Studies of privatization impacts on economic and educational outcomes

This dissertation consists of three studies on the impacts of privatization on economic and educational outcomes.; Chapter one reports new empirical evidence from China on the relative performance of state and privately owned enterprises using two new datasets. Extending previous literature on the effect of state ownership on profitability and productivity, I incorporate risk in the analysis. The results reveal a risk and return trade-off for firms' profitability and productivity, similar to that found in the financial markets. Privately owned enterprises tend to be riskier than their state-owned counterparts. Controlling for risk level, the differences in profitability and productivity between state and private enterprises are about 50 percent smaller than previous estimates. These results may be relevant for policy debates concerning pace of privatization and provide a new insight into the workings of the Chinese economy.; Chapter two, joint with Alan Krueger, reexamines data from the New York City school choice program. Including students with missing baseline test scores increases the sample size by 44 percent. For African American students, the only group to show a positive effect of vouchers on achievement in past studies, the difference in average follow-up test scores between those offered a voucher and those not offered a voucher becomes statistically insignificant at the .05 level and much smaller if the full sample is used. We also find the effect of vouchers to be sensitive to the particular way race/ethnicity was defined.; Chapter three utilizes the administrative data from New York City Department of Education to examine two puzzles raised in previous studies of this voucher experiment and to explore voucher impact on long term student academic performance. I find that the impact of voucher is sensitive to the classification of race/ethnicity. Further, administrative test scores for those not offered vouchers do not corroborate their improvement patterns implied by the test used in previous studies. Results of voucher impact on student's performance in high school regents exams indicate that being offered school voucher does not help or harm student's academic performance in the long run.