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- Creators: Arizona State University
Description
The US steel industry experienced a great decline between 1950-1985. Influenced by several government policies, the industry was first cartelized during the great depression and then subjected to an extremely powerful organized labor force. Due to high demand between and during WWII and the Korean War, the industry expanded capacity using existing technologies. Simultaneously, organized labor was able to secure increased wages and large severance costs for firms that decided to shutdown existing steel mills. In the post war years this prevented firms from innovating through investing in newer, more efficient, technologies. Eventually US steel firms had no advantage against foreign producers who could produce steel cheaper and more efficiently.
ContributorsCole, Andrew Arthur (Author) / Lagakos, David (Thesis director) / DeSerpa, Allan (Committee member) / Dillon, Eleanor (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
This dissertation explores the effect of school competition on the human capital accumulation of students. Policies that expand the scope for school choice have become increasingly popular largely due to the belief that this will create incentives for low-performing, incumbent schools to improve academic outcomes. However, there is a general lack of empirical support for these positive academic spillover effects in most contexts. In the first chapter, I demonstrate that if schools respond to competition through channels not typically considered in standard arguments in favor of school choice, it means that these policies may lead to negative, unintended consequences for academic achievement. I find that increasing the number of schools serving a given market can have a negative effect on test scores through creating incentives for schools to increase the provision of non-academic services that do not contribute to academic preparation, and through the creation of excess costs in the public school system. I use an empirical strategy designed to address strategic location decisions by new entrants as well as student selection across schools to show that entry of a new charter middle school during a recent large-scale charter expansion in North Carolina decreased average traditional public middle school test scores across a school district.
The second chapter considers the extent to which policymakers have tools available to them that can improve the ability of competition to generate the increases in test scores at incumbent schools that they have prioritized. I show that the efficacy of school choice can be improved by providing short-term, partial reimbursements to public school districts for increases in charter school enrollment by resident pupils. I also demonstrate that these effects occur not only due to the direct increase in district revenue associated with reimbursements, but also because the presence of this aid reduces the incentives of school administrators to compete for students through non-academic channels. The empirical strategy that I use to generate these results leverages plausibly exogenous cutoffs for aid eligibility induced by a unique policy in the state of New York.
ContributorsTobin, Zachary Benjamin (Author) / Aucejo, Esteban (Thesis advisor) / Silverman, Daniel (Committee member) / Murphy, Alvin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022