| The present dissertation is comprised of three chapters. In chapter 1, I find that use of multi-track year-round school calendars results in a drop in national rank on standardized test scores. This finding has policy implications for school overcrowding, since multi-track year-round school calendars allow for schools to house more students within the same facility than other calendars and are often motivated by their potential to alleviate school overcrowding. In chapter 2, I estimate the effect of the E-rate program, which provided federally-funded discounts to libraries, on internet investment in libraries. Overall, results find potentially large impacts of the E-rate program discounts on internet investment in libraries receiving the highest discounts and small or no effects in libraries at other discount levels. Finally the third paper of the dissertation estimates the effect of care provision methods to elderly parents on the adult daughter's hours worked in the labor market. In this chapter, I present a time allocation model and discuss various modifications to the model, which I then use as a framework for motivation of different sets of instrumental variables. Instrumental variables results are primarily insignificant. For the sample of women with a high school degree or less, however, instrumental variables results show that informal caregiving at the time a parent becomes dependent reduces hours worked in the labor market and having a parent in a nursing home increase hours worked in the labor market. |
