Essays in Economics of Education and Public Economics

This dissertation explores three topics in the economics of education and public economics. In chapter 1, I use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to estimate how attending an after-school program in San Diego impacts short-run student academic and behavioral outcomes. I find that the after-school program has no impact on academic outcomes in math and English Language Arts for students in K-8. On the other hand, I find suggestive evidence that student behavior is affected, but the direction of the effect varies across years. In chapter 2, I evaluate the potential for changes in expected lifetime income by major that result from changes in the individual income tax law to affect college major choices, using one of the largest federal income tax reforms in recent U.S. history, the 1986 Tax Reform Act (TRA86), as a case study. Due to the limited differential impact on expected earnings across majors, I find that TRA86 is likely to have had a small impact on the composition of completed college majors after 1986. Lastly, in chapter 3, I study the peer effects of students who speak a language other than English at home (ESL) on native English speaking (ELO) students in grades 2 to 6 in California. I find that higher concentrations of ESL students have no effect on average math test scores and a negative effect on average English test scores of ELO students