Three essays in *education and labor economics.

The three essays of this dissertation investigate the causal effects of mandatory summer school attendance and bilingual education on student achievement, and the effects of changes in earnings disregard policies on the labor supply of low-income women. I extend the existing literature on the effects of summer school and bilingual education by utilizing a regression discontinuity research design to minimize the influences of the selection biases that have plagued previous studies, and a unique data set containing information on more than two-million student-years from a large school district. In the District, program participation is determined by a student's score on an end of year achievement test in the case of summer school, or a test of English proficiency for bilingual education: in both cases students scoring below a preset threshold level are much more likely to participate in the program than students scoring even a few points above the threshold. Students scoring just below and just above the thresholds are similar in all characteristics aside from their program participation. In both cases, however, I find much smaller differences in achievement due to attending summer school and enrolling in bilingual classes than prior research has suggested. Chapter 3 takes advantage of the dramatic changes in earnings disregard policies over the 1990's to assess whether financial incentives influence the labor supply of low-income women. The magnitude of the changes that occurred over this period were unprecedentedly large---in some states implicit marginal tax rates on earnings fell from 100 to 0 percent. We find striking differences in the financial incentives to work across groups of states that adopted generous earnings disregard policies, some of which disregard all earnings in calculating welfare benefits (a zero percent implicit tax on earnings), and states that changed their disregard policies only slightly. Even after controlling for economic, policy, and demographic differences across states, however, there are little to no differences in employment rates or the average number of hours worked among workers that correspond to these differences in incentives.Ph.D.Bilingual educationEducationLabor economicsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125442/2/3192722.pd