This dissertation consists of two chapters. First, I explore the role health dynamics play in determining the value and cost-effectiveness of public health insurance. Current healthcare consumption may yield future health benefits that lower longer-run expenditures. I leverage exogenous variation in the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to assess how comprehensive insurance affects immediate healthcare spending for the near-elderly (aged 60-64) and future healthcare spending once they receive Medicare at age 65. I provide evidence that Medicaid coverage increases immediate expenditures by roughly 112 percent; but, after receiving Medicare, the same individuals are healthier and consume 77 percent less care measured by total expenditures. I then develop and estimate a life-cycle model of near-elderly individuals that incorporates the Medicaid expansions as well as dynamic health investment and endogenous mortality. I find that the Medicaid expansions were valued by the near-elderly population at slightly above net government costs, and that modest reforms to increase Medicare's generosity could generate considerable welfare improvements relative to program costs. Second, I document that flexible employment and educational arrangements can reduce the barriers that some students face in seeking a degree by mitigating the contemporaneous earnings losses associated with enrolling in college. Using detailed data, I analyze how labor supply and study efforts respond to changes in labor market conditions and college activities/tasks. My findings indicate a low ``short run" opportunity cost of studying when working. I also show that study time is not particularly sensitive to changes in labor market conditions. Consistent with these results, I find that workers take advantage of their flexible schedules by changing their usual working hours when their college courses are more demanding. Encouragingly, I do not find adverse effects of work hours on academic performance or of study hours on workplace performance. Finally, students value flexible working and educational formats highly and view online education as an important vehicle for increasing expected future income. Overall, this study underscores that combining flexible working and learning formats constitutes a suitable path for many students who work to pay for college or workers who aim to improve their skills.

This dissertation studies the differences in how men and women react to feedback or information about their performance in educational settings and how these differences might impact women’s decisions to stay away from traditionally male-dominated fields. The first chapter analyzes the gender differences in reaction to low performance during high school. I focus on the decision of North Carolina public high school students to enroll in advanced math or English classes after learning about their performance on statewide standardized tests in each subject. I find that women are more responsive to low-performing than men. Women that perform poorly on their tests are less likely than their higher-performance peers to enroll in advanced classes, while men's likelihood is the same regardless of performance. It has been documented that the probability of women continuing their studies in male-dominated fields -- like Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and business -- is more sensitive to their performance in relevant courses at the beginning of college relative to men. The second chapter studies these gender differences in grade sensitivity during college. Using novel survey data, I estimate students' sensitivity to grades and find that women value an extra grade point average (GPA) unit more than men. I find that anticipated discrimination in the labor market of male-dominated fields is important to understand this gender gap in grade sensitivity. I further provide evidence of the gender differences in beliefs about labor market discrimination in different fields. The last chapter investigates the dynamic effects of feedback in an experimental setting. I explore how individuals update their beliefs and choices in response to good or bad news over time in two domains: verbal skills and math. I find significant gender gaps in beliefs and choices before feedback: men are more optimistic about their performance and more willing to compete than women in both domains, but the gaps are significantly larger in math. Feedback significantly shifts individuals' beliefs and choices immediately after receiving it. However, there is substantial persistence of gender gaps over time. This is particularly true among the set of individuals who receive negative feedback.

Are heterogeneous labor market outcomes a product of markets efficiently allocating resources or the result of structural market failures which should be corrected through well-crafted policy? In order to address this fundamental question in modern economics, we must first understand the forces which shape individuals' earnings, employment, and occupational choices. This collection of essays provides new evidence to support several novel channels which influence labor markets. First, I evaluate the connection between technological change and labor market outcomes by bringing new data and methods to study the mechanization of American agriculture in the early 20th century. Using an instrumental variables estimation strategy, I find that exogenous increases in exposure to technological change generated occupational displacement for incumbent laborers, increased income inequality, and had important impacts on intergenerational mobility for the children of affected workers. Additionally, I investigate the connection between low-opportunity neighborhoods and public housing residents' labor market outcomes. Leveraging quasi-random variation in neighborhood quality due to a public housing demolition, I find that residents' wages increased after moving to higher-opportunity neighborhoods and that more intense supportive services improved post-move employment. Taken together, these essays provide new evidence that both large-scale factors like new technologies and local factors like neighborhood quality contribute to heterogeneity in labor market outcomes both historically and up to the present day.

