- Collection:
- Spelman College Faculty Publications
- Title:
- Three Essays on the Economics of Education
- Creator:
- Apperson, Jarod T.
- Date of Original:
- 2018-08-21
- Subject:
- Spelman College--Faculty
African American scholars
African Americans--Education (Higher)--Georgia
African American universities and colleges--Georgia--Atlanta - Location:
- United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta, 33.749, -84.38798
- Medium:
- publications (documents)
- Type:
- Text
- Format:
- application/pdf
- Description:
- This dissertation comprises essays that exploit geographic data in an effort to provide new causal evidence on three topics facing education policy makers. Chapter 1 investigates the consequences of domestic violence exposure. Despite the prevalence of domestic violence, little is known about how childhood exposure affects academic outcomes. Combining seven years of daily student observations with geocoded police records from a large urban school district, this study presents what I believe to be the first causal evidence on how domestic violence impacts a students' own academic outcomes. I show that episodes of domestic violence cause a short-term increase in absences, but I do not find evidence that the events increase or decrease the number of disciplinary infractions, conditional on attending school. In addition, I measure spillovers to peers using plausibly exogenous daily and annual variation in peer group composition. Peer effects stemming from domestic violence have been studied in one U.S. county. In contrast to earlier research, my spillover results suggest that neither peers' behavior nor their test scores are impacted. Estimates are precise enough to rule out peer spillovers of the magnitude found in prior work. I explore some possible explanations for the divergence from my findings and those found in the U.S. county previously studied. Chapter 2 analyzes the relationship between longer student commutes and outcomes including attendance and achievement. The research design relies on exogenous variation in distance to school arising from 40 school closures, relocations, and consolidations occurring in a large urban school district during the years 2010 to 2017. Because these events could impact other education inputs (e.g. peer composition, facility quality, teaching staff), I focus on comparisons between students who attend the same school both before and after the event but experience different changes in their distance to school. I find little evidence of a marginal effect when adding an additional mile to a students� commute on either academic achievement or attendance. I am able to reject the null hypothesis that adding a mile to a students� commute reduces achievement by more than 0.009 standard deviations. For attendance, I am able to reject the null hypothesis that adding a mile to a students� commute reduces percent attendance by more than 0.04 percentage points. In contrast to the null effects arising from a marginal increase in distance, I find robust evidence that being within walking distance to school affects attendance. Being able to walk to school increases attendance by 0.76 percentage points. It is not clear whether this increased attendance translates to higher achievement on annual exams. While point estimates are positive, the effects on achievement are not measured precisely enough to reject a null achievement effect. I conclude that factors other than student commutes are likely more important for district leaders to consider when setting policies on school closure and school choice. Chapter 3 evaluates the effects of charter schools on New York City neighborhoods. The most convincing charter school research focuses on how the schools affect students who attend them. Optimal policy should also weigh how charters impact nearby traditional public schools and how sorting on charter access impacts neighborhoods. Though studied by some, these questions have proven tougher to answer convincingly because of challenges dealing with endogenous charter school location. Using unique New York City laws that impact geographical access to charter schools, I employ a new approach to identifying the causal effect of charter school entry on neighborhoods. I find that for every 10 percent increase in charter market share, neighborhood student achievement (i.e. students at both charter and traditional schools) increases 0.01 standard deviations in ELA and 0.04 standard deviations in Math. I find no evidence that charter schools causally reduce or improve achievement of students remaining in traditional public schools; however, charter schools do cause substantial sorting into the neighborhood�s schools, greater concentration of students with disabilities in traditional public schools, and selection by black and Hispanic students into more segregated schools.
- Metadata URL:
- http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12322/sc.fac.pubs:2018_apperson_jarod_t
- Additional Rights Information:
- All works in this collection either are protected by copyright or are the property of the Robert W. Woodruff Library, and/or the copyright holder as appropriate. To order a reproduction or to inquire about permission to publish, please contact the Archives Research Center at:�archives@auctr.edu�with the web URL or handle identification number.
- Holding Institution:
- Spelman College
- Rights:
-
