which was administered to 2,210 households with adolescents aged 16 to 20 at least one year after having finished the program. For the analysis, this study used econometric techniques such as Propensity Score Matching (Average Treatment Effect on the Treated, Nearest Neighbor with Replacement) and performed robustness checks with a sensitivity analysis by comparing the treatment effects obtained from linear regression and Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting.

Employment rates of Mexican women increased 26 percentage points in the last 23 years. The underlying factors driving this trend are the main motivation for this study. My two explanatory hypotheses are the following: there is a lower 'motherhood penalty,' and a higher preschool enrollment encouraged women's employment. In addition, I estimate the gender gap in weekly wages and wages plus employer-provided benefits. To test these two hypotheses, I decompose changes, over the last two decades, in payoffs and endowments of 'motherhood.' Second, I measure the effect of changes in preschool enrollment on mothers' employment. In addition, I also estimate the gender gaps in wages and wages plus employer-provided benefits, incorporating a more precise measure of job experience than previously used, and measures of cognitive ability and non-cognitive traits (formerly unaccounted for in Mexican studies). My goal is to provide an explanation of the mechanisms that encouraged women's employment in Mexico, and to estimate the possible gender differences in earnings that might prevent a potentially larger progress of women in the Mexican labor market.

abstract: This dissertation consists of three essays on modern economic growth and structural transformation, in particular touching on the reallocation of labor across industries, occupations, and employment statuses. The first chapter investigates the quantitative importance of non-employment in the labor market outcomes for the United States. During the last 50 years, production has shifted from goods to services. In terms of occupations, the routine employment share decreased, giving way to increases in manual and abstract ones. These two patterns are related, and lower non-employment had an important role. A labor allocation model where goods, market services, and home services use different tasks as inputs is used for quantitative exercises. These show that non-employment could significantly slow down polarization and structural transformation, and induce significant displacement within the labor force. The second chapter, coauthored with Bart Hobijn and Todd Schoellman, looks at the demographic structure of structural transformation. More than half of labor reallocation during structural transformation is due to new cohorts disproportionately entering growing industries. This suggests substantial costs to labor reallocation. A model of overlapping generations with life-cycle career choice under switching costs and structural transformation is studied. Switching costs accelerate structural transformation, since forward-looking workers enter growing industries in anticipation of future wage growth. Most of the impact of switching costs shows on relative wages. The third chapter establishes that job polarization is a global phenomenon. The analysis of polarization is extended from a group of developed countries to a sample of 119 economies. At all levels of development, employment shares in routine occupations have decreased since the 1980s. This suggests that routine occupations are becoming increasingly obsolete throughout the world, rather than being outsourced to developing countries. A development accounting framework with technical change at the \textit{task} level is proposed. This allows to quantify and extrapolate task-specific productivity levels. Recent technological change is biased against routine occupations and in favor of manual occupations. This implies that in the following decades, world polarization will continue: employment in routine occupations will decrease, and the reallocation will happen mostly from routine to manual occupations, rather than to abstract ones. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Economics 2019