Effects of government intervention on human capital accumulation, employment, and migration

Ghosh, Anomita

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117663 Copy

Description

Title

Effects of government intervention on human capital accumulation, employment, and migration

Author(s)

Ghosh, Anomita

Issue Date

2022-12-01

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Albouy, David

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Albouy, David

Committee Member(s)

• Molitor, David
• Marx, Benjamin M
• Weinstein, Russell M

Department of Study

Economics

Discipline

Economics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• labor supply
• state and local government
• migration flows
• occupational choice
• adverse health events
• health expenditures
• subsidies
• education
• pricing
• incidence
• major choice
• undocumented Students
• fertility
• family structure
• gender
• close races.

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three papers that examine the role of state and local governments, as well as local institutions, in promoting the inclusion of underserved communities in labor markets. In these papers, I assess the intended and unintended consequences of public policies in the healthcare and education sectors on individual human capital accumulation, employment, and mobility. In Chapter 1, I use individual administrative data to study the effects of state and local loan repayment programs in the United States on life-cycle labor market and health outcomes. Do temporary labor supply programs cause physicians to move to and stay in undesirable areas? To what extent do these programs improve the health of the elderly population in those areas? I investigate these questions by studying state and local loan repayment programs for new eligible physicians which were rolled out over the last four decades in hundreds of counties across US states. Leveraging a new longitudinal dataset that tracks all physicians from medical school to mid-career, and exploiting both space and time variation, I find that these policies increase the number of physicians by 5% in treated counties relative to untreated counties in the state. The inflows of physicians are driven by higher paying eligible specialities. The programs continue to influence physicians' location decisions even after they end -- effects persist for at least ten years after the minimum obligation period. Furthermore, the programs modestly spur trainees to enter eligible specialities in treated states by substituting away from ineligible specialities. Treated counties also see the elderly increase their visits to physicians while reducing those to the emergency rooms. Using patient level data from California, I demonstrate these results are not driven by selective admission of patients to treated hospitals. Overall, my findings emphasize the importance of policies that reduce financial frictions for highly skilled professionals -- in shaping not only their migration and labor market trajectories, but also the health outcomes of people in their communities. In Chapter 2, I investigate how allowing lower tuition for undocumented students at public colleges improves education outcomes, changes institutional pricing patterns, and lowers long-run fertility rates. I use administrative data and a residual method to quantify the actual number of undocumented students at school level in the pre-reform period. Exploiting the reform's staggered adoption across states and time, as well as variation in the intensity of exposure to the reform across institutions -- I find a higher enrollment of undocumented students at the treated states' `more exposed' community colleges. Transfer, technical and vocational colleges drive the enrollment outcomes. In contrast to enrollment, there is strong evidence of higher graduation of undocumented students at both 2-year and 4-year colleges in the treated states. I also observe that students at these `more exposed' institutions experience modest tuition reductions. There is negligible displacement of Americans in treated public colleges. Undocumented females reduce their fertility in response to higher educational attainment -- driven by delayed marriage and household formation decisions. My findings indicate that the education and fertility benefits to undocumented students come with no significant unintended costs to other students. I estimate that the reform costs around $16.4 million per year on average. Chapter 3 is a comment on the paper ``Are Female Leaders Good for Education? Evidence from India’’, published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2012). Clots-Figueras (2012) studies how politicians' gender affects primary educational attainment in India. Exploiting close races to identify the causal effect of female politicians, they find higher educational achievement of primary school students in urban districts with more female politicians. I successfully reproduce their results, using primarily NSS data linked to data on electoral outcomes. However, I provide three observations on their paper. First, after correcting for multiple outcomes, female politicians do not seem to build more primary schools in urban areas -- an important mechanism explaining their result. Second, in their regression discontinuity design, continuity of the distribution of baseline covariates is violated at the cutoff for majority of the covariates in urban areas -- when the more powerful Kamat (2017) permutation test is applied. Third, the positive effects in urban areas become weaker and largely insignificant when Rehavi (2007)'s identification strategy is used.

Graduation Semester

2022-12

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Anomita Ghosh

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