Essays on Regime Change and Education Policy Reform

This dissertation consists of three chapters, each representing a self-contained research paper in health economics. The first chapter formalizes a model which generalizes several political models of collective action and regime change. It considers the impact that an extremist party can have on the choices made by the population in choosing whether or not to take part in a revolt. This third party is usually a personal interest group that benefits from a revolution, or in some cases benefits from the current regime in power, and thus will try to persuade the general population into pursuing an action that is in the extremist’s best interest. The paper presents several applications of the model with political and economic roots. These models add insight to revolutions in the present day as well as throughout history, particularly those aided by outside benefactors.(JEL codes: D5,D72,D91) In the second chapter, I study the effect that NCLB had on teacher turnover and compare it to the impact from state accountability systems that existed prior to the passage of NCLB. I find that, while state accountability systems have no significant effect on teacher turnover, teachers are 5 percentage points more likely to remain in the field following NCLB. The driving force behind this result is the year that a teacher earned his or her bachelor’s degree. Receiving a bachelor’s degree after 2002 makes an individual 27 percentage points more likely to stay in the field after NCLB was passed. I believe there is a self-selection process to explain this result, as after NCLB became law only those individuals who felt comfortable teaching under an accountability system earned their education degree and became a teacher. I find further evidence of this result by considering where the teachers earned their degrees. The state where a teacher earned their degree does not have a large effect on the likelihood of continuing to teach, regardless of whether or not that state had some kind of prior accountability system. This suggests that the self-selection process occurs before the individuals earn their degree, and not in response to a change in curriculum from the college or university at which they earned their degree. (JEL codes: I28, J08, J48) In the third chapter, I consider a teacher’s response to earning tenure as it relates to classroom performance. For elementary and secondary school teachers, earning tenure makes it very expensive and time consuming for a school to terminate them. Critics of tenure argue that this creates an incentive for teachers to expend less effort and energy into their teaching as they are able to avoid the penalty of job loss. There is a long research history of teacher characteristics and the effects they have on student achievement. Surprisingly, the impact of earning tenure remains unknown. This chapter uses student level data and pairs it with teacher and school characteristics in order to find the effect earning tenure has on test scores. By taking advantage of the staggered issuance of tenure, we can isolate the impact of earning tenure. I find that immediately after being awarded tenure, student test scores drop. However, they increase and overtake previous scores the following year. This suggests teachers earn extra benefit when their students are successful, and thereby, resist the incentive to provide lower quality teaching. (JEL codes: I20, I28, J08