This dissertation explores the effect of school competition on the human capital accumulation of students. Policies that expand the scope for school choice have become increasingly popular largely due to the belief that this will create incentives for low-performing, incumbent schools to improve academic outcomes. However, there is a general lack of empirical support for these positive academic spillover effects in most contexts. In the first chapter, I demonstrate that if schools respond to competition through channels not typically considered in standard arguments in favor of school choice, it means that these policies may lead to negative, unintended consequences for academic achievement. I find that increasing the number of schools serving a given market can have a negative effect on test scores through creating incentives for schools to increase the provision of non-academic services that do not contribute to academic preparation, and through the creation of excess costs in the public school system. I use an empirical strategy designed to address strategic location decisions by new entrants as well as student selection across schools to show that entry of a new charter middle school during a recent large-scale charter expansion in North Carolina decreased average traditional public middle school test scores across a school district. The second chapter considers the extent to which policymakers have tools available to them that can improve the ability of competition to generate the increases in test scores at incumbent schools that they have prioritized. I show that the efficacy of school choice can be improved by providing short-term, partial reimbursements to public school districts for increases in charter school enrollment by resident pupils. I also demonstrate that these effects occur not only due to the direct increase in district revenue associated with reimbursements, but also because the presence of this aid reduces the incentives of school administrators to compete for students through non-academic channels. The empirical strategy that I use to generate these results leverages plausibly exogenous cutoffs for aid eligibility induced by a unique policy in the state of New York.

A growing body of research suggests that there is more to course assessment than homework scores and test performance. This paper contributes to the empirical literature in economics and education by evaluating the impact of racial and gender congruency on the performance of ASU students. Expanding on previous research which only covered elementary and high school, we are able to draw conclusions and policy recommendations to solve the racial achievement gap in the USA.

The presence of children can influence importantly how households respond to income risk. The aim of this dissertation is to study how different aspects of families' life-cycle decisions are affected by different sources of income fluctuation. In the first part of this dissertation, I study the relationships between fertility choices, consumption, and labor supply, by developing a model with endogenous fertility decisions and income volatility. Within this framework, fertility choices act as a mechanism to smooth utility over time. In this context, I analyze the insurance value of fertility choices. I use a structural model that combines two features underexplored by the literature: children as consumption commitments, and nonseparabilities of family size and consumption. Having children in the household affects consumption and labor marginal utilities, changing the insurance value of fertility decisions and generating incentives to avoid childbearing during low-income spells. I find that the welfare loss of a negative transitory income shock is 34 to 38 times larger if households are not able to choose when to have their children. These results underscore how costly unplanned childbearing can be to the household in terms of welfare.The second part of this dissertation evaluates the impact of being born under negative conditions in the labor market on human capital formation, and what parental behavior could be leading to those effects. I estimate the impact of the unemployment rates on children's assessment outcomes in cognitive and noncognitive skills. Counterintuitively, the results suggest that higher unemployment rates are linked to positive child development outcomes later in childhood. In my main specification, an increase of 1 percentage point in state unemployment causes an increase of 2.5% of a standard deviation in cognitive test scores after controlling for income at birth, hours worked at birth, and other variables.

