JMP专栏：UC-San Diego 第6期

为什么会有这个专栏？

有人曾问退休后的萨缪尔森：“能不能请您谈谈目前经济学研究的前沿是什么?”

萨翁答:“我不知道前沿在哪儿，如果我知道，我早就在哪儿了。这问题该去问我们的博士生。”

于是，我和小伙伴们在2023年底开启了一项“宏大”的计划，搜集整理美国经济系排名最靠前的10所高校博士生们的工作市场论文，这些论文一定程度上代表了经济学界的学术前沿。

后续，我们将每期推送3名候选人信息，直至全部候选人推送完毕。

本期是工作市场候选人信息第41期内容，也是 UC-San Diego 第6期内容。

Beata Luczywek

University of California San Diego

Research interests

Labor Economics, Public Economics, Applied Microeconomics

Personal website

https://beata-luczywek.com/

Job market paper

Estimating Income Effects on Earnings using the 2021 Child Tax Credit Expansion

We estimate income effects on earnings using the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit. Children born in January 2016 were eligible for a credit of $3,600, while children born in December 2015 were eligible for $3,000 dollar. We use administrative tax data and a regression discontinuity design to estimate the earnings response to this temporary, one-year $600 increase in non-labor income. We find that employment as reported by third parties decreased by 2.0% in 2021 and 1.1% in 2022 in low-income families, with no effect on families with higher incomes. However, this decrease in wages was offset by an equivalent increase in self-employment income reported on tax returns, implying either increased misreporting or no overall change in real employment.

Diana Martinez

University of California San Diego

Research interests

Development Economics, Labor Economics

Personal website

https://www.dianamartinezheredia.com/home

Job market paper

Immigrant children and optimal school choice: Evidence from the Venezuelan migration to Peru

In recent years, millions of children have been displaced, and evidence informing public policy for the welfare of migrants and recipient communities will be critical in the coming years. In this paper, we leverage cross-grade within-school variation on migrant share to understand the effect of the sudden influx of Venezuelan migrant children into the Peruvian school system. Our estimates show that as Venezuelan migrants enter Peruvian schools, parents of incumbent students react by transferring their children to higher-quality schools with fewer migrants. A ten-percentage-point increase in migrant exposure increases the probability of switching by 1.5 percentage points in primary and 1.1 percentage points in secondary schools. To understand the implications of this native flight on academic achievement, we employ a structural model that identifies students who switch schools because of migrants and compare their outcomes in the presence of migrants to a counterfactual scenario without migrants. Our findings reveal that switchers experience small gains (close to zero), albeit at a higher tuition cost, while students left behind are not negatively impacted. This suggests that native flight can serve as an adaptive strategy only for some students to mitigate the effects of the migrant influx, but generally brings no gains to students who switch schools. Moreover, it comes at a high cost.

Anjali Pai

University of California San Diego

Research interests

Economics of Education, Labor Economics, Applied Microeconomics, Behavioral Economics

Personal website

https://anjalipai.com/

Job market paper

The Effect of School-Based Health Care on Adolescent Behavior and Mental Health

In the past decade, policymakers have increasingly begun to consider School-Based Health Centers (full-service health clinics located in school buildings) as potential means of addressing the worsening adolescent mental health crisis. However, there is little causal evidence on the impacts of these health centers on mental health and student behavior. This paper looks at the effect of access to School-Based Health Centers on suspensions and dropouts, two metrics that may be strong proxies for adolescent mental health status. First, using data from a statewide survey on school climate and socioemotional well-being I provide descriptive evidence that worse reported mental health and school climate are positively correlated with higher suspension rates but not necessarily with higher dropout rates. Next, I look at the effect of access to a school-based health center using a difference-in-differences analysis that leverages the timing of health center openings in California and a propensity-score matched control group. The opening of a new school-based health center decreases school-level suspension rates by around 1.1 percentage points (27% of the baseline suspension rate) within 3 years of the opening when compared to matched schools. A heterogeneity analysis reveals that these effects are driven by decreases in suspensions from “disruptive behavior", rather than weapon possession, violence, or drug use. I find no effect on dropout rates, suggesting that the decline in suspensions is unlikely to be caused by the crowd-out of delinquent behavior by an increase in dropouts. These results suggest that school-based health centers warrant further consideration as an effective means of addressing adolescent mental health.

供稿 | 翁煜晗

编辑 | 翁煜晗

审核 | 张毅