| This dissertation consists of three separate papers on topics in the economics of education. The first chapter is "Who Benefits from Kindergarten? Evidence from the Introduction of State Subsidization." Over the last seventy years, all states in the U.S. began to publicly subsidize kindergarten using state revenue. The variation in adoption dates across states allows for a unique opportunity to measure the effectiveness of the largest early education program implemented in recent history. The estimated effects from the instrumental variables specification indicate that kindergarten decreases later grade failure by 64 percent. Overall, kindergarten has a significant and positive effect on academic and labor market outcomes primarily for black individuals and those who grow up in a lower socioeconomic status.The second chapter is "What Makes a Leader? Relative Age and High School Leadership." Economists have identified a substantial adult wage premium attached to high school leadership activity. Unresolved is the extent to which it constitutes human capital acquisition or proxies for an "innate" unobserved skill. We document a determinant of high school leadership activity that is associated purely with school structure, rather than genetics or family background. That determinant is a student's relative age. State-specific school entry cut-offs induce systematic within-grade variation in student maturity, which in turn generate differences in leadership activity. We find that the relatively oldest students are four to eleven percent more likely to be high school leaders.The final chapter is "The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects." A continuum of ages exists at school entry due to the use of a single school cut-off date---making the "oldest" children approximately twenty percent older than the "youngest" children. We provide substantial evidence that these initial maturity differences have long lasting effects on student performance across OECD countries. In particular, the youngest members of each cohort score 4-12 percentiles lower than the oldest members in grade four and 2-9 percentiles lower in grade eight. In fact, data from Canada and the United States shows that the youngest members of each cohort are even less likely to attend university. |