The gig economy is a rapidly growing portion of the US labor landscape. It is appealing to many individuals, as it provides autonomy for workers and opens up increased opportunities for working jobs with desirable schedules. The new California legislation, Assembly Bill 5, is likely to disrupt this sector by increasing costs for employers and removing autonomy from independent contractors with the ABC test that challenges current legal classifications of independent contractors. The ABC test has previously been passed in Massachusetts in 2004 and this paper aims to determine how the test has impacted the Massachusetts self-employment sector. A difference-in-differences estimation and linear regression model were analyzed to accurately determine the impact. A minimal negative correlation was found between the introduction of the ABC test in Massachusetts and the proportion of self-employed individuals in Massachusetts post-treatment. It was also found that the percentage change of average wages for self-employed individuals sharply increased in the first year directly following the implementation of the ABC test in Massachusetts and then decreased in the next year. The regression showed little correlation between the ABC test and self-employment in Massachusetts, as the p-value was not significant at the 5% level for the difference-in-differences interaction term, possibly due to limitations of the model.

This dissertation consists of two chapters. The first chapter studies children's skill formation technology while endogenizing the maternal age and child investments. I estimate the effect of a mother's age at childbirth on her child's health, skill level, educational attainment, and adulthood earnings. There is a tradeoff between delaying childbirth to provide a more secure economic environment for mother and child versus the potential negative biological consequences for a child of having an older parent. I quantify this tradeoff. The results indicate that a five-year decrease in the maternal age of educated women, ceteris paribus, results in over 0.50 std increase in the child’s skill level due to an increase in the child’s ability to acquire skills. However, if one adjusts child investment according to individuals’ wage profile conditional on reduced maternal age, the average child’s skill level decreases by 0.07 std. This reduction in children’s skill highlights the impact of lower inputs that children of younger mothers receive. The negative effect of foregone wages may be reduced through policy approaches. My policy analysis indicates implementing a two-year maternity leave policy that freezes mothers’ wages at the level before childbirth would reduce average maternal age at the first birth by about two years, while also increasing the average child’s skill level by about 0.22 std and future earnings by over 6%.

In chapter two, I study the impact of females' perceptions regarding their future fertility behavior on their human capital investments and labor market outcomes. I exploit a natural experiment to study the causal effect of fertility anticipation on individual's investments in human capital. I use the arguably exogenous variation in gender mix of children as an exogenous shock to the probability of further fertility. I document that having two children of the same gender is associated with about 5% lower wages for the mother compared to having two children of the opposite sexes. Mothers with same-sex children perceive themselves as more likely to bear one more child, and so less attached to the labor market, so invest less in human capital, and this is reflected in wages today.

This dissertation comprises three chapters.

In chapter one, using a rich dataset for the United States, I estimate a series of models to document the birth order effects on cognitive outcomes, non-cognitive outcomes, and parental investments. I estimate a model that allows for heterogeneous birth order effects by unobservables to examine how birth order effects varies across households. I find that first-born children score 0.2 of a standard deviation higher on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes than their later-born siblings. They also receive 10\% more in parental time, which accounts for more than half of the differences in outcomes. I document that birth order effects vary between 0.1 and 0.4 of a standard deviation across households with the effects being smaller in households with certain characteristics such as a high income.

In chapter two, I build a model of intra-household resource allocation that endogenously generates the decreasing birth order effects in household income with the aim of using the model for counterfactual policy experiments. The model has a life-cycle framework in which a household with two children confronts a sequence of time constraints and a lifetime monetary constraint, and divides the available time and monetary resources between consumption and investment. The counterfactual experiment shows that an annual income transfer of 10,000 USD to low-income households decreases the birth order effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills by one-sixth, which is five times bigger than the effect in high-income household.

In chapter three, with Francesco Agostinelli and Matthew Wiswall, we examine the relative importance of investments at home and at school during an important transition for many children, entering formal schooling at kindergarten. Moreover, our framework allows for complementarities between children's skills and investments from schools. We find that investments from schools are an important determinant of children's skills at the end of kindergarten, whereas parental investments, although strongly correlated with end-of-kindergarten outcomes, have smaller effects. In addition, we document a negative complementarity between children's skills at kindergarten entry and investments from schools, implying that low-skill children benefit the most from an increase in the quality of schools.