Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education

This dissertation consists of three chapters that explore the mechanisms through which postsecondary education may drive economic growth and the ways in which investments in education at the primary and secondary levels can facilitate skill development and neighborhood change. The first chapter considers the role that elite colleges play in preparing talented students for top management positions. The second chapter focuses on a very different group of students---those whose academic qualifications place them on the margin of admission to four-year college---and asks whether expanding the supply of spots in four-year colleges to accommodate more such students would encourage educational investments with high private and public returns. The third chapter uses data from a comprehensive school construction project in a low-income urban school district to study the effects of investments in school infrastructure on residency choices, test scores, and home prices.;Chapter 1 presents the first causal evidence on the role that the skills and peer ties gained at elite universities play in helping students from elite and non-elite backgrounds reach top management positions. I construct a novel dataset linking archival records for 28 cohorts of applicants to elite colleges in Chile to the census of corporate directors and executive managers at publicly traded Chilean firms. I combine this data with a regression discontinuity design based on admissions cutoffs to estimate the causal effect of elite college admission on leadership outcomes. Admission raises the number of leadership positions students hold by 50 percent, but these gains accrue only to students from elite private high schools.;The larger effects for students from elite high schools could be due to complementarities between an elite social and educational background and institutional inputs like coursework. Alternatively, elite high school students may be better able to take advantage of ties formed with peers from their college cohort. To assess the importance of peer ties, I compare the rates at which pairs of students who were college peers serve on leadership teams at the same firms to rates for pairs from the same degree programs in different cohorts or different degree programs in the same cohort. I interpret results from this difference-in-differences analysis using a model of referral-based hiring in which students may inform firms about the skills of their college peers. The model yields qualitative insights tying changes in co-leadership rates for admitted students to the relative importance peer ties, as well as a simple formula for the share of the admissions effect attributable to peer referrals. Peer ties account for 80 to 100 percent of the total admissions effect for elite high school students. My results suggest that, even given transparent admissions policies, elite universities widen the gap in management outcomes between students from elite- and non-elite backgrounds because students from elite backgrounds form valuable connections with other students like themselves.;Chapter 2 combines a regression discontinuity design with rich data on academic and labor market outcomes for Florida students to determine whether relaxing constraints on the supply of spots in four year colleges through reductions in admissions standards would allow students to make high-return educational investments. Students with grades just above a threshold for admissions eligibility at a large public university are much more likely to attend any university than below-threshold students. The marginal admission yields earnings gains of 22 percent between eight and fourteen years after high school completion. These gains outstrip the costs of college attendance, and are largest for male students and free lunch recipients. My findings indicate that expanding the supply of seats in four-year colleges would likely be welfare improving provided it did not reduce returns for infra-marginal students.;Chapter 3, which is joint with Christopher Neilson, provides new evidence on the effect of school construction projects on home prices, academic achievement, and public school enrollment. Combining the staggered implementation of a comprehensive school construction project in a poor urban district with panel data on student test scores and neighborhoods of residence, we find that, by six years after building occupancy, school construction increases reading scores by 0.15 standard deviations relative to the year before building occupancy. School construction also raised home prices in affected neighborhoods by roughly 10 percent, and led to increased public school enrollment in zoned neighborhoods. These results suggest that investments in school infrastructure may form an important part of the school reform toolkit. In particular, infrastructure investments have the potential to reach students who are unlikely to opt in to choice-based reforms.